Silencing the Skies: Germany’s Unique Scepticism in the Age of UFO Disclosure
Opinion
Written by Lindsay Marie Marcks - 23 December 2025
While the U.S. moves towards transparency, one of Germany’s primary civilian reporting centers remains a bastion of categorical rejection, leaving witnesses silenced and scientific data in the dark.
At a time when the Pentagon is declassifying ‘Tic-Tac’ footage and convening public hearings—and when China is deploying artificial intelligence to detect Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena—Germany in comparison stands apart: a silent fortress of scepticism and institutional resistance.
The German narrative on UAP has been - to a disproportionate effect - cornered by one magisterial gatekeeper: a private, unregistered organisation operated out of the Odenwald Forest by a self-taught hobby astronomer.
Hans Jürgen Köhler, the surviving founder of CENAP (Central Research Network for Anomalous Phenomena), appears weekly in the press. If you prefer to call it by its native German name, you can refer to it as Centrales Erforschungsnetz außergewöhnlicher Himmelsphänomene.
Despite having no formal university diploma or official organisational registration, Köhler is supported by the European Space Agency - I have firsthand experience of this.
And he remains a fixture on German news networks, such as ZDF, a German equivalent of the BBC.
To the German media, he is the ‘expert sleuth’ of rationalism; to his critics in the German UAP community, he is a contentious roadblock who weaponises hoaxes to justify a wholesale rejection of anomalous data.
This investigative article delves into the data divide currently splitting German UAP research.
Through exclusive interviews with Köhler in a Mannheim café, I explore the profound irony of a man who demands transparency from military whistleblowers while keeping his own 13,000-case archive hidden from the public.
As the ‘age of disclosure’ gathers steam globally, Germany faces a jarring geopolitical reality gap: its mainstream media is not just sceptical—they are effectively insulating the German public from a developing global narrative with the help of Hans Jürgen Köhler.
Self-Appointed and Sceptical: Germany´s Pioneer UAP Investigators
Werner Walter and Hans Jürgen Köhler were two classmates who started CENAP in 1973 out of the “giddy levity” of young men fascinated by UAPs and astronomy.
With Werner Walter dying in 2016, Hans Jürgen Köhler has taken over running CENAP.
When I asked whether CENAP had any other investors besides himself, Köhler’s cheeky response was, “No, but I have several unpaid invoices to the CIA, KGB, and BND.”
Above: Hans Jürgen Köhler (left) and Werner Walter perusing their first case files in CENAP's office in 1976.
Köhler says he has long-standing working relationships with the German Armed Forces (the Bundeswehr), a major air traffic control agency and regulator in Germany (the DFS and LBA), plus a controversial one-time relationship with the German Federal Ministry of Defence - known as the BMVg.
When I called the European Space Agency to report a UAP sighting in September 2025, I was given Köhler’s number to call.
Köhler also confirmed this working relationship between CENAP and the Space Agency. I asked the European Space Agency about the nature of their preference for CENAP as their referral via email, but they did not respond.
Köhler said he shares some of his large caseload with four to five other investigators around Germany, though he did not share their names.
Although he rejects the label of sceptic, Köhler’s take-away from his fifty-year career is that, “as of today, I do not believe ET has visited Earth.”
Köhler justifies his incredulity with CENAP´s well-touted record of ‘solving’ 13,269 UFO cases.
While Köhler has successfully identified some cases as misperceived military craft with U.S. assistance, he acknowledged that, as a private citizen, his access to U.S. and NATO installations remained limited.
Although there are roughly 40 to 50 active U.S. military installations in Germany, Köhler did not consider this a potential blind spot in his investigations.
In fact, Köhler explained that CENAP’s current “ninety-eight open cases are just a matter of missing data like date and exact time, and not likely because of a true anomaly” - a familiar declaration he makes in the German press.
But CENAP is not Germany’s oldest or only pioneer UAP reporting center.
Germany’s Other—and Older—Civilian UAP Reporting Center
In 1972, a year before CENAP, the GEP (the Society for Research of the UFO Phenomena) was Germany’s first non-governmental UAP reporting center for civilians.
It is registered as an institution with 200+ members, including a team of practising scientists who help investigate reports of UAP.
GEP’s founder, Hans-Werner Peiniger, was once a friend and colleague of CENAP’s Werner Walter until 2011.
