Project Waveform formalizes something Field Investigations had been doing informally for years: cross-referencing the timestamp of every reported sighting against public gravitational-wave detector data, and against Project Horizon’s own strain logs, before a case is ever escalated for modeling.
It started as a checklist taped above one desk. It’s now the standard intake procedure for every field report RGL receives.
The Problem It Solves
Project Tesseract’s flight-profile modeling is only as good as the sighting reports feeding it, and the single biggest quality problem was never witness reliability — it was timestamp precision. A report logged as “around 11, maybe 11:30” produces a 30-minute search window against detector data, during which any number of unrelated strain fluctuations, and typically zero confirmed astrophysical events, may have occurred. A report with a phone-verified timestamp to the second produces a window we can actually work with.
Method
Every field investigator now works from a standardized intake protocol:
- UTC logging at the point of contact. Local-time conversion happens on-site, before memory does the converting later.
- Second-level precision wherever possible — a timestamped photo, video, notification, or call log takes priority over verbal recollection.
- Ambient-noise notes — nearby traffic, construction, or weather that could register as ground noise at a detector site, which might otherwise look like a coincidental match.
- A pre-check against the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center’s (GWOSC) public event list, so a confirmed astrophysical merger is ruled in as the likely explanation before anything is filed as an anomaly candidate.
- Mandatory filing regardless of outcome. Non-matches are logged with the same rigor as matches — a clean negative is data, not a discard.
Reports that clear this protocol are timestamped precisely enough to check against three independent timelines: the public LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA event catalog, Project Horizon’s own three-site strain logs, and the original sighting report — before Tesseract ever touches them.
Status
Since standardizing the intake procedure, report quality has improved enough that the July Anomaly Cluster (see Field Notes, August 2026) could be cross-checked against all three timelines within a day, rather than the week or more that comparable cases took before the protocol existed. The procedure is now mandatory for all incoming field