UFO reporting up in Germany as people misidentify planets

Germany's nationwide unidentified flying object (UFO) reporting centre received many calls after lights were seen in the morning sky that were said to resemble "pairs of drones, car headlights in the sky and stars that do not exist."

"Many people have called excitedly or written emails," the head of the UFO reporting centre at the Central Research Network for Unusual Celestial Phenomena (CENAP) told dpa on Tuesday. The calls started coming in on Monday and the reason behind the strange celestial happenings is simple, Hansjürgen Köhler said.

"The two bright points in the morning sky are the planets Jupiter and Venus, which are currently positioned close together when seen from Earth. This constellation will persist for a few more days but there is no reason to be worried," the UFO reporting centre said.

The two planets are particularly bright and can still be seen clearly in the morning twilight when other stars have already faded. In the coming nights, the planetary pair will appear one above the other, Köhler said.

Most enquiries to the reporting centre came from the wetern states of Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate, and Baden-Württemberg in the south-west, but there were also concerns from the northern states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony as well as from Bavaria in the south.

CENAP serves as a contact point for citizens seeking a scientific explanation for their observations in the sky. Since its founding in 1973, the centre, based Hesse, has received more than 12,000 reports of UFO sightings, according to its own figures.