1 – A VIEW FROM EUROPE
1.1 – EUROPE AS A PLURALITY OF COUNTRIES, LANGUAGES, EXPERIENCES
Europe is made of at more than 40 different nations, speaking at least 36 different languages.
As a first consequence, such a wide fragmentation has always been a difficulty for communication (the so-called language barrier). As a second consequence, separate cultures mean a great richness of different experiences, ideas and initiatives.
Both consequences have had a role in the development of ufology in the Old Continent, not to tell about different political systems (including liberal democracies, Communist regimes and right-wing dictatorships).
We’d better talk of European “ufologies” in a plural way, indeed, since difference has always been the rule, as of government involvement as well as of mass media attitudes, as of available UFO literature as well as of UFO researchers communities. In a way, each country has had its own history, activities and features, even if ufologists have long had a tendency to comunicate with their fellows in nearby or faraway countries.
The United States of America have been the point of reference, for obvious reasons. But British and French ufology have also had a strong influence on other European countries.
Even if less known outside each one’s boundaries, smaller nations’ ufologies have long been producing interesting results, which have often been overlooked, alas, until exchanges have become better, the more so after the Internet became widespread.
- – A EUROPEAN NETWORK: EUROUFO.NET
After some previous failed attempts, a successful initiative to create a circular communication among European researchers was started in 1998, following the launch of a short-lived “European Journal of UFO and Abduction Studies” : six long-standing national organizations [from Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden] agreed to create an informal network connecting not groups but individuals. To be precise, it was meant for researchers doing a specific project or activity of any kind, so to keep one another informed and get a better cooperation.
After more than 25 years EuroUfo.net is still working as a community of scientifically oriented fellows, with a mailing list, a web site, some meetings during international congresses (eg. in Chalons 2005, Saint Vincent 2007, Paris 2014, Toulouse 2022, Bruxelles 2024), regular video meetings, intense exchanges of documentation and information.
People have come and gone of course. The informal network is presently including about 100 members from 23 countries. Quite a few of them are or have been MUFON representatives or members, of course.
EufoUfo.net is and has long been the main connection tool in the Old Continent, and its members are actively participating in the international UAP Check iniziative for a worldwide network.
- – SOME EXPERIENCES IN EUROPEAN UFOLOGY
It’s obviously impossibile to offer a comprehensive overview of what European ufologists have been producing, bei t similar or different from their American counterparts. My cursory presentation will offer a glance of just a few selected initiatives, which gave a new perspective to UFO (now UAP) studies in five different areas:
– Data collection and analysis;
– Instrumented research;
– Analysing the data;
– Archives;
- Disclosures;
– Artificial Intelligence.
2.1- INVESTIGATION OF TESTIMONIES
2.1.1 COGNITIVE INTERVIEW FOR UAP INVESTIGATION
An investigation tool coming from France is the UFO adaptation of the Cognitive Interview. It is a methodology of collecting information from eye-witnesses, that was developed from police investigation needs in the mid-‘80s. Its aim is double: to optimize retrieval of details from memory, while minimizing misinterpretations or confabulatios.
Apart from the theoretical background, which is well established in psychological literature, some specific “rules” have been developed. MUFON Field Investigators may be pleased to compare those rules with our Investigators’ Manual indications since the late ‘70s:
– reconstructing the environment situation, preferably on the spot;
– an introduction explaining the reasons and the importance of the interview to the witnesses;
– in-depth reporting, divided in two parts, the first being a free account by the witnesses; then follow the open-ended questions by the interviewer.
The enhanced cognitive interview also includes some specific techniques:
– describing the events in several different orders and from different perspectives, in order to help recovering more details;
– helping the witness to re-live the state of mind at the time of the event; tailoring the language upon the witness’ own one; leaving some pauses between questions; using tricks to reduce distractions and to remain in a state of focused concentration.
Though time-consuming (2 hours would be the best), the cognitive interview has been shown to collect much more information from the witness (30%-40%) than any other interviewing technique.
