News / May 20, 2026

What other countries are doing about UAPs

By Jan for UAP Logbook / Published

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Jan
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Outside the United States, UAP work is less cinematic and more scattered: reporting forms, aviation safety channels, public archives, FOI logs, and a few small official offices.

Generated editorial map showing international UAP reporting channels, including Canada, France, Chile, Italy, Japan, the United States, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Spain, the Netherlands, and the EU
Generated editorial map. International UAP handling is a patchwork of reporting reviews, official offices, archives, FOI trails, pilot forms, and negative searches.

The U.S. dominates most public UAP coverage, but it is not the only place where governments, aviation authorities, or public agencies have touched the subject.

Outside the United States, the pattern is quieter. There are reporting forms, old archives, freedom-of-information releases, aviation safety channels, and a few official anomaly offices. There is much less evidence of a single global "disclosure" track.

That makes the international picture useful precisely because it is uneven.

Some countries built formal reporting systems. Some hold old UFO files in public archives. Some treat the subject as an aviation-safety or public-records issue. Some say they searched and found nothing. The interesting part is not that everyone is secretly doing the same thing. The interesting part is that they are not.

The short version

Several countries have public UAP or UFO-related records, but they do not all mean the same thing.

  • Canada has a government science-advisor report about how UAP reports should be managed.
  • France and Chile have long-running official anomaly-reporting bodies.
  • Italy still has an official OVNI reporting form through the Air Force and Carabinieri.
  • Argentina publishes annual case-resolution material through its aerospace-identification center.
  • Spain has a digitized archive of declassified UFO files.
  • Australia has a FOI trail through Defence, ATSB, and air-traffic material.
  • Germany has a practical pilot-reporting route through the University of Wuerzburg and the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt.
  • Brazil has an archive-and-transfer story involving Aeronautics and the National Archive.
  • The Netherlands has a clean negative record: a Woo request found no UAP documents.
  • The EU has parliamentary questions, but no central UAP office.

This is not one story. It is a map of different bureaucracies touching the same uncomfortable category: things seen in the sky that were not immediately identified.

Canada: reporting system, not disclosure

Canada is the cleanest example of a modern public-policy approach.

The Sky Canada Project, led by the Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada, produced a June 2025 report on the management of public UAP reporting. The report is not an investigation into specific sightings. It says the project was about current resources and processes for handling UAP reports, not about deciding what UAPs are.

That distinction matters.

The report says Canadians may report roughly 600 to 1,000 UAP sightings each year, but there is no cohesive national system for collecting and following up on those reports. It also says reports are scattered across government and non-government channels, and that most agencies do not analyze sightings unless they fall inside a specific safety, security, or transport mandate.

Canada's useful contribution is not a secret file drop. It is a sober question: if citizens and pilots report unusual aerial observations, who receives the reports, who follows up, and what happens to the data?

France: GEIPAN and public case classification

France has one of the most established official models.

GEIPAN, under the French space agency CNES, collects, studies, and publishes cases of unidentified aerospace phenomena. Its public case database is important because it does not treat every report as mysterious. Cases can be categorized after investigation, including ordinary explanations.

That makes GEIPAN useful as an anti-hype reference point. It keeps the category open without turning every witness report into a conclusion.

France is also politically relevant because other countries, including Canada, cite GEIPAN as an example of a structured approach. But the important feature is procedural: collection, investigation, classification, publication.

Chile: an official office that resolves many cases

Chile has SEFAA, the Section for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena, within the Directorate General of Civil Aeronautics.

SEFAA is worth watching because it is an official aviation-linked body and because its public posture is not "everything is unexplained." In a 2023 lecture, a SEFAA representative described common explanations including birds, insects, reflections, flares, and satellites. The same lecture said that, since 2018, 75 percent of cases had been resolved at that point.

That is exactly the kind of number that should cool the room down.

Chile's model shows what an official anomaly office often does in practice: receive reports, inspect audiovisual material where it exists, compare against ordinary explanations, and publish or discuss outcomes.

Italy: the official UFO form still exists

Italy's Air Force still has an official OVNI page.

The origin goes back to the Italian wave of sightings in 1978, after which then-prime minister Giulio Andreotti designated the Aeronautica Militare as the institutional body responsible for collecting, checking, and monitoring OVNI reports.

The current process is strikingly old-school. Anyone who wants to report an OVNI-related event can fill out an official form and hand it to the nearest Carabinieri station. The Air Force then performs technical checks to see whether the report correlates with human activity or natural phenomena. If no technical or natural explanation is found, the episode can be classified as an unidentified flying object sighting and published in the annual sighting section.

This does not mean Italy has a secret UAP program. It means Italy has a surviving official reporting channel with published annual lists.

Argentina: annual case-resolution reports

Argentina has a formal aerospace-identification center under the Air Force.

The Centro de Identificacion Aeroespacial was created in 2019 after a restructuring of the earlier CEFAE. Its public description says the center organizes, coordinates, and carries out investigation and analysis of events, activities, or elements in aerospace that are of interest, then identifies causes and informs the relevant bodies.