The official and dramatic split between CENAP’s and the GEP’s cooperative relationship was reported by long-time German investigative journalist and founder of Germany’s ExoMagazin.tv and ExoPolitik.org, Robert Fleischer, as “decades-in-the-making," however.
Kramer confirmed by email that the GEP’s methodological and ideological differences with CENAP have not changed since the 2011 split. He wrote:
‘While CENAP maintains an openly sceptical stance on the topic and considers UFOs 100% conventionally explainable, the GEP takes an open-ended position. We do not consider the phenomenon to be definitively explained.’
In his interview with me, Köhler dismissed people with an open-ended position on UAP and the GEP as "crazy ufologists."
Although the GEP also has a working relationship with the European Space Agency, it is still CENAP to whom they directly refer incoming UAP reports over the phone, which was my experience.
The Space Agency declined to comment on the nature of its apparent preference for CENAP.
The Vital Role of Civilian UAP Reporting Centers and Archives, Plus the Data Divide between CENAP and the GEP
Throughout history, governments and media institutions have often withheld, shaped, or distorted information about unexplained phenomena—whether to protect national security, preserve power, or maintain control of the prevailing narrative.
What has always been at stake is people’s open access to world-changing information.
This is why civilian UAP reporting centers are so important: they provide a democratic counterweight to decades of government and military secrecy—and to media framing that can obscure or distort the underlying data behind people’s varied experiences of UAP.
Robert Fleischer commented via email that ‘the more important—and troubling—critique of CENAP is that it is not transparent about the details of its cases and the details of its investigations.’
In fact, this criticism was confirmed at a conference marking the 50th anniversary of CENAP in 2023, to which Hans-Werner Peiniger devoted a detailed article in the GEP association magazine ‘Journal für UFO-Forschung’ - the Journal for UFO Research.
At the conference, Köhler was asked whether he could release and open up his own data.
According to Peiniger, Köhler replied that it would not help him:
“Not that it would not help UFO research, but it would not help him personally.”
I asked Köhler where someone could find the case archives on his website. Köhler responded:
“My data bank is not public outside of the monthly reports on my blog because the files contain the private contact details of the observers. If you need example cases, I can gladly look some up for you. Or also photos.”
CENAP’s monthly reports are published as a blog entry, hidden among a list of hundreds of other blog posts on its website.
The reports are spreadsheets that record the date, location, number of witnesses, and conclusion, but do not include photos, drawings, videos, or a textual description of the encounter, nor any details about investigations.
A comparison between monthly reports of CENAP and the GEP reveals a stark stylistic contrast.
GEP’s monthly reports are easy to find on its updated website. Although they cover fewer cases (eleven in July 2025), they take a more qualitative and transparent approach. Each entry includes a narrative of the witness’s account, plus photos or sketches, alongside the same core data found in CENAP’s spreadsheet.
But even before the 2011 split, CENAP had not shared details of its cases with other German UAP organisations or scientists.
“Unfortunately, CENAP has never published an overview of their cases or at least a list with the basic data,” wrote Peiniger in his article.
During the conference, Köhler spoke for hours about easily identifiable objects such as Starlink satellites, which he was able to explain in detail.
Peiniger was sceptical.
“Given the variety of sighting reports received by the GEP, some of which are unusual, I can't imagine that CENAP only receives cases of objects that are relatively easy to identify,” said the experienced UAP researcher.
In our interview, Köhler shared the story of a still-open case from three years ago: a woman reported seeing an enormous black triangle that had followed her car while she was driving on a country road along the Baltic Sea Coast.
Köhler explained, “I have an idea what the explanation might be, but cannot yet prove it,” and, “because there is a great sketch of the object and the woman was followed, if I publish this, those gentlemen [referring to the ‘crazy ufologists’] will rejoice!”
Whispers around CENAP’s Government Ties
CENAP’s apparent close relationship with authorities such as the European Space Agency has prompted colourful—and at times suspicious—speculation.
Much of it traces back to a one-off meeting CENAP had with the German Federal Ministry of Defence (BMVg) in the 1980s.
Köhler confirms the meeting took place, but he strongly rejects what he calls the “mumbo jumbo” that “conspiracy theorists” have built around it.
Andre Kramer of the GEP declined to comment on the meeting.
Above: CENAP’s report of its meeting with the BMVg in Bonn, Germany, 1984. Top picture, from the left: Werner Walter and Hans Jürgen Köhler; Bottom picture, from left: Roland Gehardt, Werner Walter and Hans Jürgen Köhler
Köhler summarised the correspondence by stating, "they [the BMVg] wrote to us because they see that we work sensibly and that we are not crazy ufologists."
