From August 28 to 30, Trondheim and the Hessdalen Valley in Norway hosted the Hessdalen Field Trip & Conference 2026, an international meeting organized by Project Hessdalen: three days of presentations, discussion and field expedition, with participants coming from Germany, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Ukraine and Chile.
A report by Francisco Mourão Corrêa is available on UAP Check website.
EuroUfo.net + UAP Check monthly Zoom Meeting on September 17th had Michael Vaillant as a speaker.
He presented in English the talk he had given to the UAP Symposium, held in a hall of French Parliament (Assemblée Nationale) in Paris, on June 29th: “Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena: From Investigation to Science” (with 5 suggestions for government actions).
As usual, the video recording of his presentation may be watched on EuroUFO YouTube channel.
A private discussion then followed with the attending fellows from Czechia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and the USA.
UAP Check website is publishing the global statistics of UFO reports from all over Europe, which Philippe Ailleris updated with 2025 data, shared by quite a few EuroUfo.net members.
The paper is not just an updated version of the previous annual editions: it is meant to provide a shorter, more focused assessment of recent reporting trends, while incorporating newly available 2025 data and additional reporting channels.
The unexpected encounter of an Italian settler with a “flying cigar” that landed in front of him, with “pilots” onboard and traces on the ground, causing a week of turmoil in the community and on the local newspapers.
A detailed re-examination of an early African close encounter during the peak of the 1954 wave of flying saucers over Europe, based upon hitherto unknown sources, recovered from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome.
French data scientist, GEIPAN longtime collaborator and UAP Check founder, Michael Vaillant was a guest speaker at SCU Conference 2026 in Toronto (Canada) on July 26th.
Vaillant’s paper was titled “Lessons from the GEIPAN Experience: Science, UAP Investigation, and the Case for an International Standards Coalition”. An abstract is available here.
Other European fellow among speakers were Christian Peters (University of Bremen, Germany) with a paper titled “Between Epistemic Ideals and Political Realities: Rethinking the Role of Science in Governmental UAP Research“, and Rainer Haseitl with an “Invitation to Hessdalen: An Active Hotspot for Instrumental UAP Research” (in Norway).
MUFON Director of International Development Robert Spearing presented the current situation and activities of the Mutual UFO Network to EuroUFO.net and UAP Check members, on April 15th, 2026, followed by a private discussion with the attending fellows from 10 different countries.
The video recording of the presentation is available on EuroUFO YouTube channel, as usual.
March 20th, 2026 marks the second anniversary of the historical meeting about “UAP in European Airspace”, organised at the European Parliament building in Bruxelles, which was baptized as the first “European UAP Day”.
This may be a good opportunity to resume what European developments of the UAP scene have happened in the twelve months elapsed since the previous anniversary.
On the very March 20th, 2025, in an unprecedented collective iniziative, Charles Maxence Layet’s article about a “European Strategic Autonomy and the Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena” was published in 11 different languages on the websites of 14 national UFO organizations across Europe (and was even relaunched across the Atlantic by the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies).
On April 10th, the shared appeal for the new European Parliament to take action on UAP in relation to their aims, values, mandates and priorities (which had been signed and submitted by the representatives of 15 national UAP organizations in October 2024), generated a wider public support campaign: UAP Coalition Netherlands called on citizens and organizations to jointly exert pressure on the European Parliament, by writing to each one’s Member of the new EuroParliament,.asking to take concrete measures toward a greater transparency and serious research about UAP, such as Data collection (a central European system), Scientific research (funding for multidisciplinary studies) and Policy integration (aviation and safety protocols).
As it will be noticed, the Dutch organization UAP Coalition has constantly been on the forefront of the initiatives toward European Union institutions, indeed.
On April 30th, UAP Coalition representatives had the first meeting with EuroParliament member Fabio De Masi (Germany), who had asked a Parliamentary question to the EU Commission about what information was known about UAP in connection with the critical infrastructure of member states, in December. During the two hour meeting, several critical issues were discussed: Stigma & Mental Health (the psychological impact on pilots and professionals and the need for a safe reporting culture), Flight Safety (the risks of unknown phenomena in European airspace); Cooperation (concrete actions for greater transparency and cooperation at EU level).
Those same topics were raised during another meeting of UAPC officers with a MEP, Lukas Mandl (Austria), on September 24th.
On July 20th, European ufology was put on stage of the annual symposium held by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in Cincinnati (USA): Edoardo Russo (Italy) was the invited foreign representative of the year, talking about “New Perspectives in UAP Studies from the Old Continent”: having more than 40 different countries (speaking dozens of different languages) has brought communication difficulties but also a great variety and richness of approaches and initiatives, which were presented to the unknowing American fellows, including: augmented reality tools for field investigation, cognitive psychology interview techniques, new software packages specifically devised for UFO photo analysis and for automated IFO identification, case classification by text mining and machine learning, new integrated systems for automatic sky monitoring & UAP detection, massive digitization of UFO literature, search engines for specialized bibliographies, A.I. tools for archival purposes, UFO ChatBots.
