Dec 23, 2025
Written By [Christopher Sharp](https://www.liberationtimes.com/?author=610434e320e3e945538177b1)
Opinion
Written by [Lindsay Marie Marcks](https://x.com/LindsayMarie369) \- 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auITEKd4sjA) and convening public hearings—and when China is deploying artificial intelligence [to detect](https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/china-ufo-artificial-intelligence-military-b1860974.html) 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](https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/knowledge/ufos-over-germany-hansjuergen-koehler-and-cenap) \- 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.”
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](https://mybaseguide.com/military-bases-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](https://exopolitik.org/mind-the-gep/).
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.](https://www.jufof.de/2023/12/jufof-270-062023/) ”
I asked K
*[Read full article at Liberation Times]*