Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Brussels Responds To Growing Concerns Over Airspace Surveillance

Brussels has acknowledged that unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) can be reported through existing EU aviation-safety systems, while previously released correspondence shows officials have also discussed improving space-object detection capabilities.

The European Commission has faced questions about UAPs for several years, although it has stopped short of establishing a dedicated programme to investigate them.

The term UAP was adopted by the US government in 2020 as a broader alternative to the older UFO label, in part to strip away decades of stigma and widen the scope of what counts as an unexplained phenomenon.

Since then, Washington has held high-profile congressional hearings and released declassified footage, while European discussions have remained far more muted.

Brussels Has Discussed Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena

A letter from the Commission's defence department said, 'We are getting better at seeing it and better identifying it as our technological capacities improve, but we need to get even better.'

The document relates to sky and space observations submitted by a Malaysian father-and-son team of amateur astronomers, who in October 2022 sent 37 images of alleged UAPs to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The pair, who had previously received attention for lunar observations, wrote that governments 'simply have no opinions' when confronted about such sightings and noted the objects appeared to fly 'very near to aircraft and important targets, such as military and nuclear facilities.'

They also claimed to have detected signals 'from up above through the local networks Wi-Fi frequency.'

Brussels replied that it had no authority to investigate events over Malaysia, but said it would propose to its 27 member states that they 'increase [their] ability to detect objects in the space environment around the Earth.'

The Commission added this was 'partly to help us better identify the UAPs that you have seen and the many pieces of space debris that endanger the many uses of space'.

It cautioned, however, 'We do not claim that in the future this will solve all cases like those you have reported, but maybe some of them.'

The correspondence should not be interpreted as evidence that the Commission established a dedicated UAP investigation. In March 2025, it said gathering information or documentation about UAPs was not an objective of the EU Space Programme and that it held no information corresponding specifically to the phenomenon.

The Malaysian duo also contacted NASA, the Malaysian Nuclear Agency, the Malaysian science ministry and Canada's defence ministry. According to the correspondence, those bodies did not pursue the observations further.

Former Canadian MP Larry Maguire, approached individually, was more encouraging. 'I suspect that more and more people around the world will be turning their attention to the skies and will be collecting even more data and recordings in the coming year,' he wrote in June 2022.

'At the end of the day, the skies aren't classified, and as more information is collected, it will lead to more public awareness of the issue.'

Flight Safety and the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Reporting Gap

In the EU, the debate has increasingly centred on aviation safety. MEP Fabio De Masi has repeatedly pressed the Commission to update EU aviation reporting systems to include a dedicated, standardised category for UAP incidents.

In April 2025, he argued that existing classifications did not adequately capture the nature of such incidents.

Pilots and UAP campaigners argue that the lack of a dedicated classification hampers data collection and risk mitigation, and that sudden appearances of unidentified objects could lead to loss of situational awareness or emergency manoeuvres.

Rob Akkermans, a commercial pilot with a Dutch airline, has described a 2023 flight from the Middle East to the Netherlands during which he and five other crew members reportedly observed strange lights for more than two hours.

'It began while we were south of Cyprus... we saw a light flare up intensely and then slowly fade out,' he said. 'The most bizarre aspect was that one of the three lights would sometimes manoeuvre around the others. It resembled a chase, what air forces call dogfighting.'

'You are forced to carry this experience in silence, worrying far more about the professional consequences of the taboo than the actual safety risk you just witnessed,' he said.

Christiaan van Heijst, a Boeing 747 captain, has documented several unexplained encounters, including one over Spain on 23 January 2010. He said military air traffic control confirmed there was 'no other traffic at all, all the way down to Morocco, no military activity, no commercial traffic, no weather balloons, nothing.'

Van Heijst's own account and independent reporting confirm the 2010 sighting and his contact with air traffic control, although the nature of the object remains unexplained.

Joachim Dekkers, chair of the UAP Coalition Netherlands, argues that stigma poses a risk to accurate aviation reporting. 'Without a dedicated UAP category in aviation safety systems, flight crews are forced to misclassify critical data,' he said. 'The EU cannot maintain global leadership in aviation safety while ignoring a reality other major powers measure.'

EASA and the European Commission, however, dispute the suggestion that the EU lacks a mechanism for recording such incidents. The Commission confirmed in July 2025 that relevant occurrences could be recorded in ECCAIRS2, the EU's harmonised aviation-safety reporting system.

In March 2026, the Commission went further, saying EASA was aware of recent international developments concerning UAP reporting and that incidents could be stored in the European Central Repository for analysis. EASA nevertheless concluded that the risk situation remained unchanged and that no additional action was warranted.

That official position leaves a clear divide between campaigners seeking a dedicated UAP category and EU authorities, which maintain that the existing system can already accommodate such reports.

A Commission spokesperson has previously maintained that national-security aspects of UAP incidents remain primarily a matter for individual member states. De Masi, meanwhile, has continued pressing Brussels for greater coordination, arguing that the issue concerns airspace security and aviation safety rather than speculation about extraterrestrial life.

What remains unproven is the nature or origin of the phenomena being reported. Neither the correspondence nor the pilots' accounts establish that the objects were extraterrestrial, technologically extraordinary or connected to a single cause.

What the official record does establish is that UAPs have reached the European Commission's agenda, can be recorded through EU aviation-safety systems and have prompted repeated questions about whether Europe's existing detection and reporting mechanisms are sufficient.