Jacques Py (a professor of psychology at Toulouse University) has long been teaching courses in cognitive interview to Gendarmerie (a French police). This techniqe was also adapted for collecting witness testimonies about ball lightning reports from the BL study group at the Laboratoire de Foudre (Lightning Laboratory) headed by Raymond Piccoli.
And a special course for UFO field investigators has long been created and taught by him and his university associates to GEIPAN investigators, that is the network of volunteers doing the field investigation preliminary work for the UAP study group within the French NASA (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales).
An Online Cognitive Interview was also designed for UFO reports, specifically to elicit a comprehensive initial account which prevents loss of information from any delayed interview, as well as helping investigators to establish priorities in resource allocation.
Some analyses of the impressive results have been shown during specific workshops about data collection and evaluation, which the Groupement d’Etudes et Information sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiales Non-identifiés organized in Paris (2014) and in Toulouse (2022).
2.1.2 – WHAT ABOUT EYEWITNESS RELIABILITY?
Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos is a veteran Spanish ufologist, active since 1968. He has been a Spanish representative of MUFON and a speaker at MUFON Symposiums in 1993 and 1997. He recently coordinated an international collection of essays about as complex an issue as eyewitness reliability, which has been the subject of a rich literature in forensic as well as in psychology studies at large.
The challenge here was to put a reference opus together about the UFO eyewitness testimony. As many as 60 researchers from 14 different countries (and from different perspectives or experiences) collaborated with 57 chapters to a monmouth volume, amounting to 711 pages in large format, which was published in 2023 and was co-edited by American ufologist Richard Heiden.
Specialists in social, physical, and biological sciences, including psychology as well as psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, folklore, religion, journalism, engineering, computing, medicine, education, analysts with experience in the study of UFO perceivers, and other professionals offered a cross-disciplinary overview on Case Studies, Psychological Perspectives, Witness Testimony, Empirical Research, Anthropological Approaches, Metrics and Scaling, and Epistemological Issues, going from
clinical assessment to psychometrics, from comparative inquiry to statistical analysis.
It will remain as a milestone in applied scientific study to our subject.
2.1.3 – TRYING TO REDUCE SUBJECTIVE DATA
Laurent Chabin is a French engineer, has long been a volunteer field investigator with the UFO study group of the French National Space Center, and is presently working with SCEAU (the French Association for Saving and Preserving UFO Studies and Archives).
He was inspired by a field equipment that GEIPAN created in 1978, called SIMOVNI (UFO Simulator), which helped witnesses to point the exact direction and elevation they saw a UFO, and placing a simulation of it (as of size, shape and brightness) in the exact position through the visor. New technologies enabled Laurent to use Augmented Reality for more modern an equivalent device, which he presented at CAIPAN (the Workshop on Data and Analysis Collection about UAP, organized by GEIPAN in Toulouse, in 2022). Interested fellow researchers were able to test the device on place. The main problem with it is the price: 3,500 dollars, which is still expensive for private individual investigators and is acceptable only for a government organization like GEIPAN. But as software and hardware standardization and the user base progress, implementation complexity will decrease and costs will become reasonable.
This may be a practical solution to reduce some subjective estimation errors and obtain more objective and reliable data on observation reports. This is also a powerful tool for cognitive psychology studies; for instance, studying the correlation between the angular height and the angular size over-estimation, becomes simple.
2.2 – INSTRUMENTED RESEARCH
Reducing or eliminating subjective testimonies and the witness role itself: that’s long been the goal of “instrumental ufology”, that is using automatic recording of visual or physical data (eg. radar, magnetic fields, electromagnetics, sound) which can offer science something objective to work on. Several old or current examples are know.
2.2.1 – FROM A REMOTE NORWEGIAN VALLEY…
Probably the longest enduring one is Project Hessdalen, in Norway. A series of recurrent sightings of luminous aerial phenomena in a remote valley prompted Norwegian ufologists to organize skywatch campaigns there, then a college professor, Erling Strand, made it a structured effort to get instrumented confirmation of the sightings in 1983.
