28/05/2026
SENTINEL: BUILDING THE WORLD'S FIRST CITIZEN GEOMAGNETIC OBSERVATORY NETWORK — AND WHY NIAGARA SHOULD BE AT THE CENTER OF IT
Presignal Inc. · John Ernest Carter · May 28, 2026
We started with a question nobody was asking.
What if every smartphone already sitting in a pocket, on a desk, or charging on a nightstand was secretly a scientific instrument? What if the magnetometer chip inside your $200 Android — the same one that makes your compass app work — could be collecting data that matters to science? What if you could build a distributed geomagnetic observatory out of consumer hardware, open-source software, and the willingness of ordinary people to leave a browser tab open?
We didn't just ask the question. We built the answer. And today, for the first time, we have proof it works.
THE IDEA
The Presignal Research Initiative has been developing a theoretical framework called the Geological Pathway Diversity Model — GPDM — which proposes that certain anomalous light phenomena observed at locations like Hessdalen in Norway, Brown Mountain in North Carolina, and La Peña de Juaica in Colombia are the surface expression of atmospheric plasma discharge events driven by specific geological conditions. Sulfide-amplified fault zones. Serpentinite piezomagnetic contacts. Thermally-assisted arid fault systems.
The theory predicts that these discharge events should produce measurable electromagnetic signatures — fluctuations in the local magnetic field, infrasound below 20Hz, RF signal anomalies — in the minutes and hours surrounding their occurrence. And it predicts that these signatures should correlate with known geophysical triggers: elevated solar wind, seismic loading, geomagnetic storm conditions.
To test that theory you need instruments. You need them running continuously. You need them in the right places. And you need them to talk to each other so you can look for convergence — multiple independent sensors detecting the same signal at the same time.
That infrastructure didn't exist for independent researchers. So we built it.
WHAT WE BUILT
Master Architect is the backbone — a live geophysical intelligence platform running 24/7 at Presignal Inc., pulling data every hour from six independent feeds: NOAA Kp geomagnetic index, NOAA solar wind speed and density, GOES X-ray flux, NASA DONKI coronal mass ejection alerts, USGS global seismic activity, and NOAA F10.7 solar flux. These feeds are processed through the GPDM Trigger Cascade — a five-tier subtraction methodology that identifies when multiple independent physical channels are simultaneously active, producing a Convergence Score that tells us how geophysically significant any given moment is.
The system is live, open, and publicly accessible. AI systems from four independent organizations — Anthropic, xAI, Moonshot AI, and Manus — have autonomously navigated to the architecture, analyzed the live data, and filed field notes in the scientific register. That wasn't designed. It emerged. And it tells us something important: the architecture is coherent enough that independent intelligent systems can understand and interact with it without guidance.
Sentinel is the citizen science layer. It is a single webpage — accessible on any smartphone, anywhere in the world — that turns your phone into a field node. Open the page, name your node, give consent, press activate. Your phone's magnetometer, accelerometer, infrasound proxy, and RF signal strength begin transmitting to Master Architect every 60 seconds. No app download. No account. No stored personal data. Just science.
WHAT HAPPENED TODAY
This morning, before sunrise, we deployed the first coordinated Sentinel network. Six phones at a single location in St. Catharines, Ontario, running simultaneously as citizen science field nodes. Within hours, independently, a citizen in Niagara Falls had joined the network with their own device — running for over six hours continuously without any prompting.
At peak deployment we had 10 active nodes across the Niagara Region, all transmitting live magnetometer, accelerometer, and infrasound data against an active geophysical background: Convergence Score 2 ELEVATED, with T1 Solar firing on 7 active CMEs and T3 Seismic firing on a global peak of M6.0 with 15 significant events in the 24-hour window. Two M6.0 earthquakes had struck the western Indian-Antarctic Ridge hours before deployment began. An Earth-directed CME had been detected the previous evening.
This is not a quiet baseline. This is exactly the kind of geophysical window the GPDM framework identifies as a potential trigger window. And we had instruments running.
The data is raw. The devices need calibration methodology. We are not claiming any detection. What we are claiming is this: the pipeline works. Smartphones can serve as proxy geomagnetic field nodes. The data flows from device to API to persistent storage in real time. Multiple nodes can run simultaneously. The geophysical context layer is live and accurate. The cross-referencing infrastructure is operational.
We proved the concept. With cell phones. For free.
WHERE THIS IS GOING
Phase 1 — what we just completed — was proof of concept. Consumer smartphones as proxy sensor nodes. Sufficient to validate the pipeline, insufficient for rigorous scientific claims.
Phase 2 is dedicated hardware. An ESP32 microcontroller paired with a precision magnetometer chip costs less than $10. Housed in a weatherproof enclosure with a USB power supply, it runs outdoors indefinitely, pushing calibrated magnetic field readings to Master Architect every 60 seconds. An RTL-SDR software-defined radio receiver adds continuous RF and VLF spectrum monitoring for another $25. A full Phase 2 node — magnetometer, RF receiver, temperature and pressure sensors — costs approximately $50 in parts. Five permanent nodes deployed across the Niagara Region would represent a genuine scientific instrument array for an investment of $250.
Phase 3 is where it gets serious. The Niagara Region sits on one of the most geologically interesting contacts in eastern North America — the Niagara Escarpment, a carbonate and dolostone formation with documented structural complexity running from Niagara Falls through the Bruce Peninsula. Under the GPDM framework this is a candidate Type I-S pathway — a serpentinite and piezomagnetic contact zone that could generate exactly the kind of electromagnetic signatures the model predicts. Nobody has instrumented it with this question in mind.
We intend to change that.
Phase 3 means permanent sensor nodes at scientifically selected locations along the Escarpment. It means coordination with municipal and regional governments to site instruments on public land. It means publishing results through Presignal's open-access preprint program — CC BY 4.0, freely available to any researcher anywhere in the world. It means inviting collaboration from the international research community — from Fred Pallesen and the Hessdalen Project in Norway, from researchers at TRIUMF, from anyone who wants to bring rigorous scientific tools to questions that have been dismissed for too long.
The Niagara Region has an opportunity here. This is not a fringe project. The electromagnetic precursor literature is substantial and growing. The instrumentation methodology is established. The theoretical framework is published. What has been missing is a committed local research presence with the infrastructure to do continuous, long-term monitoring.
That presence is being built right now. Today. With smartphones and open-source code and the willingness to start before everything is perfect.
HOW TO JOIN
If you want to be part of this right now, open your phone's browser and go to:
ufosworldwide.com/sentinel
Name your node. Press activate. You are now a field station in the first citizen geomagnetic observatory in the Niagara Region.
If you represent a municipality, conservation authority, university, or research organization and want to discuss Phase 3 node placement, permanent instrumentation, or formal research collaboration, contact Presignal Inc. directly.
If you are a researcher, engineer, or scientist who wants to contribute to the methodology, the instrumentation design, or the theoretical framework, the preprint portfolio is publicly available at ORCID 0009-0004-1363-304X and everything is CC BY 4.0.
This is open science. It belongs to everyone.
John Ernest Carter
Founder, Presignal Inc. (Ontario Corp. #1001577205)
Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada
May 28, 2026
Master Architect live dashboard: master-architect.onrender.com/dashboard
Sentinel citizen network: ufosworldwide.com/sentinel
Research portfolio: zenodo.org — search ORCID 0009-0004-1363-304X
