Hermes Watch V1 Is Live: A Chrome Extension for Watching the Sky

We have been heads-down building the evidence side of the UAP investigation problem, and today we are putting the first piece of that work into beta testers' hands. Hermes Watch V1 is now available as an unpacked Chrome extension for the Florida, Texas, Connecticut, and Georgia tester network.

If Hermes is the analyst, Hermes Watch is the witness. It sits in your browser, watches a livestream or a region of your screen, and quietly produces structured evidence packages that Hermes can later grade. That is the whole philosophy in one line: the U becomes an I through evidence, not assumption.

What Hermes Watch is

Hermes Watch is a Chrome extension that captures live video streams or screen regions, runs frame analysis locally on your machine, and bundles what it sees into case files — clips plus metadata — that fit cleanly into the Hermes investigation pipeline. You point it at a sky cam, a YouTube livestream, or any window on your desktop, and it watches for you. It is the evidence-producing front end of the same project. Hermes grades cases. Hermes Watch produces them.

What V1 does — and does not do

We want to be honest about where V1 sits. This release ships with a motion-stub analyzer: it does frame differencing, so anything that changes in the watched region triggers an event. It is not yet identifying aerial phenomena specifically. The real vision model plugs in later.

What V1 does deliver today: region selection on any tab, window, or full screen; a rolling clip buffer so you do not miss the moment something happens; automatic case-file grouping with a canonical filename schema; watermark scaffolding (real DCT-domain watermarking comes later); IndexedDB-backed local storage; and a built-in cases browser and options page.

Pairing with a Hermes account is coming soon. V1 is local-only — every case stays on your machine until you choose to export or share it.

System requirements

Chrome 116 or newer. Desktop OS: Windows, macOS, or Linux. No mobile support.

Install instructions

V1 ships as an unpacked extension. You do not need to read code — just follow these steps:

1. Download hermes-watch-ready.zip
2. Extract the zip
3. Open chrome://extensions/ in Chrome
4. Toggle Developer mode in the top-right
5. Click Load unpacked
6. Select the extracted hermes-watch folder (the one containing manifest.json)

That is it. The Hermes Watch icon will appear in your Chrome toolbar.

How to use it

Click the toolbar icon, hit Start Watching, pick a source (screen, window, or tab) when Chrome asks, then confirm the unpaired-mode dialog — local-only is fine for V1. Let it run. Cases accumulate in the cases page as motion events fire. When you find something interesting, send it to us through whatever feedback channel we have set up with you.

Known V1 caveats

The motion stub will trigger on cursors, scrolling, and ambient screen activity. Tune it by selecting a smaller region — the sky portion of a livestream, for example — before starting. The pairing UI is visible but the button is disabled. Pairing and upload are the next group of work.

Trust and transparency

All cases stay on your machine. The extension only captures what you explicitly pick during Chrome's source-selection dialog. There is no background telemetry and no auto-uploads. The settings page includes Export all cases (JSON) and Clear all local cases so you stay in control of your data.

Download and verify

hermes-watch-ready.zip — 47,875 bytes, 31 files.

SHA-256: 2880652a406ea7c8403bb31377588fcab4c64f4f0b685b36e1e9f4df46ba5694

Verifying the hash is optional, but if you want to confirm integrity on Windows, run this in PowerShell:

Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 .\hermes-watch-ready.zip

What is next

After V1, the roadmap includes a real vision-model analyzer to replace the motion stub, Hermes account pairing with a signed upload pipeline, ADS-B and weather correlation overlays (the API stack is already wired into the VPS-side investigation pipeline), and DCT-domain video watermarking for evidence integrity. We are not putting dates on any of it yet — we would rather ship it right than ship it loud.

Thanks to everyone in the beta network. Install it, watch something, and tell us what breaks. Learn more about the broader project at projecthermes.tech.

Project Hermes and UFO Index are affiliated projects.