After more than 40 years, the project is still active. It would be impossibile to give even a quick overview of it in a few minutes. Let’s just say that the project has collected a huge lot of documentation and data about anomalies in photos, videos, EM data. Analyses have been performed and new tools or devices have been designed and installed in a permanent automatic station which is still in operation. Dozens of researchers have taken part in such life-long activity, with international cooperation from other countries.
Let me remind the Italian Commitee for Project Hessdalen, which organized some field expeditions in the early 2000’s, with instrumentation and personnel from the Radioastronomy Institute of the National Research Council as well as from the University of Bologna.
A rich literature exists on this Project. Interpretations and controversies have never stopped, but it’s right that it is so.
2.2.2 – … TO THE ROOFS OF A GERMAN UNIVERSITY
More recently, a German university launched a new project for instrumented research on UAP. The man here is Hakan Kayal, professor of Space Technology at Julius-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg. In 2021 he created IFEX (the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Extraterrestrial Studies) which includes research on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena among its activity.
Among the center’s activities, more than one specific automatic station for video-recording anomalous aerial phenomena were developed:
– The first SkyCAM systems for the detection of transient celestial events started as early as 2008 with the simple all-weather cameras. Over the years, several variants with low-cost components were implemented by student work to integrate self-received ADS-B data from aircraft, self-received weather satellite images from geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites, or passive RADAR.
– In 2016, ASMET camera project (Autonomous Sensor network for the detection and observation of METeors) was funded by the EU Regional Development Fund (EFRE), primarily designed for the detection of meteors but also for other short-term light phenomena. This new system uses AI neural networks to reduce the false alarm rate.
– Since December 2021, SkyCAM-5 has been in continuous operation at the university’s geography building. This is an experimental test platform for the autonomous detection of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP’s). Through the use of image processing algorithms, the sky is continuously monitored for unusual phenomena. Current machine learning models are applied to reduce wrong detections. The main objective of the camera system is to detect UAP’s, though it can also detect short duration luminous phenomena such as lightning or meteors. A client/server system is designed to network additional cameras.
– Since 2024, SkyCam-6 dual camera system has been in operation in Hessdalen, Norway, and is connected to the main server and UAP observation station of SkyCAM-5 in Würzburg, enabling it to automatically search for anomalies in the sky over that Norwegian valley.
– Another SkyCAM is soon be installed on the Zugspitze, the highest Mountain in Germany.
Hakan Kayal’s IFEX is probably the most advanced series of projects in instrumented UAP research in Europe.
- – ANALYSING THE DATA
2.3.1 – AUTOMATIC CLASSIFICATION AND FILTERING OF UFO REPORTS
Preliminary analysis of incoming UFO reports in order to identify conventional objects or phenomena is a primary activity with any UFO investigation group, as MUFON field investigators know far too well. Sometime it demands a long time and a deep experience, but the largest part of those reports are rather easily recognizable as IFOs (Identified Flying Objects) of just a few recurrent categories: stars and planets, bolides and meteors, as of natural causes; aircrafts and satellites, balloons or sky lanterns, rocket launches or reentries, as of artificial causes.
An automated recognition tool was developed by French data scientist Michael Vaillant for the official UAP study group within CNES (the French NASA,) soon implemented in a newer version called UAP Check, to be offered as a free API to private UFO organizations participating in an International network.
The system relies on data collected through an electronic questionnaire and generates a profile of the phenomenon based on the information provided by the witness: date, time, exact location, direction, azimuth, elevation, duration, movements, shape, color, etc. These data are then compared to the positions of hundreds of potential explanations, whose characteristics are computed in relation to the witness’ location, using real-world data from specialized databases (in line with the previously mentioned categories: satellites, stars, aircraft, balloons, etc.).
The results are given as a probability rating for each potential identification, in a totally objective way, thus helping investigators to properly classify incoming reports.