He explained the meeting's primary purpose was for the Federal Ministry of Defence to confirm his and his colleague Walter's correct findings on a specific UAP sighting from multiple witnesses at Bremen Airport: “They basically just wanted to say: ‘Good job, keep going!’” Köhler explained by phone.
That context still makes CENAP’s meeting with the BMVg noteworthy. It sits uncomfortably alongside long-running allegations—voiced by some former U.S. defence and intelligence personnel—that official messaging has, at times, sought to stigmatise or manage public interest in UAP.
Köhler said there is no relationship between the BMVg and CENAP.
He insisted any apparent alignment with the BMVg or the European Space Agency is purely coincidental.
In his view, it simply reflects a shared commitment to integrity and sensible analysis—arrived at independently.
Media Capitulation: The German Press Elevates CENAP’s Singular Scepticism
Werner Walter was CENAP’s spokesperson until his death in 2016. For many years, CENAP has been a favourite source for the German mainstream media.
‘For decades, Werner Walter has shaped the reporting on UFOs in the German media with banal explanations,’ Robert Fleischer wrote in his 2011 article, ‘Mind the GEP!’.
These ultra-sceptical explanations were repeatedly promoted as definitive, often overshadowing the work of other German UAP researchers.
Fleischer also highlighted the challenge facing German coverage:
‘It remains to be seen how the press will now behave. Will it continue to serve up to the German public a man who has now been ostracised by all German UFO research associations? Or will it look for a new UFO expert—one who has his ego under control?’
Fast forward to 2017, one year after Walter’s death.
The New York Times revived international attention on the Navy’s ‘Tic-Tac’ case and related footage.
In Germany, CENAP’s new spokesperson then saw a sharp rise in mainstream coverage. He became a default point of contact—often treated as the sceptical voice of record—eclipsing other German commentary.
Mainstream German coverage shows a recurring pattern: articles repeatedly rehearse CENAP’s archives and methods, yet rarely confront two central issues—the non-public nature of Köhler’s database, and the substantial criticism from other German UAP researchers over how he handles civilian reports.
A clear example is Deutsche Wirtschaftsnachrichten.
Its coverage largely repeats Köhler’s claim that an ‘extensive archive’ explains CENAP’s near-perfect debunking rate.
In doing so, it reads less like scrutiny and more like amplification—closer to a mouthpiece than a watchdog.
Köhler’s public language is often pugnacious, and at times openly contemptuous of anyone who takes a non-sceptical view of UAP. In tone and posture, it closely echoes Werner Walter’s approach up to 2016.
In Köhler’s interview with me, he called Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb a “Fachidiot,” which roughly translates to ‘a blinkered specialist.’
One headline from the Frankfurter Allgemeine in 2024 by Ole Kaiser reads as a direct quote from Köhler: “I am a red flag for crazy people."
Around the release of the UAP documentary ‘The Age of Disclosure’ in November 2025, CENAP was featured in twenty-five German news publications within a two-week period.
The coverage largely repeated the familiar ‘nothing to see here’ line, with headlines such as ‘No Flying Saucers’, ‘Experts: UFO Sighting in Vogtland Was an Optical Illusion’, and ‘Those Were Definitely Earthlings’.
Meanwhile, outlets such as Berliner Morgenpost and SWR Aktuell publish CENAP’s limited annual statistics as a matter of routine.
On 3 November 2025, Köhler was featured on a ZDF science news show called ‘Terra X: The Truth about UFOs’ with Harald Lesch, where Köhler is presented as an expert sleuth and rational humanist, committed to the truth yet sympathetic to ‘UFO dreamers.’
Despite its title, Lesch uses most of the show’s time to showcase the off-earth search for ET intelligence by astronomers.
I reached out to ZDF´s press desk regarding Lesch´s show via email.
I asked whether they could provide evidence of CENAP’s formal registration as an organisation, or explain why they continue to prioritise Köhler’s expertise despite the controversy around his data. They did not respond.
In a nation that requires a three-year apprenticeship just to sell doughnuts, the glaring incongruity between Köhler’s lack of formal qualifications and his elevated status as a state-preferred expert is nothing short of extraordinary.
CENAP’s bombastic and declarative media behaviour differs greatly from the media policies of other UAP reporting centers.
