Bremen Airport UFO

Monday evening, 6 January 2014. Bremen Airport, in the south of the city. At about 18:00 the tower reported an unidentified object in the approach sector.

The controllers could see it through binoculars. To DFS it was "a perfectly normally lit object". Axel Raab of DFS said it "moved and glowed." Spokeswoman Anja Naumann added detail: "It had normal lights, red and green, and an approach light on both sides."

At 18:30 the police were alerted. In the Walle district, Dominique Höber watched it pass low, perhaps 100 to 200 metres up. It flew back and forth over the house four times before turning away. "It looked like a plane," Höber said. "It had lights but was a lot louder."

A patrol car gave chase. The officers followed it from the Stadionbad at the Osterdeich, over the Weserstadion, towards the city centre. Something like a helicopter. But not a helicopter. When it turned back towards the Neustadt, it disappeared into dark clouds.

Take-offs and landings stopped for about two hours. A Lufthansa flight from Munich was diverted to Hanover. Its pilot said the object was about the size of a helicopter. A Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt was cancelled. An Air France flight from Paris was told to go around and landed about 15 minutes later.

At about 20:00 a police helicopter arrived. It found nothing. At 20:45 the search was called off. "All in all it lasted two hours," the DFS spokeswoman said, "and then the spook was over."

"We still don't know what it was," a police spokesperson said the next day, "but something was there." Bremen police opened an investigation for unauthorised interference with air traffic. At least 50 eyewitness reports came in. Even the radar was disputed, as the airport's press release said DFS radar caught the object repeatedly, but only briefly each time. Yet DFS, quoted on 9 January, said it was not on radar at all.

Around 21 January, police said they were "very certain" it was a multicopter. The Local reported a model plane, perhaps flown by someone indoors at a computer. Many public reports, police said, were really their own helicopter or an Air France aircraft waiting on the runway. Inquiries in Bremen's model plane scene led nowhere, and no operator was ever identified. The Bremen state prosecutor's office took over the case, and no outcome has surfaced.

Others had their own ideas. A balloon-like craft. A stealth helicopter from EADS. A secret military test. Mannheim UFO researcher Werner Walter suggested a radar angel, a false echo, though the Weser-Kurier argued the controller's visual sighting made that unlikely.

The story reached Euronews, Time and outlets as far away as Malaysia and Peru. In the Netherlands, Pepijn van Erp of Kloptdatwel faulted Coen Vermeeren for assuming a radar detection. The day before Bremen, a mystery craft in Neumark near Zwickau had turned out to be a remote-controlled model airship. Bremen now looks like an early chapter in the drone disruptions that later troubled airports.