Pilots have reported unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs) over Cyprus, including a sighting involving six crew members on a flight south of the island.

As reported by Euronews, the Cyprus incident was described by Dutch airline pilot Rob Ackermans, who said he and five other crew members observed unusual lights for more than two hours during a flight from the Middle East to the Netherlands in 2023.

Ackermans said the phenomenon first appeared while the aircraft was south of Cyprus.

“We saw a light suddenly become very bright and then slowly fade away,” he said.

“The strangest thing was that one of the three lights would sometimes manoeuvre around the others. It looked like a chase, what the air force calls a dogfight, and then two or all three would disappear again.”

The crew initially considered whether the lights could have been connected to a military operation over the Balkans.

However, Ackermans said the phenomenon remained visible in the same direction after the aircraft reached the Balkans.

One of his colleagues reported seeing the same phenomenon from the Netherlands the following day.

Euronews said the European Commission had become more active in monitoring UAP reports, citing a response from its defence department to two amateur astronomers in Malaysia who had submitted images of 37 unexplained objects.

The reports concern phenomena officially described as UAP, a term increasingly used instead of UFO.

There is at present no evidence that such sightings are extraterrestrial in origin.

Another pilot, Christian van Heist, described a separate incident over Greece in 2005, when he and colleagues saw a bright light moving at what appeared to be extremely high speed.

The sighting occurred around the time the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier was enroute to the Persian Gulf, in preparation for the second Gulf War.

France is currently the only EU member state with a dedicated state funded centre for investigating UFO reports.