Presentation at the annual MUFON Symposium, Cincinnati, 20–22 July 2025

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by Edoardo Russo

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ABSTRACT

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Rapidly evolving new technologies have given fresh momentum to our field of study on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ufology in 44 different European countries (which speak dozens of different languages) has followed its own path for a very long time. Communication difficulties have led to a large variety of approaches and initiatives, which only in recent decades have begun to interconnect with one another.

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Some of these original initiatives, current activities, or planned projects from the Old Continent include: augmented reality tools for field investigations, interview techniques from cognitive psychology, new software packages specifically designed for the analysis of UFO photos and for automatic IFO recognition, case classification using text mining and machine learning, new integrated systems for automatic sky surveillance and UAP detection, large scale digitization of UFO literature, search engines for specialized bibliographies, AI tools for archival work, UFO chatbots.

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1 – A VIEW FROM EUROPE

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1.1 – EUROPE AS A MOSAIC OF COUNTRIES, LANGUAGES, AND EXPERIENCES

Europe is made up of more than 40 different nations, speaking at least 36 different languages.

As a first consequence, this strong fragmentation has always created difficulties in communication (the so called language barrier). As a second consequence, distinct cultures mean a great wealth of different experiences, ideas, and initiatives.

Both consequences have influenced the development of ufology in the Old Continent, not to mention the different political systems (including liberal democracies, communist regimes, and right wing dictatorships).
It is in fact more accurate to speak of European “ufologies” in the plural, since diversity has always been the rule: in government involvement and government stance, in media attitudes, in the amount and type of UFO literature available, and in the nature of UFO research communities. In a sense, each country has had its own history, its own activities, and its own specific features, even though ufologists have long tended to communicate with colleagues in nearby or distant countries.

For obvious reasons, the United States of America has been the main point of reference. But British and French ufology have also had a strong influence on other European countries.

Even if they are less known outside their borders, the ufologies of smaller nations have for a long time produced interesting results, which were often ignored until exchanges improved, especially after the widespread diffusion of the Internet.

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1.2 – A EUROPEAN NETWORK: EUROUFO.NET

After some earlier unsuccessful attempts, a successful initiative to create a circular flow of communication among European researchers began 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 that would connect not groups, but individuals. Specifically, it was aimed at researchers carrying out some specific project or activity of any kind, so that they could keep one another informed and achieve better cooperation.

More than 25 years later, EuroUfo.net is still active as a community of scientifically oriented collaborators, with a mailing list, a website, several meetings held alongside international conferences (e.g. Chalons 2005, Saint Vincent 2007, Paris 2014, Toulouse 2022, Brussels 2024), regular video meetings, and an intense exchange of documents and information.

Of course, people have come and gone. The informal network currently includes around 100 members from 23 countries. Several of them are or have been MUFON representatives or members, naturally.

EuroUfo.net is, and has been for a long time, the main linking tool on the Old Continent, and its members are actively involved in the international UAP Check initiative for a global network.

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1.3 – SOME EXPERIENCES IN EUROPEAN UFOLOGY

It is obviously impossible to give a complete overview of what European ufologists have produced whether similar to or different from their American counterparts. My brief presentation will offer just a glimpse of a few selected initiatives that have brought new perspectives into UFO (now UAP) studies in five different areas:

• Data collection and analysis

• Instrumented research

• Data analysis

• Archives

• Disclosure

• Artificial intelligence

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2.1 – WITNESS INVESTIGATION

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2.1.1 – COGNITIVE INTERVIEWING FOR UAP INVESTIGATIONS

One investigative tool that comes from France is the adaptation of the Cognitive Interview to UFO cases. It is a methodology for gathering information from eyewitnesses that was developed for police investigative needs in the mid 1980s. Its goal is twofold: to optimize the retrieval of details from memory, while minimizing misinterpretations and confusion.