On September 10th, a collective feedback to the European Commission for the European Research Area (ERA) Act. was submitted by UAP Coalition and signed by 24 scientists and researchers from 14 countries, in another shared initiative sponsored by UAP Check network. This legislative initiative should ensure a resilient and inclusive European Research Area and the contribution was focused on a fundamental issue : stigma as a systemic barrier, discouraging researchers from applying for funding and hindering access to essential research infrastructures.The document offered four concrete proposals to the European Commission: Promoting curiosity (encouraging open and unbiased research); Anti-stigma Guidelines (development of frameworks for assessors and funders); Support for Exploratory Research (creating space for controversial or marginalized fields); Inclusive Networks (stimulating interdisciplinary collaboration); Fair Access (ensuring access to infrastructures, regardless of the research domain).
In the following months, more researchers joined the initiative and the total of signatures has grown to 36 by the end of January, 2026.
A few days later, on September 26th, UAP Coalition submitted a feedback to the public consultation about another relevant topic: the EU Space Act, suggesting that it should include: Explicit Recognition (inclusion of UAP in the legal texts), Reporting Obligation (for operators to report unidentified phenomena), Synergy (use of existing monitoring systems for UAP detection), Transparency (central data collection without the hindering effect of stigma).
The October 24-27th weekend saw the third SOL Symposium, organized by the American SOL Foundation in Europe for the first time: three full days of speeches and meetings, involving more than 20 speakers from academia, government, civil society, and the private sector, as well as 440 guests from all over the world in the touristic town of Baveno, on Lake Maggiore (Italy) probably made this the main European UAP event in 2025.
As a a direct result of its feedback to the European Research Area (ERA) Act, UAP Coalition obtained a consultation meeting with the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) of the European Commission on December 19th. Accompanied by Prof. Anders Warell and Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, they made it clear that an integrated European research market is unattainable as long as stigma hinders progress in unconventional fields such as UAP.
December 24th saw the publication of the annual European UAP Barometer by Philippe Ailleris for EuroUFO. An annual overview of the UFO reports which have been collected by the main UFO organizations in Europe has been published for several years, but the 2025 edition showed a significant improvement compared to previous years: five additional national organizations joined the survey and two international collections contributed to reaching a staggering total of 33,600 reports from 40 European countries for the years 2019-2024.
On the very last day of 2025, December 25th, another joint initiative was launched by EuroUFO.net and UAP Check: Euro Ufo Index, the catalog of reports and news of alleged UFO sightings in European countries. For the first time ever, 23 national UFO organizations from all over Europe (as well as two international ones) agreed to share their data sets in order to create a common reference tool. The first experimental version has been limited to sighting reports from the year 2024, and the essential data for indexing each case (date, time, location, type, originating organization). After the test phase is completed, the Euro Ufo Index will be extended to a longer time frame (from 1947 or earlier) and more data will be added for each report. Meanwhile, more than 4,000 reports from 43 different nations have already been indexed for that single year and the total is expected to reach 5,000, after the addition of a few more national collections.
A notable year as of the European Union UAP scene, indeed.
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This article is published simultaneously in 12 different languages and relaunched on the websites of 16 national or international organizations.
Cover image by Andrea Bovo (CISU)
Scientific Director Mark Rodeghier presented the current situation and projects of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) to EuroUFO.net and UAP Check members, on March 5th, 2026.
The video recording of the presentation is available on EuroUFO YouTube channel, as usual.
A private discussion followed with the twenty-five attending fellow researchers from Czechia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal: Romania, and Spain.
The first EuroUFO + UAP Check monthly meeting of the year took place on January 21st: Marco Bianchini talked about “U.S.O.: Unidentified Submerged Objects – History and mythology of a peculiar phenomenon”, presenting both his decades-long cataloguing of Italian reports and the international situation.
The video recording of the presentation is available on EuroUfo YouTube channel.
His talk was followed by a private discussion with the attending fellows from 11 different countries.
A new joint initiative was launched by EuroUFO.net and UAP Check: Euro Ufo Index, the catalog of reports and news of alleged UFO sightings in European countries.
For the first time ever, 20 national UFO organizations from all over Europe (as well as two international ones) agreed to share their data sets in order to create a common reference tool.
The first experimental version is limited to sighting reports from the year 2024, and the essential data for indexing each case (date, time, location, type, originating organization).
After the test phase is completed, the Euro Ufo Index will be extended to a longer time frame (from 1947 or earlier) and more data will be added for each report.
Meanwhile, more than 3,000 reports from 43 different nations have already been indexed, and the total is expected to reach 5,000 in the next few weeks, after the addition of three more national collections.
The search engine can be accessed on the Euro Ufo Index page on EuroUFO.net web site.
Currently participating organizations are listed on a dedicated page.