2.3.2 – HUMAN VS. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Parallel to the automated tool, which was introduced in 2016, GEIPAN investigators have long been doing the classification work with their own hands and heads. In the early ‘80s, GEIPAN had a larger paid staff of analysts and could afford a double-blind evaluation process, where two different experts (not the investigators) were evaluating each report and offered their hypotheses of identification: if both were agree, the case was closed; if they did disagree, a deeper collective analysis was required. This process was bringing to each case being assigned a quality judgement going from A (lowest) to D (highest), i.e. from the insufficient data through certainly identified, then probably identified, up to unidentified aerial phenomena.
This classification is still in use, but times have long changed since then, the current staff is very small and most of the field investigation activity is performed by a network of volunteers, many of them ufologists, which are trained by GEIPAN experts, then go out investigating incoming reports, just like MUFON Field Investigators do. And just like MUFON F.I., GEIPAN investigators are also offering their first evaluation of each case, which is later discussed in the group, also involving external experts for the strangest (D-class) case histories.
A Belgian investigator, to be precise the Director of Field Investigators for the UFO group COBEPS (formerly known as SOBEPS, famous for investigating the great wave of Belgium sightings in 1989-1991), Jean-Marc Wattecamps, had an experiment with Machine Learning supervised classification procedure, using the high quality GEIPAN database for French reports as well as the Belgian national collection of reports. A geologist by education, a high school teacher by profession, Wattecamps tested the efficiency of an automatic GEIPAN classification (A,B,C,D), with 1) numerical parameters like angular size, duration, etc.; and 2) text mining of the testimonies or case summaries. Orange software by Lubiana University was used. The best algorithm was the so-called “Random Forest” (a collection of decision trees working together to make predictions). After some experiments, the best results were obtained for the extreme categories ‘A’ and ‘D’ (where ‘A’ are clearly identifiable cases, ‘D’ clear-cut UFOs). In such case both numerical and text approaches performed very well, with AUC >0.9 and Precision >0.85.
2.4 – ARCHIVES AND ARCHIVAL RESEARCH
2.4.1 – OPERATION ORIGINS: HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Research of news items in old newspaper collections has long been done by UFO researchers and historians for a long time, and the huge amount of such information has only been scratched. Modern instruments are making such searches easier that in the past, at least when newspaper collections are digitized and made available. Such a lucky situation is not widespread in all countries, and a lot of human work has been and is still used, especially for local editions or low circulation periodicals.
The Italian example is the Operation Origins, which has involved more than 40 volunteers who checked more than 80 daily newspapers collections for the “primordial” years from 1946 through 1954.
A total of 8,000 previously unknown newsclippings were recovered and reproduced, bringing to 2,000 old reports surfacing from decades of oblivion, and allowing Italian UFO historians to get much more complete a view of our own beginnings.
Following a similar path to that of the American UFO historian Loren Gross, the longtime coordinator of the Italian project, Giuseppe Stilo, wrote a full collection of books reporting and organizing such documentation, one for each of the recurrent “waves of sightings” in 1946 (ghost rockets), 1947 (“flying saucers” arrival), 1950, 1952 and 1954 (two volumes because of the sheer volume of case histories and news reports in that fabulous year).
2.4.2 – BUILDING AND KEEPING THE LARGEST ARCHIVES IN THE WORLD
Anders Liljegren is a veteran Swedish researcher, full-time devoted to ufology since he retired from work in 2012. He was one of the founders of AFU in 1973. At that time, the name was different, then it became Archives for UFO Research, and in 2013 it was changed to Archives for the Unexplained, because of an enlarged focus of activity. It was started as a national lending library, but soon it became an international archive.
AFU is now a foundation, with a network of volunteers and some personnel paid by the Swedish civil service. Along the decades, it had an unprecedented snowball effect (attracting more and more collections from deceased or retired researchers from all over Europe and even from the States), which took it to become the largest existing UFO archive in the world.
That may sound like a big claim, but let’s consider some figures: the latest totals are 1.5 kilometers (one mile) of shelves in ten different facilities (all within the town of Norrköping), totalling nearly 5,000 square feet, which are hosting more than 20,000 books, more than 50,000 magazine issues, about 500,000 newsclippings and more than 50,000 original European UFO reports.
