ExhibitionDocumentary deep-dive: primary sources, witness accounts, government records, cross-collection braiding
Public Parliamentary Record
The European Parliament UAP Meeting
European Parliament, Brussels | 20 March 2024
Three decades after the European Parliament last considered the UFO question in a 1993 plenary motion that was struck from the record, MEP Francisco Guerreiro convened the most substantive UAP hearing yet held inside an EU institution. Six main speakers and eight Q&A contributors representing nine countries, three intergovernmental bodies, and the major civil-society UAP research organisations across the continent gathered in Brussels on 20 March 2024 to consider a single proposition: that the European Union, alone among major Western blocs, has no harmonised system for reporting, monitoring, or scientifically assessing unidentified anomalous phenomena in its airspace, and that the absence is no longer defensible.
14Speakers & Contributors
1h 47mSession Length
9Nations Represented
FirstEU UAP Hearing in 30+ Years
Full Recording: European Parliament UAP Meeting
The complete one-hour-forty-seven-minute session held in the European Parliament building, Brussels, on the afternoon of 20 March 2024. Hosted by MEP Francisco Guerreiro under the auspices of the Greens/EFA group. All speakers in English unless otherwise noted.
The arguments that moved the meeting from individual perspectives to a shared policy framing.
MEP Francisco Guerreiro | Opening Remarks
Guerreiro opened by framing the meeting in regulatory terms rather than spectacle. The European Union has 27 member states and no harmonised system for collecting, monitoring, or analysing UAP data. The United States, despite its institutional resistance, has built more infrastructure for this question in the past three years than Europe has in three decades. The question for the parliament was not whether UAP exist as a phenomenon worth scientific attention. The question was whether European airspace would continue to be the only major airspace block where pilots had no clear reporting channel and aviation safety regulators had no agreed framework.
On the absence of a harmonised EU reporting framework
Ryan Graves | Via Videoconference
Graves recounted his Navy squadron's daily encounters with UAP off the Atlantic coast from 2014 to 2015, including objects observed on multiple sensor systems and one that closed to within fifteen metres of an F/A-18 in a near miss. He repeated his three-point case from the 2023 US congressional hearing: pilots see UAP regularly, their training and expertise make them credible observers, and stigma continues to prevent reporting at the rate that aviation safety requires. He emphasised that the European discussion would do well to skip the legitimacy debate his US colleagues are still fighting and proceed directly to reporting infrastructure.
On pilot reporting and the cost of stigma
Christiaan van Heijst | Boeing 747 Captain
Van Heijst described an unexplained bright light that descended at extraordinary speed in front of his aircraft over Germany early in his career, followed years later by a similar event over Greece when his plane was in proximity to the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group. Made the point that the public imagination locates UAP in the United States but his own most anomalous sightings happened in European airspace. Said that since going public, dozens of his colleagues have privately come forward with their own accounts, some of which were "far more significant than my own."
On the European character of pilot UAP observation
Dr. Beatriz Villarroel | Astrophysicist
Villarroel made the scientific case from astronomical archives. The VASCO project has documented multiple instances where objects appear and disappear from sky-survey plates within minutes in alignments that natural astrophysics struggles to explain. The 1950 Palomar plate showing nine such transients in a row remains unaccounted for after fourteen years of analysis. Argued that European astrophysics has both the archive depth and the methodological discipline to lead an evidence-based UAP investigation programme if the political framework existed to fund it.
On the empirical case from archival astronomy
José Luis Penedo del Rio | EASA
Penedo del Rio gave the institutional EU response: a reporting system already exists. EASA's occurrence-reporting framework, mandated by Regulation (EU) No 376/2014, allows pilots and aviation professionals to report any safety-relevant event, including anomalous observations. It is not specifically labelled UAP, but it is operational, available, and underutilised. He acknowledged the framework could be improved and made more visible to pilots, and welcomed the parliament's attention as an opportunity to do so.
On the EASA occurrence-reporting framework
Michael Vaillant | GEIPAN Consultant
Vaillant proposed a sequencing for any EU framework: agree the methodology before designing the data infrastructure. Drawing on nineteen years at GEIPAN, he argued that without shared investigation principles, harmonised data collection produces incomparable case files. The GEIPAN methodology, "remain neutral and exhaustive," has been adopted by several European bodies and could form the starting point for a Brussels-level consensus before any reporting platform is constructed.
On methodology as a prerequisite for harmonisation
What the Meeting Established
Five propositions emerged from the discussion with broad assent from speakers and contributors.
The first proposition was institutional. EASA confirmed on the record that a reporting system already exists, mandated by EU Regulation 376/2014. That admission, taken alongside MEP Guerreiro's plenary intervention and the parliamentary question E-000318/2024, removed the most common objection to UAP reporting in the EU: that there is no legal basis. The legal basis is in place. What is missing is awareness among pilots, training in how to file under it, and clarity from EASA on whether UAP observations should be filed at all. That gap is closable through guidance documents rather than new legislation.
The second proposition was methodological. Michael Vaillant's case for "neutrality and exhaustiveness" as the prerequisite to harmonised data collection drew explicit support from Edoardo Russo, Danny Ammon, and Lee Dines, each of whom has spent decades arguing that investigation discipline matters more than enthusiasm. The four largest European research bodies, CISU (Italy), GEP (Germany), COBEPS (Belgium), and the SCU European chapter (UK), all signalled willingness to operate under a shared methodology if the EU framework were built on one.
