The Central Research Network for Extraordinary Celestial Phenomena, or CENAP, says it has cleared up some 14,000 UFO cases in Germany, and director Hansjürgen Köhler says the group gets between three and six reports a day. That’s the basic machinery here: people see something in the sky, and a small reporting centre in Lützelbach becomes the place where the mystery gets sorted, explained, or left hanging.
The State Likes Its Own Mysteries
Köhler said the recent release of so-called UFO files by the Pentagon has put the topic back in the spotlight. The Pentagon formally confirmed the authenticity of three recordings from 2004 and 2015 in April 2020, after the U.S. Navy had already released videos showing unidentified flying objects, now mostly referred to as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAP. In December 2022, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, was set up within the U.S. Department of Defense to investigate UAP reports, assess potential threats to national security and review past cases. The language is pure institutional gravity: national security, formal confirmation, review, assessment. The usual state ritual. Something appears, the military names a bureau, and the bureaucracy gets to own the uncertainty.
Köhler said one of the recordings, the Gimbal video, was made in January 2015 during a training flight by a U.S. Navy F/A-18 off the coast of California. He said the infrared footage shows an unidentified object that appears to rotate on its own axis and is commented on in astonishment by the pilots. He said the Pentagon has confirmed the authenticity of the recording but has not been able to clearly establish the object’s exact identity. Even here, the state’s great apparatus of certainty runs into the same wall: it can authenticate the image, but it can’t pin down what it actually is.
Köhler said he is convinced the video shows nothing more than a balloon and explained its apparently rapid movement as a relative motion between the aircraft and the balloon. He also said the F/A-18 has had issues with its electronic tracking systems since it was introduced by the U.S. Navy, has received nine updates to get that under control, and still has misreadings, including in speed indications. The military’s expensive hardware, apparently, still misreads the sky. Nine updates later, the machine remains a machine.
From War Files to Sky Reports
Köhler said the work began with “youthful recklessness” and that he and others started looking more closely at the UFO subject after calls kept coming into an observatory. He said that in 1973, when they were young men, they obtained microfilms from the United States from the Second World War era showing flying objects that were considered inexplicable phenomena. “We realised that even back then, during the war, there were repeated natural phenomena,” Köhler said. “Some of the images were quite striking – not least because of the pilots' reactions, as they asked themselves in astonishment what might just have flown past them.”
That’s a neat little archive of state history: war-era footage, military pilots, unexplained objects, and the same astonished reaction from men trained to control the sky. The state records what it can’t fully command, then stores it in files and offices.
Köhler said social media and X amplify tall tales and that the debunking often disappears. He said, “Supposedly, visitors from far out there drop by every day to see what we're up to here. I do not deny that there is life out there. But are we really to believe that they travel across galaxies with highly advanced technology to our blue planet and then crash of all places here above the desert?” The line lands because it cuts through the noise. Not every strange light is a revelation. Not every clip is proof. And not every viral claim deserves a throne.
What Can Actually Be Identified
Köhler said people can use free astronomy apps to identify what they are seeing in the sky. He listed aircraft, helicopters, rocket stages, satellites, meteors, bright fireballs, planets, bright stars, balloons of all kinds and decorative foil balloons from children’s birthday parties and weddings, as well as lasers used by event organizers that sometimes shine over distances of several kilometers, among the things he has identified so far. That list is less glamorous than the internet’s fantasies, but it’s the real one: ordinary objects, commercial clutter, military hardware, and the occasional bit of party decoration drifting into the wrong frame.
He said some cases remain unexplained because key information is missing, and that for a serious investigation researchers need the date, time, place, direction in the sky and, if possible, visual material. In other words, even the sky gets reduced to paperwork before anyone will take it seriously. The reports keep coming. The institutions keep filing them. And the rest of us are left with the same old arrangement: people looking up, authorities looking for a category, and the military still pretending its own systems are more reliable than they are.