It also says the center continues, as a secondary task, to provide a public service for resolving sighting cases and publishing annual material.

That makes Argentina another useful country to track: not because every case is extraordinary, but because there is a visible institutional home and a habit of publishing case-resolution reports.

Spain: old files, already public

Spain is mostly an archive story.

The Spanish Defence Virtual Library hosts declassified OVNI files. The archive page says the declassification process began in 1991, that a physical copy was deposited in 1992 at the Central Library of the Air Force in Madrid, and that the digitized material can now be consulted online.

The archive covers 80 files and about 1,900 pages of strange aerial-sighting material involving, in some way, Spanish Air Force personnel or material. The cases run from 1962 to 1995.

That is not current disclosure. It is still important because it shows what a mature public archive looks like: not a teaser, not a press tour, just documents.

Australia: FOI, aviation records, and no central office

Australia's trail is less centralized but still useful.

The Department of Defence FOI disclosure log includes UAP and UFO-related releases, including Senate Estimates material and correspondence. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has a 2025-26 FOI item covering aviation occurrences involving objects, activity, or phenomena that were unidentified at the time and not readily classifiable as aircraft, drones, balloons, meteorological events, or other conventional sources.

Airservices Australia material also contains pilot and controller reports using terms such as "UFO" in air-traffic contexts.

The key point is modest: Australia has records. It does not appear to have a public UAP office comparable to GEIPAN or SEFAA. The Australian story currently runs through FOI and aviation reporting, not a disclosure bureau.

Germany: a pilot reporting route

Germany has a practical reporting development rather than a national UAP office.

The University of Wuerzburg announced cooperation between its IFEX project and the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt. The stated idea is simple: pilots need a way to report unusual aerial observations without forcing those observations into bad categories.

IFEX runs a UAP reporting form for pilots. The LBA said it would link to the form under its general occurrence-reporting area. IFEX also said the form should be expanded with database integration and the ability to upload images and video.

That is small, but useful. Germany's story is not about a dramatic archive. It is about whether aviation reporting can catch observations that would otherwise fall through the cracks.

Brazil: archives and Aeronautics transfers

Brazil has one of the more interesting public-records trails.

Brazilian reporting says the National Archive holds more than 800 OVNI records from Aeronautics. A 2025 Brazilian access-to-information decision says available COMAER records from 1952 to 2024 had already been transferred to the Arquivo Nacional. It also says COMAER's role is receiving and cataloguing UFO reports from users of air-traffic services and forwarding them annually to the National Archive.

That is a strong archive story. It is not proof that the records contain extraordinary evidence.

The important part is the process: records come in, get catalogued, and move to the archive. If 2025 records exist, the same official decision indicates they would be catalogued and sent around mid-2026.

The Netherlands: a search that found nothing

The Netherlands is useful because it is negative.

A January 2026 Woo decision on UAP documents says the request covered policy documents, registrations, risk analyses, and international information exchange involving Dutch government bodies. The result: no documents were found.

That does not prove nothing was ever seen in Dutch skies. It means the requested government document trail did not exist, or at least was not found under that request.

Negative records matter. They keep the map honest.

The EU: questions, not an office

At EU level, the public trail is mostly parliamentary questions.

Members of the European Parliament have asked about UAP in relation to aviation safety, security, and international developments. Commission answers keep the subject close to Member State competence and existing aviation occurrence-reporting systems.

That is a pattern seen elsewhere: when the subject enters government language, it often becomes a reporting and safety problem before it becomes anything larger.

The EU does not currently look like a central UAP program. It looks like a place where scattered national approaches and aviation categories may eventually create pressure for clearer reporting.

What the international pattern actually shows

The international picture does not support a single simple claim.

It does not show every government rushing toward disclosure. It also does not show that the subject exists only in fringe culture.

What it shows is more bureaucratic and more interesting:

  • aviation systems sometimes receive reports that do not fit easy categories;
  • public agencies often lack a single place to send them;
  • old military or aviation files can end up in national archives;
  • a few countries have official anomaly offices;
  • FOI laws expose fragments of how the subject is handled;
  • negative searches are part of the record too.

The strongest countries for useful public tracking are not necessarily the loudest ones. They are the ones with visible procedures: France, Chile, Canada, Italy, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Brazil, and Spain.

What would make this more useful

The next step is not another broad claim. It is better public data.

Useful international UAP records would include:

  • original reports, not just summaries;
  • dates, locations, duration, and observer role;
  • sensor or platform context where safety permits;
  • the method used to rule out aircraft, drones, satellites, balloons, weather, insects, reflections, and camera artifacts;
  • the final classification and who made it;
  • a record of cases that remain unresolved because of missing data, not because they are extraordinary.

That is the standard that separates an archive from a mythology engine.

Why this matters

The international angle matters because it moves the UAP discussion away from a single U.S. narrative.

Different countries are making different choices. Some publish old files. Some collect new reports. Some build pilot forms. Some answer FOI requests. Some say they have nothing.

That patchwork is not as dramatic as a disclosure countdown.

It is more useful.

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