Like the GEP’s open-ended, neutral stance, GEIPAN in France takes a similarly restrained line. GEIPAN is the UAP unit within CNES, France’s space agency.
On its website, GEIPAN says it is not a ‘specialist’ of the phenomenon. Instead, its mission is to compile a case file that is ‘as complete and precise as possible’ so external scientific teams can study what was observed—and to inform the public.
Public derision of anyone taking an open approach to UAP can deter citizens from reporting encounters.
In practice, a reporting agency that signals contempt discourages participation. The likely result is underreporting—and a research sample that is skewed from the outset.
Köhler himself explained to me that, in the last several years, “most people who call CENAP are not convinced they have really seen a UFO—they just want help identifying what it is they saw.”
CENAP’s Defense of a Modern German Press Safeguarding Reality Amidst Global Disclosure
I asked Köhler why he thought CENAP was so favoured by the German press.
“Because CENAP is the best,” he said, with a good-natured grin, “and because they know I do sensible work.”
Andre Kramer’s response to this question via email was:
‘This is likely due, on the one hand, to the high frequency of press releases issued by CENAP and, on the other hand, to the fact that the German press seems to favour conservative (sceptical) opinions on the subject of UFOs and equates them with ‘seriousness’.’
Köhler told me of a sensationalist German media of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, which had cemented his commitment to keep CENAP “down-to-earth and scientifically rigorous.”
In Köhler’s telling, the media frenzy helped create dangerous “UFO religious fanatics.”
He has even suggested that the stress of near-constant harassment from people angered by CENAP’s conclusions contributed to CENAP co-founder Werner Walter’s early death from a stroke.
For CENAP’s critics, however, it is CENAP that has a well-known history of bullying people.
The GEP’s Andre Kramer cited a UFO report via email that had come from Linz - a city in Upper Austria - to CENAP in 2011, where:
“The witness submitted photos of a silvery object in the sky over Linz and was immediately labelled a fraud by CENAP, accused of throwing a hubcap into the air and taking pictures.
“In CENAP’s reply email to the witness, he was immediately subjected to derogatory terms.”
Although the GEP later identified a conventional explanation after taking over the case, Kramer wrote that “CENAP had dismissed the claim without investigating it and had verbally abused an innocent, sincere witness in the process.”
Köhler argues that an “open” approach is less about investigation and more about validating witnesses to reinforce what he calls a “UFO ideology” and generate income.
He illustrated the point with an anecdote: in 1995, four women said they had encountered non-human entities, and their stories were featured on the popular talk show Schreinermakers.
Köhler and Werner Walter were invited to speak on the show, along with the famous Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist and UAP expert, Professor John E. Mack.
In Köhler’s view, Professor Mack took up the women’s cases and, recklessly, “encouraged” what he regarded as their delusions that they had encountered something unknown—because, Köhler claimed, it helped Mack sell more UFO books.
Köhler explained his own assessment of the women’s alleged encounters to me: “It turned out that all four women had had miscarriages and, while some women handle that ok, it is harder for other women.”
Köhler admitted he did not know anything about the fate of these women since the 1990s, nor did he divulge where precisely he had got his information about their miscarriages or psychological states from.
Köhler emailed me several images of aliens he said were being presented as factual on uncited North American news sites, writing: "And that's my problem with disclosure: that such posts are presented unfiltered to the public as reality."
He expressed relief that such content is generally ignored by the German media, saying that when he “raises the issue in interviews, editors often hear of it for the first time or demand concrete evidence beyond ‘fake alien videos and photos’.”
You do not need definitive proof of UAP craft—or so-called biologics—to report on, and take seriously, the disclosure movement itself.
There is already a substantial body of material worth examining: military videos and sensor data (including radar claims from credible witnesses), multiple accounts from current and former government and military personnel, and reported cases of UAP-associated medical effects.
A U.S. Defense Intelligence Reference Document from 2010 reports ‘three previous fit and active individuals experienced an anomalous aerospace-related event’ and immediate medical problems, which ‘can inform (e.g., reverse engineer), through clinical diagnoses, certain physical characteristics of possible future advanced aerospace systems from unknown provenance that may be a threat to United States interests.’
When I raised this kind of evidence, Köhler was unmoved. He said the cases either have conventional explanations that investigators have overlooked, or involve people acting in bad faith—much as he claims Professor Mack did in the 1990s.
He also argued that whistleblower accounts are inherently difficult to assess, because key details remain inaccessible behind government secrecy.