Beyond its theoretical foundation well established in the scientific psychological literature several specific “rules” have been developed. MUFON field investigators will be pleased to see how closely these rules match the guidance in our own Field Investigator’s Manual from the late 1970s:

• reconstructing the environmental setting, preferably on site

• an introduction that explains the reasons and importance of the interview to the witnesses

• a detailed account, divided into two parts, the first being a free narrative from the witnesses

• followed by open ended questions from the interviewer.

The enhanced cognitive interview also includes certain specific techniques:

• asking the witness to describe the events in several different orders and from different perspectives, in order to help retrieve more details

• helping the witness to re enter the state of mind they were in at the time of the event

• adapting the interviewer’s language to that of the witness

• allowing pauses between questions

• using tricks to reduce distractions and keep the witness in a state of concentration.

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Although time consuming (two hours is ideal), the cognitive interview has been shown to extract 30–40% more information from a witness than any other interviewing technique.

Jacques Py (professor of psychology at the University of Toulouse) has long taught courses in cognitive interviewing to the gendarmerie (French police). This technique has also been adapted for collecting testimonies on lightning reports by the BL study group at the Laboratoire de Foudre (Lightning Laboratory), led by Raymond Piccoli.

A special course for UFO investigators has also been created and for years taught by him and his academic colleagues to GEIPAN investigators, i.e. the volunteer network that carries out preliminary fieldwork for the UAP study group within the French “NASA” (Centre National d’Études Spatiales).

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An online cognitive interview tool has also been designed for UFO reports, specifically to extract a complete initial description that prevents the loss of information due to any later interview, and to help researchers set priorities for allocating resources.

Some analyses of the impressive results were presented during dedicated workshops on data collection and evaluation, organized by the Groupement d’Études et d’Information sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non identifiés in Paris (2014) and Toulouse (2022).

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2.1.2 – WHAT ABOUT EYEWITNESS RELIABILITY?

Vicente Juan Ballester Olmos is a veteran Spanish ufologist, active since 1968. He has been MUFON’s representative in Spain and a speaker at MUFON symposia in 1993 and 1997. He recently coordinated an international collection of essays on the complex subject of eyewitness reliability, a topic that has generated a rich literature in both forensic and psychological studies in general.

The challenge here was to assemble a reference work specifically on UFO eyewitness testimony. Over 60 researchers from 14 different countries (with different standpoints and experiences) contributed 57 chapters to a single volume, totaling 711 pages in large format, published in 2023, with American ufologist Richard Heiden as co editor.

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Experts in the social, physical, and biological sciences including psychology as well as psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, folklore, religious studies, journalism, engineering, computer science, medicine, and education plus analysts with experience in the study of reported UFOs and other professionals, together provided an interdisciplinary overview covering case studies, psychological perspectives, witness testimony, empirical research, anthropological approaches, measurement and scaling, and epistemological issues: from clinical assessment to psychometrics, from comparative research to statistical analysis.

It will stand as a landmark in the applied scientific study of our subject.

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2.1.3 – ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE SUBJECTIVE DATA

Laurent Chabin is a French engineer, long time volunteer field investigator for the UFO study group of the French National Space Center, and currently working with SCEAU (the French Association for the Preservation and Conservation of UFO Studies and Archives).

He took inspiration from a device created by GEIPAN in 1978, the SIMOVNI (UFO Simulator), which helped witnesses to indicate the exact direction and elevation where they had seen a UFO and to position a simulation of it (in terms of size, shape, and brightness) at the precise spot through a visor. New technologies allowed Laurent to use Augmented Reality for a more modern equivalent device, which he presented at CAIPAN (the workshop on the collection and analysis of UAP data organized by GEIPAN in Toulouse, 2022). Interested colleague investigators were able to test the device on site.

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The main drawback is price: about 3,500 dollars, still too expensive for private researchers and acceptable only to a government body such as GEIPAN. But as the standardization of software and hardware and the size of the user base advances, the complexity of the application will decrease and the cost will become reasonable.