Besides the physical (paper) collections, AFU have been painstackingly digitizing periodicals, clippings and documentation, which has been uploaded on a huge website, presently consisting of several Terabytes, openly accessibile, and another large mass of data not publicly available because of privacy or copyright reasons.
2.4.3 – HOW TO INVOLVE PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES
SCEAU (Sauvegard et Conservation des Etudes et Archives Ufologiques, i.e. “Preservation and Conservation of UFO Studies and Archives”) is a French non-profit organization founded in February 1990 by a small group of longtime or formerly active ufologists, with the goal of a long-term preservation of ufological heritage as a cultural product. Its current secretary is Gilles Durand, a librarian by profession.
The French way has been quite original and different from the previously described example of an archive, because of the planned destination of recovered documentation: it’s not meaning to keep it in a private archive or organization, but to make it available to either future researchers or the general public, by depositing them in national and local archive centres as well as in public libraries.
35 years of activity have defined a regular operating path. The first step is recovering UFO groups’ or individual’s archives before they get lost, when the group disbands or the individual retires from active ufology (or has died). Dozens of such operations have been conducted all over France. Books and periodicals are the less relevant part, which is often a duplicate of other collections, while investigation reports and personal correspondence are the heart of these rescue activities.
The second step is the classification and a detailed inventory of each archive contents, which is published in SCEAU bulletin.
The third and final phase is recovering those files and archives in a durable deposit. France has got a long tradition of National Archives and Provincial Archives. As of now, SCEAU signed a written agreement wth three of those public archives and with four public libraries, which accepted to include the UFO collections, preserving them to posterity, ensuring their durability and consenting to consultation rules, that may depend on the original owner’s intentions. SCEAU means to be a mere intermediary between the donor and the archives centre or the library. It is bound by a code of ethics, never discarding any documentation (whatever its content), never keeping any original document, always strictly respecting the donor’s will.
As of now more, than 1,000 UFO books from SCEAU are hosted at the public library in Metz, several hundreds in the Nice University library and 200 more in a museum library in Yverdon. More than 10,000 UFO periodical issues have been catalogued and stored, too, as well as more than 15,000 newsclipping in French and about 8,000 in other languages.. 13 contract were signed with national or provincial archives, for storing archival collections (preferably from local ufologists).
A large digitization of UFO periodicals, newsclippings and investigation reports have been ongoing, with A.I. tools, too. A total of 3.5 Terabytes of digitized documents have been stored on a NAS (Network Access Storage) up to now.
- – DISCLOSURE OF GOVERNMENT UFO FILES
2.5.1 – SPANISH AIR FORCE FILES
We already mentioned Spanish ufologist Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos. Besides cataloguing Iberian close encounter reports since the 1970’s, he has long been collecting and analysing Spanish military case histories, i.e. testimonies by on-duty armed forces officers.
Within this specific interest area, in the late ‘80s he started a series of enquiries to the Spanish Air Force, aiming to obtain copy of military pilots UFO sighting reports. The full story of this is a bit long, and Mr. Ballester Olmos reported it at length in hisarticles and books, including the American masterpiece “UFOs and the Government” edited by Mike Swords and Robert Powell in 2012. Let’s say that as an effect of meetings and correspondence between him and the Air Force Public Affairs Office as well as the Air Staff where UFO reports were kept, in 1991 a declassification procedure was started. All Air Regions were asked to transmit their UFO files to the Air Force Headquarters. In the following months, there were hundreds of hours of meetings between the ufologist and Air Operative Command intelligence officers charged for the process. A long and painstacking work followed, finally bringing to declassify a total of 84 files (about 122 sightings) by Spanish Air Force personnel. During 7 years, Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos was asked to brief the intelligence officers and oversee the whole process.
What is of interest here is that a civlian ufologist was not just the trigger for a declassification, but unexpectedly became a consultant to the military for the disclosure process. This was a first time, as far as I can say. But it’s not been the last time, as of the Old Continent.