The third proposition was scientific. Beatriz Villarroel's archival-astronomy work and Vaillant's GEIPAN database between them established that the empirical material for European UAP investigation already exists. The VASCO project's 1950 Palomar plate, the GEIPAN case database accumulated since 1977, and the COBEPS archive from the 1989 to 1991 Belgian wave together represent a documentary record richer than the US ARRO holdings. The case for European institutional engagement is not contingent on new observations. It is contingent on a willingness to analyse the observations already in hand.
The fourth proposition was aviation-safety. Christiaan van Heijst's testimony, supported via videoconference by Ryan Graves's parallel arguments, brought the discussion back to the regulatory framing Guerreiro had opened with. Pilots are encountering objects they cannot identify. The reporting rate is suppressed by stigma. The flight safety implications, particularly around near-miss incidents at altitude, are independent of any cosmological framing of the phenomenon. EASA's existing framework can absorb these reports today; the question is how to encourage them.
The fifth proposition was political. The presence of EASA at the table, the explicit support of the Greens/EFA group, the involvement of the Sol Foundation as a US policy interlocutor, and the cooperation of seven national research bodies created the conditions for a follow-up resolution. Guerreiro indicated in his closing remarks that he would table additional parliamentary work, and that the November 2024 plenary debate on AARO and the EU's posture toward US disclosure would be the next opportunity to consolidate the consensus formed in Brussels.
The Broader Picture
What preceded the meeting, what followed, and how it fits the European trajectory.
The European Parliament last engaged the UFO question in 1993, when MEP Tullio Regge tabled a motion calling for an EU-wide investigation body. The motion was struck from the parliamentary record without debate. For the three decades that followed, European institutional engagement with UAP collapsed to national level. France maintained GEPAN/GEIPAN throughout. The UK ran DEFE 24 until 2003. Italy retired its military reporting framework in the 1980s. Belgium relied on civilian organisations like COBEPS. Germany never had a state programme. Across these national variations, the EU itself did nothing.
The trigger for the March 2024 meeting was external. The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence published its first preliminary UAP assessment in June 2021. The AATIP revelations had broken in late 2017. By 2022 the Pentagon had stood up AARO, by 2023 David Grusch had testified before the House Oversight Committee, and by early 2024 AARO had released its Volume 1 Historical Record Report. The asymmetry between US institutional movement and European silence had become impossible to ignore for any European policymaker tracking the file.
Guerreiro's parliamentary question E-000318/2024, tabled on 6 February 2024 alongside his floor intervention, formally asked the Commission whether the upcoming EU Space Law would include UAP reporting provisions and how the EU would coordinate with allied jurisdictions that had moved ahead. The Commission's reply was characteristically cautious but did not foreclose engagement. The 20 March meeting was the next step: not a legislative session, not a binding hearing, but the largest cross-organisational European UAP gathering in three decades. The meeting was held in a Parliament committee room, on a Wednesday afternoon, under Greens/EFA group auspices.
Follow-on activity through 2024 included a November plenary intervention on the AARO Historical Record Report, ongoing consultation between UAPCNL and DG MOVE on aviation-safety reporting visibility, and the November 2024 publication of the Historic Call to Action signed by COBEPS, CISU, GEP, UFOMeldpunt.be, the SCU European chapter, and UAPCNL. The Call to Action consolidated the positions reached in Brussels into a single policy document addressed to the Commission, the Parliament, and EASA.
UAPCNL Historic Call to Action (November 2024)
The principal follow-on document from the Brussels meeting. Co-signed by the seven national research bodies present in March, the Call to Action requests three concrete steps from EU institutions: (1) explicit EASA guidance that UAP observations are reportable under Regulation 376/2014; (2) a European Commission feasibility study on a harmonised UAP data framework, modelled on GEIPAN and informed by US AARO experience; and (3) parliamentary follow-up to integrate UAP reporting provisions into the next iteration of EU space legislation. The Call to Action sits in the NHI Archive's UAPCNL document collection.
From the Archive
For the US parallel timeline, the 2023 House Oversight Hearing shows where Ryan Graves first testified under oath, and the 2024 follow-up hearing covers the Elizondo, Gallaudet, Shellenberger, and Gold testimony. For the French institutional context that Michael Vaillant drew on, see the GEPAN/CNES Document Viewer. For the Belgian wave referenced by Wattecamps, see the COBEPS-archive entries in the Belgium sighting record. Beatriz Villarroel's VASCO project sits alongside Sol Foundation work in the Encyclopedia, and Peter Skafish's role as Sol's research director connects to the Sol Foundation launch coverage. The earlier 1968 House Science Committee Symposium is the only prior parliamentary-level UAP event of comparable substance in the archive.
The European Union has 27 member states and zero harmonised systems for monitoring or analysing UAP. We are alone among major Western blocs in this absence, and the absence is no longer defensible. The objective today is not to settle the question of what these phenomena are. The objective is to acknowledge that pilots see them, that scientists can study them, and that European citizens deserve a reporting framework that does not depend on the cultural courage of individual aviators.
MEP Francisco Guerreiro, Opening Remarks, European Parliament, 20 March 2024
