An independent record of the signals that persist

The Laboratories were founded in 1958, in the wake of the International Geophysical Year, to pursue a single unfashionable question: why do certain places hold a tone of their own, long after any obvious source has gone quiet. What began as one field station has become a standing catalog of anomalous detections, a distributed network of volunteer analysts, and a set of instruments that measure across media and across decades.

We are not a believers' society and we are not a debunking service. We measure. We classify our detections by their observed behavior, not by any presumed cause. We publish what the record supports and we hold the rest in the catalog, open, until it can be explained. Most signals resolve to a known source, near or far. A small number, some held for fifty years, have not.

The Laboratories are supported entirely by private and philanthropic funding, and are not affiliated with any government agency. Our analysis pipeline is built in partnership with Stratis, Inc. The work of turning decades of raw recording into a searchable catalog is carried, in large part, by the tens of thousands of volunteers of the Distributed Analysis Initiative.