2.5.2 – FROM THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE TO THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES
David Clarke is an associate professor at Sheffield Hallam University Department of Media and Communication, but he has long been an active ufologist with BUFORA (British UFO Research Association) and other local organizations, before engaging in an academic career. He has been author of a lot of articles and a few books about our topic, and was one of the first researchers to use the new Freedom of Information Act to access UFO files in Great Britain.
Between 2008 and 2013 he was involved as a consultant in the release of United Kingdom Ministry of Defence UFO files.
Up to 2007 the National Archives had released around 200 files from WW2 to 1984. Under Dave Clarke’s curation, a further bunch of more than 200 files (for a total of 12,000 pages) were not just released in redacted format but also as scanned downloads (available from the Archives website).
Another group of 18 files emerged in the following years, including the unredacted original of the so-called Condign Report (a statistical secret study completed in 2000, which first relaunched the name Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). As a whole, more than 52,000 pages of UFO-related documents have been opened to the public. A few books have been published about those released data in the UK, notably by Dr Clarke himself.
2.5.3 – AN ITALIAN JOB
The Air Force UFO files declassification man is Paolo Fiorino. A veteran ufologist with a specialization in humanoid reports (CE-III), in the 1990’s he teamed with a few collegaues within the Italian Center for UFO Studies to create a catalogue of testimonies and reports of sightings by military personnel.
In late 1996, he and his fellow Renzo Cabassi (recently deceased) got an appointment at the Italian Air Force headquarters in Rome, meeting an Air Force Intelligence Staff General and asking for the Air Force to release its UFO files (which had been informally collected since the 1950’s, more formally since 1979). Motivations and seriousness were appreciated, a long process began and went on for a few years, at first through the Defense Staff at the Ministry, then directly from the Air Intelligence Staff. Each request generated the usual procedure of asking authorizations from all involved offices or branches, deleting personal data, finally releasing the documents. Sometimes, original photos and videos were released. An unprecedented feature was the ufologists leading the military to recover their own documentation gone lost: official investigations which we knew of, the reports of which had never arrived from local branches to the central archives, were called for, received, properly archived and declassified for us. Lists of old reports filed at Air Regions were also prepared upon request by the liaison ufologist!
The reorganization of the Air Staff after the 9/11/2001 interrupted the collaboration by the military, alas. But during those five fruitful years, the whole content of the Italian Air Force UFO files had been declassified and released to the Italian Center for UFO Studies for research purposes: a total of 508 case files (1,700 pages) were obtained.
2.5.4 – FRANCE: VIVE LA DIFFERENCE!
France has followed a completely different way from all other countries in whe world, in the last 48 years. As you may remember, in 1977 President Carter’s Science Advisor wrote to the NASA asking them to set up a panel and check if some study might be done about UFOs, but NASA returned a kind “No, thank you!”.
In that same year the French equivalent of NASA, the National Space Studies Center (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, CNES) took the opposite direction and created an Unidentified Air-Space Phenomena Study Group (Groupe d’Étude des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés, GEPAN), which started with creating a methodology, doing field investigations and conducting some statistical studies.
That group has had a long and variable life, suffering budget reductions which nearly took to its cancellation, surviving with a different mission and a different name (Atmospheric Reentries Phenomena Analysis Service) for some years, then resurrecting with a revamped old name (GEIPAN, adding an “information” in their mission), new resources and motivated people in the new century.
The relashionship between this government UFO office and the private ufologists have also been variable along the years, but the new GEIPAN soon showed a different, more open attitude, in at least two important directions: we already mentioned the creation of a network of volunteer investigators since 2008, the greater part of them coming from civilian ufology. Most relevant here is that in 2007 GEIPAN began to release its case investigation files as an online database, after clearing all personal data (which are protected all over Europe by strict privacy laws, now by a European General Regulation).
The publication of those reports is still ongoing, both as of new incoming reports and as of old reports from GEPAN archives. As of now, more than 3,000 case histories have been made available (and the full database with all data has been offered to external researchers, as we have seen above).
2.6 – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE FUTURE AHEAD
Isaac Koi is the ufological pseudonym of an English attorney (a barrister, to be precise) that has been active in UFO documentation preserving and sharing for more than 20 years.