This may become a practical solution for reducing some subjective estimation errors and obtaining more objective and reliable data in observation reports. It is also a powerful tool for cognitive psychology studies for example, studying the correlation between angular elevation and overestimation of angular size becomes straightforward.

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2.2 – INSTRUMENTED RESEARCH

The aim of this type of research is to reduce or eliminate subjective testimony and the witness’s role itself: this has long been the objective of “instrumented ufology,” that is, automatic recording of optical or physical data (e.g. radar, magnetic fields, electromagnetism, sound) that can provide science with something objective to work on. Several earlier and current examples are well known.

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2.2.1 – FROM A REMOTE NORWEGIAN VALLEY…

Probably the longest running of these is the Hessdalen project in Norway. A series of recurring observations of luminous aerial phenomena in a remote valley prompted Norwegian ufologists to organize sky watching expeditions there, and then a college professor, Erling Strand, launched a structured effort to obtain instrumental confirmation of the sightings in 1983.

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More than 40 years later, the project is still going. It would be impossible to give even a brief overview in a few minutes. Suffice it to say that the program has amassed a huge body of documentation and data on anomalies in photos, videos, and electromagnetic measurements. Analyses have been carried out, and new tools and devices have been designed and installed in a permanent automatic station that is still operating. Dozens of researchers have taken part in this lifetime long activity, with international cooperation from other countries.

Let me recall the Italian Committee for Project Hessdalen, which organized several field expeditions in the early 2000s, with instruments and staff from the Institute of Radioastronomy of the National Research Council and from the University of Bologna.

There is a rich literature on this project. Interpretations and debates have never ceased and rightly so.

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2.2.2 – …TO THE ROOFTOPS OF A GERMAN UNIVERSITY

More recently, a German university has started a new instrumented project on UFOs. The coordinator is Hakan Kayal, professor of Space Technology at the Julius Maximilians Universität in Würzburg. In 2021 he created IFEX (Interdisciplinary Research Center for Extraterrestrial Studies), which includes research on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena among its activities.

Within the center’s work, more than one special automatic station has been developed for video recording of anomalous aerial phenomena:

• The first SkyCAM systems for detecting transient sky events began as early as 2008 with simple all weather cameras. Over the years, several variants using low cost components were implemented by student projects to integrate self acquired ADS-B data from aircraft, self acquired satellite weather images from geostationary and polar satellites, or passive RADAR.

• In 2016, the camera program ASMET (Autonomous Sensor Network for the Detection and Observation of METeors) was funded by the EU Regional Development Fund (EFRE). It was mainly designed to detect meteors, but also other short lived luminous phenomena. This new system uses artificial intelligence neural networks to reduce the false alarm rate.

• Since December 2021, SkyCAM-5 has been in continuous operation on the roof of the university’s geography building. It is an experimental test platform for the autonomous detection of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). Using image processing algorithms, the sky is continuously monitored for unusual phenomena. Current machine learning models are applied to reduce false detections. The system’s primary goal is UAP detection, although it can also capture short duration luminous events such as lightning or meteors. A client/server system has been designed to network additional cameras.

• Since 2024, the dual camera SkyCAM-6 system has been operating in Hessdalen, Norway, connected to the central server and the UAP observation station of SkyCAM-5 in Würzburg, allowing automatic detection of anomalies in the sky above that Norwegian valley.

• Another SkyCAM will soon be installed on the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain.

Hakan Kayal’s IFEX is perhaps the most advanced set of UAP instrumented research projects in Europe.

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2.3 – DATA ANALYSIS

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2.3.1 – AUTOMATIC CLASSIFICATION AND FILTERING OF UFO REPORTS

The preliminary analysis of incoming UFO reports to identify conventional objects or phenomena has always been a primary activity of every UFO research group, as MUFON field investigators know very well. Sometimes it takes a lot of time and deep experience, but the majority of such reports are relatively easy to recognize as IFOs (Identified Flying Objects) belonging to a few recurring categories: stars and planets, fireballs and meteors (natural causes) airplanes and satellites, balloons or sky lanterns, rocket launches or re entries (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), and soon implemented in a newer version called UAP Check, to be offered as a free API to private UFO organizations that participate in an international network.

