by Charles-Maxence Layet (CIPO) & Edoardo Russo (CISU)
In 2024, more than 5,000 unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) sightings were reported across Europe—not by government agencies, but by 23 independent civilian organizations. (1)
This figure, drawn from the newborn Euro UFO Index ecosystem, is not anecdotal. It is the product of a growing continental effort to consolidate reports from national associations, scientific groups, and citizen reporting platforms. Across Europe, from Scandinavia to Italy, from Germany to Belgium, these organizations collectively document thousands of cases every year—part of a broader dataset exceeding 33,000 observations across 40 countries between 2019 and 2024. (2)
How many of these sightings are actually recorded, cross-checked, and investigated by European authorities?
DATA GAPS IN THE SINGLE MARKET
The European Union has built integrated systems for aviation safety, satellite monitoring, and climate surveillance. Through frameworks like Eurocontrol and Copernicus, it is tracking aircraft, emissions, and orbital debris in near real time. But when it comes to unidentified objects in European airspace, there is no equivalent. There is no EU-wide reporting protocol, no centralized database, no coordination between Member States.
Europe relies on a patchwork of isolated national approaches—most of them minimal, some opaque, many nonexistent. France’s GEIPAN, a unit under CNES, remains an official notable exception, with decades of public case analysis and open data. But with too few resources of its own to be really impactful.
The result is a fragmented twin systems of UAP knowledge : dense citizen science and civilian networks collect more data than public national and European institutions. This information asymetry and critical lack of official data has generated growing strategic blindspots. Thousands of observations constitute a massive, underexploited set of data for atmospheric science, sensor analysis, and perception studies. Moreover, unidentified objects in controlled airspace—whether drones, foreign surveillance systems, or unknown phenomena—represent a failure of situational awareness. In Autumn 2025, the Baltic UAP alert over Danish, Belgian, German and Swedish airspace has exposed the Europe’s weakness to rapidly collect, correlate and interpret hybrid threats and ambiguous incursions of anomalous aerial events across borders.
THE UNKNOWN ELEPHANTS IN THE SKY CORRIDORS
From September to November 2025, multiple objects over critical infrastructures triggered precautionary airspace monitoring across the Baltic region. The wave started on 22 September above Copenhagen and Oslo airports, extended to military facilities. Anti-drones wall forced the agenda of the European Summit. (3) In October, the unidentified incursions focused on Germany, delaying Berlin and Munich airports activity. It continued in November over Sweden and Belgium airports. Sightings of drone of unknown origins were also reported over Dublin Airport and a nuclear naval base in France in December. (4)
The UAP debate is often framed in cultural terms—belief, speculation, stigma. But times are changing. Across the world, a rising numbers of policymakers, from Japan, from China, from the Congress of United States of course but also MEPs in the European Parliament, are considering the importance of issue at the intersection of airspace security, defense intelligence, civil aviation safety, scientific research. UAPs are not anymore a fringe issue but a governance one.
Josef Aschbacher, Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA) recently added his voice against this institutional blindspot. He indicated that the UAP topic “probably deserves more attention and investment”, stating the lack of a specific budget for structured research. (5)
The European Commission’s own answers to Parliament make one point clear: UAPs are not currently treated as a distinct policy domain at EU level. But the data – and the alerts – are accumulating. In Belgium alone, the UFO hotline recorded 237 sightings of unidentified flying objects in 2025, including the 11 ones spotted near military bases and airports in November. (6)
THE NEED FOR AN UAP HYBRID TOOLBOX
In operational terms, UAP incidents overlap with known categories of hybrid risk, such as low-observable drones or platforms, unregistered aerial systems, sensor interference, atmospheric or electromagnetic anomalies affecting detection systems. Each of these can test response chains or create ambiguity in decision-making. That ambiguity is precisely the terrain of hybrid threats.
In other domains—cybersecurity, disinformation, critical infrastructure—the EU has developed hybrid toolboxes: flexible, cross-sector frameworks combining civilian, technological and security instruments. UAPs and their presumed dual advanced technologies now require a similar approach.
Such European UAP hybrid toolbox could operate across four data intelligence domains: standardized reporting protocols across member states; structured cooperation with accredited civilian organizations data which already represent a significant share of Europe’s observational capacity; support situational awareness through cross-border database accessible to national authorities, aviation agencies and defense actors; and to conclude, implementation of a secure but open access to anonimized datasets for research and transparency, enabling institutional and citizen science exploitation while maintaining security and privacy constraints.
Today, a pilot report in Denmark, a radar anomaly in Germany, and a civilian observation in France may follow entirely different reporting pathways. Establishing a common EU reporting form for aerial anomalies is a decisive first step, enabling pilots, air traffic controllers and citizens to report anomalies in a structured format. It will pave the way to next step : integration with aviation safety channels fusing with optional input streams from radar, satellite and observational data.
From cybersecurity to climate risk—the EU has demonstrated its ability to strongly improve coordination when confronted with systemic gaps. The unknown in our common sky is also a matter of public policy. Why should European Union institutions stay structurally unprepared to address it?
References
(1) https://www.euroufo.net/euroufo-index
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_European_drone_sightings
(4) https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-drone-wall-plan-crash-eu-reality/
(5) https://uapcoalitienederland.nl/en/esa-director-josef-aschbacher-uap-telegraaf