Among other accomplishments of his, I chose to mention the implementation of the first known UFO-chatbots. As you know, a bot is a software application that is programmed to do certain tasks automatically. A chatbot is a bot which can simulate human conversation, usually by using conversational A.I. (artificial intelligence) tools such as natural language processing (NLP) to understand user questions and give answers to them.
The first experiment (an absolute first, as far as I know) was “Robert”, created in 2018 (and named after the late British ufologist Robert Moore) which used IBM Watson Assistant framework in trying to respond to raw reports of basic UFO sightings by asking some questions and suggesting possible solutions, based on the flowcharts contained in the book “UFO Study”, in an attempt to filter UFO reports automatically.
The second one was “Jenny”, in April 2013 (and named after another well-know British ufologist, Jenny Randles). It’s been the first UFO chatbot using ChatGPT to answer questions and summarise information to assist with UFO research and investigations. Unfortunately, though a significant upgrade over Robert, Jenny showed to be unreliable and prone to “hallucinating” answers – a typical feature of ChatGPT indeed.
A few months lated, in December, Isaac released his third chatbot, “Dave” (named after the British journalist and professor David Clarke, of course). It used ChatGPT 4 and, like his predecessor “Robert”, was intended to give critical evaluations of potential explanations for UFO sightings, based upon a larger collection of books and articles by Jenny Randles, J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée, Richard Haines, etc.
In June 2024, it was the turn of “Jacques”, the first of his chatbots to be named after a non-English fellow ufologist. French-American scientist J. Vallée was not only the inspiration for the name as an hommage, but this chatbot was accessing a large collection of the real Jacques’ books, diaries, articles, e-mails, augmented with A.I. agents scraping websites, and based upon an AI software called “Anything LLM” which is able to implement document collections on one’s own PC, thanks to the ever-accelerating pace of technology developments, which are available to all of us at home (an ordinary desktop equipped with Windows 10 and a 6 GB RAM was enough). The conversation abilities of “Jacques” were nothing, if compared with the research steps it was able to build by itself, to a point that its creator felt not just surprised but somehow concerned.
This is probably a most promising avenue for future ufology.
– – –
As I tried to briefly sketch it from Old Continent’s a viewpoint, the road (but I’d better say ”many a road”) is ahead of us.
Notes and References
- – EuroUfo
EuroUfo.net Website: https://www.euroufo.net/about-euroufo/
2.1.1 – Cognitive Interview
Bouvet, Romain, & Jacques Py. “Using the online cognitive interview with unidentified aerospace phenomenon testimonies.”, CAIPAN, 8-9 July 2014, Paris (France), GEIPAN, 2014, https://www.cnes-geipan.fr/sites/default/files/06_PY_abs.pdf
Mourato, Antoine, & Jacques Py. “How To Get Useful Data From UAP Witnesses.”, CAIPAN-2, 13-14 Oct. 2022, Toulouse (France), GEIPAN, 2022,
2.1.2 – Eyewitness Reliability
Ballester Olmos, Vicente-Juan, & Heiden, Richard W. (editors), The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony ., UPIAR, 2023, https://www.academia.edu/101922617/The_Reliability_of_UFO_Witness_Testimony
2.1.3 – Augmented Reality
Chabin, Laurent. “Augmented reality for more fidelity in UAP reports and cognitive psychology studies.”, CAIPAN-2, 13-14 Oct. 2022, Toulouse (France), GEIPAN, 2022, ttps://videotheque.cnes.fr/index.php?urlaction=doc&id_doc=38988&rang=48&id_panier=
Chabin, Laurent. “SIMOVNI2”, https://ufowaves.org/enquetes/simovni2/doku.php
- – Project Hessdalen
MUFON devoted a special issue of its journal with articles by Strand, Erling, et al. “Project Hessdalen.”, MUFON UFO Journal, no. 237, 1988.