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The system is based on data collected via an online questionnaire, from which it builds a profile of the phenomenon using the information provided by the witness: date, time, exact location, direction, azimuth, elevation, duration, motions, shape, color, etc. These data are then compared to the positions of hundreds of possible explanations, whose characteristics are computed relative to the witness’s position using real world data from specialized databases (in the categories already mentioned: satellites, stars, aircraft, balloons, etc.).

The output is a probability score for each possible identification, in a fully objective way, thus helping researchers correctly classify incoming reports.

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2.3.2 – HUMAN VS. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Alongside the automated tool, introduced in 2016, GEIPAN researchers have long carried out the classification work themselves. In the early 1980s GEIPAN had a larger paid staff of analysts and could afford a double blind assessment process, where two different experts (not the field investigators) evaluated each report and proposed their own hypotheses for identification: if both agreed, the case was closed if they disagreed, a deeper collective analysis was required. This process led to each case being given a qualitative rating from A (lowest) to D (highest): from insufficient data, through certainly identified, then probably identified, up to unidentified aerial phenomena.

That classification system is still in use, but times have long since changed: the current staff is very small, and most field investigation work is carried out by a network of volunteers, many of them ufologists, trained by GEIPAN experts and then dispatched to investigate incoming reports, just like MUFON field investigators. And just as MUFON FIs do, GEIPAN investigators provide an initial evaluation for each case, which is later discussed within the group, with external experts also brought in for the strangest (D-class) case histories.

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A Belgian researcher, specifically the Director of Field Investigators for the Belgian group COBEPS (formerly SOBEPS), known for investigating the large 1989–1991 Belgian wave, Jean Marc Wattecamps, performed an experiment with supervised Machine Learning classification using the high quality GEIPAN database of French reports and the Belgian national collection.

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Wattecamps, a geologist by training and a high school teacher by profession, tested the effectiveness of automatic GEIPAN style classification (A,B,C,D) using 1) numeric parameters such as angular size, duration, etc., and 2) text mining of witness testimonies or case summaries. The Orange software package from the University of Ljubljana was used. The best algorithm turned out to be the so called “Random Forest” (an ensemble of decision trees working together to make predictions).

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After some trials, the best results came for the extreme categories “A” and “D” (“A” being clearly identified cases, “D” clear UFO cases). In these, both the numeric approach and the text approach performed very well, with AUC > 0.9 and Precision > 0.85.

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2.4 – ARCHIVES AND ARCHIVAL RESEARCH

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2.4.1 – OPERATION ORIGINS: HOW IT ALL STARTED

Newspaper archive research has been carried out by UFO researchers and historians for a long time, and the enormous amount of available information has only been scratched. Modern tools make such searches easier than in the past, at least when newspaper collections have been digitized and made accessible. This fortunate situation does not exist in every country, and a great deal of human work has been and is still required, especially for local papers or low circulation periodicals.

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The Italian example is “Operation Origins,” which involved more than 40 volunteers checking over 80 daily newspaper collections for the “early” years from 1946 to 1954.

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In total, 8,000 previously unknown clippings were recovered and reproduced, bringing to light 2,000 old reports after decades of oblivion and allowing Italian UFO historians to gain a much more complete picture of our own beginnings.

Following a path similar to that of American UFO historian Loren Gross, the long-time coordinator of the Italian program, Giuseppe Stilo, wrote a full set of books that report and organize the documentation, one volume for each of the recurring “flaps” in 1946 (ghost rockets), 1947 (the “arrival of flying saucers”), 1950, 1952, and 1954 (two volumes, due to the massive number of case histories and news items in that legendary year)