Yet his insistence on total transparency sits uneasily alongside his own refusal to open CENAP’s archives.
Even so, German outlets routinely amplify Köhler’s dismissals of U.S. UAP claims.
That remains true even when his reasoning appears strained—for example, when he implies that a person’s beliefs or interests are, in themselves, grounds to discount their account.
In a 2023 article by Redaktions Netzwerk Deutschland online titled ‘Why are Americans in particular infected with UFO mania?’ journalist Adrian Habenicht uses Köhler’s singular opinion to dismiss the 2017 NYT article’s credibility, writing:
“The criticism is mainly aimed at the fact that the New York Times, as a renowned newspaper, omitted important aspects for objective reporting. Billionaire Robert Bigelow, who was commissioned by Reid to conduct research, also has a fascination with werewolves, ghosts, and life after death.”
Following this logic, most of humanity who ascribe to religious or spiritual beliefs should not be deemed reasonable.
In a tactic mirrored by Köhler and the German media, proven frauds—or, more accurately, their perception of a proven fraud—are weaponised to justify a wholesale rejection of the UAP phenomenon.
By centring their narrative on known tricksters, handpicked debunked cases, or the purported psychological instability behind UAP disclosure, they effectively insulate themselves from having to engage with truly anomalous data and the growing body of scientific evidence.
Inverting the UAP Conspiracy Theory
As Germany’s key NATO ally, the United States, and the wider English-language media have grown increasingly willing to treat UAP as a legitimate subject, the posture of the German press becomes the most intriguing—and, in some respects, the most disconcerting—dimension of the CENAP story.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung published an article headlined ‘US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warns against losing the arms race for alien technology: Is everything okay in the US?’
The article adopts a derisive tone toward what it labels ‘American paranoia’ and a ‘naive American belief in the future,’ dismissing the U.S. disclosure movement’s drive to master UAP-related technologies.
With a note of weary cynicism, the piece mocks the American push for military-technological superiority:
"Considering that the Americans have been trying to do this for eighty years and have apparently made no progress, one can only marvel at their confidence that they will now suddenly succeed."
Mirroring CENAP’s pugnacious rhetoric, we see a leading German broadsheet—the national equivalent of The New York Times—exhibiting a posture that transcends healthy scepticism.
Instead, the publication displays an overt hostility toward the strategic and national security concerns voiced by the defense department of Germany’s most vital NATO ally.
What are the ramifications of NATO countries operating from two drastically different views on reality?
When one half of the alliance treats UAP as a national security priority, and the other treats them as a psychological delusion, the shared intelligence landscape begins to fracture.
On a societal level, this monolithic and selective journalistic focus fosters a dynamic where curiosity is curbed.
The German public is denied critical engagement with a developing global narrative, while credible witnesses—pilots, radar operators, and citizens—are effectively deterred from reporting by the threat of public ridicule.
Recent German coverage is not sensationalist in a pro-UAP direction. Instead, its blanket denial can veer into sensationalism at the opposite extreme.
It tacitly invites a different conspiracy narrative: that the disclosure movement is colluding to stage a global hoax in which UAP are fabricated.
By that logic, even highly placed figures—such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—would have to be complicit.
I asked Köhler whether he thought the U.S. disclosure movement was being driven by motives I was missing—some political operation, orchestrated by unseen power brokers.
It was an opening for him to connect his ‘hubcap’ explanations to the wider international context.
After all, if the answer is not “something is there,” the implication is more radical: that countries, and hundreds of participants and witnesses, are collectively manufacturing a false reality.
Köhler did not offer a defence. He smirked, shrugged, and reached for his coffee.
That said, it would be a mistake to portray Germany’s UAP ecosystem as a single-gatekeeper environment.
In recent years, the conversation has been growing broader: the University of Würzburg’s IFEX (the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Extraterrestrial Studies) —led by aerospace engineer Professor Hakan Kayal—has emerged as a visibly institutional, science-facing actor, pairing public outreach with structured reporting initiatives, including work connected to aviation reporting pathways.
Alongside this, the GEP continues to operate as a civilian reporting and casework body.
Moreover, journalist Andreas Müller’s outlet Grenzwissenschaft-aktuell (GreWi), his Deutschlands UFO-Akten book series, and his bylines for major German outlets underscore that Germany’s public-facing UAP discussion now extends well beyond CENAP—even if sceptical framing still exerts an outsized pull in certain editorial circuits.