Project Hessdalen website, https://www.hessdalen.org
2.2.2 – IFEX
Kayal, Hakan. “Space Technology and UAP Studies at IFEX”. SIGMA2 Webinar Approach to UAP physical observables, 14 May 2024, Paris (France), 3AF, 2024
https://www.3af.fr/fr/agenda/3af-sigma2-webinar-2-approach-to-uap-physical-observables-2324
Interdisciplinary Research Center For Extraterrestrial Studies (IFEX) Website:
2.3.1 – UAP Check and automated classification
Vaillant, Michael. “Evaluation Methodology for UAP cases at GEIPAN”, CAIPAN-2, 13-14 Oct. 2022, Toulouse (France), GEIPAN, 2022, https://videotheque.cnes.fr//index.php?urlaction=doc&id_doc=39006&rang=1
UAP Check reports classification tool: https://www.uapcheck.org/reports/?&lang=en
2.3.2 – Human vs. Artificial Intelligence
Wattecamps, Jean-Marc. “GEIPAN classification with text mining and machine learning”, CAIPAN-2, 13-14 Oct. 2022, Toulouse (France), GEIPAN, 2022, https://www.academia.edu/99067452/GEIPAN_classification_with_text_mining_and_machine_learning?uc-sb-sw=61206979
2.4.1 – Operation Origins
Stilo, Giuseppe. Scrutate i cieli! 1950: La grande ondata dei dischi volanti e la globalizzazione del fenomeno UFO. UPIAR, 2000.
Stilo, Giuseppe. Ultimatum alla Terra. 1952: i dischi volanti in Italia e nel mondo. UPIAR, 2002.
Stilo, Giuseppe. L’alba di una nuova era. 1946: il fenomeno dei “razzi fantasma” in Italia e nel mondo. UPIAR, 2003.
Stilo, Giuseppe.“Il quinto cavaliere dell’Apocalisse. La grande ondata UFO del 1954. UPIAR, 2006.
Stilo, Giuseppe. Un cielo rosso scuro. 1947-1949: l’arrivo dei dischi volanti sull’Italia e sul mondo. UPIAR, 2015.
2.4.2 – Largest archives in the world
AFU (Archives for the Unepxplained) Website: https://www.afu.se/
2.4.3 – Public libraries and archives
SCEAU (Sauvegarde et Conservation des Etudes et Archives Ufologiques) Website: https://sceau-archives-ovni.org/?page_id=178&lang=en
2.5.1 – Spanish Declassification
Ballester Olmos, Vicente-Juan. “Spanish Air Force UFO Files: The Secret´s End”, in MUFON 1993 International UFO Symposium Proceedings. Mutual UFO Network, 1993.
Ballester Olmos, Vicente-Juan. Expedientes Insólitos. Temas de Hoy, 1995.
Ballester Olmos, Vicente-Juan. “Monitoring Air Force Intelligence (Spain´s 1992-1997 UFO Declassification Process)”, in MUFON 1997 International UFO Symposium Proceedings. Mutual UFO Network, 1997.
2.5.2 – UK: From MOD to National Archives
Clarke, David. The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real Life Sightings. The National Archives, 2009, 2012.
2.5.3 – An Italian Job
Fiorino, Paolo. Gli OVNI dell’Aeronautica Militare Italiana. UPIAR, 2025.
2.5.4 – France difference
GEIPAN (website: https://geipan.fr/en
2.6 – UFO Chatbots
Koi, Isaac. “Robert 2.0 chatbot : World’s first robot ufologist?.”, 2018,
Koi, Isaac. “World’s first GPT-based UFO chatbot? Jenny (UfoGPT Chatbot1) – exploring the potential for new UFO research and investigation tools.”, 2023,
Koi, Isaac. “New UFO Chatbot – Dave”, 2023, https://data.isaackoi.com/2023/11/
Koi, Isaac. “Jacques – UFO chatbot with access to substantial scanned UFO collections.”,2024,
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the following peeple for contributing or helping with this presentation: Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Laurent Chabin, Dave Clarke, Paolo Fiorino, Andreas Müller, Michael Vaillant, Jean-Marc Wattecamps.