Why are there fewer reports of UFOs from Minnesotans?

Minnesotans love to be above average, but we fall well below average when it comes to spotting and reporting unexplained objects flying around in the sky.

At least that’s what the data from Enigma Labs says.

The new startup has developed an app billed as the “#1 mobile app for UFO sighting stories and real-time alerts.” It’s designed to be a crowdsourced, citizen-science platform where the public can report UFOs — or UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), which is the more current term.

Since the app went live in the spring of 2023, users have submitted 176 new sightings in Minnesota, typically with a cellphone video capturing a strange light in the sky. One sighting labeled as “Enigma #297316″ is a two-minute video recorded at 3:10 a.m. on Aug. 9 at Elko New Market. It’s described as “Three glowing discs hovering steadily.”

“I did not recognize these objects as stars since I am familiar with the night sky. I began recording to share with the world. I am a military veteran trained in identifying aircraft in the day and nighttime. I identified them as other than conventional craft,” read the description from an unnamed observer included with the report.

Another video, submitted last Mayis of a “Tic-tac shaped UFO seen hovering over I-90″ near Grand Meadow, Minn.

Recent reports like these have been added to an Enigma database of previous sightings gleaned from the internet or other publicly available sources. Enigma said it has collected a total of 3,698 reported UFO sightings in Minnesota, or about 63 sightings per 100,000 Minnesota residents.

But that places us about 35th among states in likelihood of someone seeing and reporting a UFO. In comparison, people in New Mexico are 2 ½ times likelier than Minnesotans to have seen a UFO, according to Enigma data. There have been about 162 sightings per 100,000 residents in that state, the top-ranked UFO reporting state per resident, according to Enigma.

It seems like Minnesota isn’t flyover country when it comes to flying saucers.

To find out why, we talked with Lauren Butler, head of operations of Enigma.

Enigma is based in New York City, but Butler grew up in Burnsville and went to Augsburg University. So she’s well-placed to have some ideas on why Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 Lakes but fewer than 4,000 UFO sightings.

Like so many explanations of life here, Butler suggested it might have something to do with the weather.

“Minnesota is the coldest place in the U.S.,” Butler said. “People are not outside for six months of the year, and therefore they’re not out camping and observing.”

That, however, doesn’t explain why Alaska, another coldish place, ranks as the third highest in UFO reports per resident, just behind New Mexico and Montana, according to Enigma data. Also, residents in some warm-weather states like Virginia, South Carolina and Mississippi are pretty low reporters of UFOs, according to the app’s numbers.

Maybe a Minnesota mind-your-own-business attitude toward potential outer space visitors might be in play.

“I think of my parents and if they saw something in the sky, I don’t know if they would believe it was a true UAP or something unidentifiable,” Butler said. “I think there’s sort of this Midwestern sensibility of ‘Oh, that’s nothing. This is just a plane or whatever.’ ”

Butler said the aim of the app is to encourage people to be more curious, to point their phones toward the sky and take a video if they see something puzzling flying above.

“You should absolutely record it, and if there are other witnesses nearby, encourage them to record it, also. The more recordings we have from multiple viewpoints, the better,” according to the app’s FAQ.

She hopes Enigma will be the go-to place if you see something weird and don’t know who to tell.

“We’re crowdsourcing to solve this mystery of what is in our sky that we can’t explain,” she said.

The app is still undergoing improvements, but the goal is to use AI and other data science methods to give each submission a score on how “anomalous” they are.

For example, “Enigma UFO Sighting #28529″ reported in Minneapolis on Nov. 21, 2023, shows what the user describes as a six-minute encounter with 14 lights in the sky.

“They were in a perfect straight line and were moving slowly across the sky,” according to the submitter. But perhaps concluding that the lights were Starlink internet satellites from SpaceX, the Enigma algorithm didn’t seem too impressed, giving that sighting a score of 36 out of 100. In comparison, a blinking light in the sky seen in Welcome, Minn., on Sept. 28, 2023, was given an anomaly score of 44.

The app will also send out push alerts so that if someone in your area sees something interesting in the sky, you can sign up to get a notice and provide a corroborating recording from a different angle. The company also is developing an augmented reality lens so that if you point your cellphone camera at an object in the air, it will recruit plane traffic and satellite data to tell you whether you’re looking at a star, a satellite, a drone or something really unknown.

“We are the Shazam for the sky,” Butler said, referring to the song identification app.

Ultimately, Butler hopes, Enigma’s data will be used by researchers, journalists and maybe government agencies. (Recently, the Pentagon has been mandated by Congress to tell the public more of what it knows about UAP sightings, and NASA and U.S. intelligence agencies are looking at ways to collect more comprehensive data about the anomalies.)

While Enigma strives to use science and technology to identify UAPs, the platform is also a place for people to go if they just need to share a strange thing they saw.

“People are coming here for community, to share their stories, and they don’t feel like they have another place where they can do that,” Butler said.

Butler is not a lifelong skywatcher. In fact, she didn’t think a lot about UFOs before getting her current job. But after seeing all the reports the company has collected, she feels that “there are definitely things that we cannot explain in the sky. I think there’s a lot of weather phenomena that is hard to explain,” she said. “I don’t count out the idea that there are truly anomalous things out there that we can’t explain. Although I don’t think it’s green men, I think that it’s maybe something far more interesting than that.”