Hakan Kayal

Early life and background

Hakan Kayal was born in 1965 in Ankara, Turkey, and moved to Germany to study aerospace engineering at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin). His early career was conventional aerospace engineering, not fringe science: he spent a year operating the geostationary communications satellite TÜRKSAT 1B, then joined the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin-Adlershof, where he worked for seven years on the BIRD small-satellite mission, eventually rising to deputy project manager. He returned to TU Berlin for a five-year postdoctoral stint, during which he led development of BEESAT, Germany's first picosatellite — a formative project in the miniaturized, autonomous spacecraft systems that would define the rest of his research life. This trajectory, entirely within mainstream German aerospace institutions, is the backdrop against which his later turn toward UAP research should be read: he arrived at the subject as a working satellite engineer, not as an outsider.

Career at Würzburg

Since 2008, Kayal has held the professorship for Space Technology (formally the Chair of Computer Science VIII, Information Technology for Aerospace) at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria. His chair's core research concerns the design, construction, and autonomous operation of small spacecraft — nanosatellites and picosatellites capable of detecting and responding to anomalies on board without ground intervention. Under his leadership, JMU Würzburg developed and flew the SONATE nanosatellite missions, technology demonstrators for autonomous fault- and anomaly-detection software — work that gave his later group the algorithmic toolkit (novelty detection, automated classification of the unexpected) that Sky-CAM would later apply to the sky rather than to a spacecraft's own systems.

Founding IFEX and the turn to UAP research

In 2016, Kayal founded the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Extraterrestrial Studies (IFEX) within JMU Würzburg's Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. IFEX gave institutional cover to two subjects that rarely find a home in mainstream European universities: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and the systematic, instrument-based study of unidentified anomalous phenomena in the atmosphere. Kayal has been candid in interviews about the professional risk this represents — UAP research carries a long history of institutional stigma in academia, and he has described part of his mission as demonstrating that the topic can be approached with the same rigor as any other unsolved sensor-data problem. IFEX's guiding premise is methodological rather than speculative: rather than starting from claims of alien visitation, it starts from the observation that some fraction of sky observations resist conventional classification, and asks what instrumentation and analysis would be needed to characterize that residue properly.

Sky-CAM and the detection network

The centerpiece of IFEX's UAP work is Sky-CAM, a network of autonomous, AI-assisted optical observation stations. Sky-CAM-5 has run continuously from the JMU Würzburg campus since December 2021 (with additional testing at the Zugspitze summit observatory in the Alps), and Sky-CAM-6, a dual-camera successor, was installed in March 2024 on the "Blue Box" station in Hessdalen, Norway — the valley whose recurring, still-unexplained light phenomena have been studied since Project Hessdalen began in 1983, and to which IFEX is now a contributing member. Each Sky-CAM unit uses custom image-processing pipelines and convolutional neural networks trained to recognize and discard known causes — aircraft, satellites, meteors, lightning, birds, weather artifacts, lens flares — so that what remains in the archive is, by construction, footage the software could not already explain. Complementing Sky-CAM is ADEOS (Anomaly Detection and Observation System), a modular platform Kayal introduced that is designed to catch indirect signatures associated with anomalous events — atmospheric or instrumentation effects — rather than only direct optical detections of an object itself. The explicit goal across both systems is continuous, unmanned, multi-sensor monitoring that removes eyewitness unreliability and equipment inconsistency from the front end of the data, leaving a more tractable dataset for later analysis.

Publications and international collaboration

In 2025, Kayal was one of roughly thirty-three co-authors, led by Kevin H. Knuth of the University at Albany, on "The New Science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (UAP)", published in the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Aerospace Sciences. The paper is a large-scale literature synthesis — reviewing roughly twenty historical government studies of anomalous aerial phenomena dating back to 1933 across Scandinavia, wartime Europe, the United States, Canada, France, Russia, and China, alongside private historical investigations and current scientific programs in Ireland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the U.S. — and it argues, as the University of Würzburg's own summary put it, for "the need for systematic scientific investigation of UAP." Its appearance in a mainstream aerospace-engineering journal, rather than a UFO-specialist outlet, was itself treated as newsworthy by outlets covering the field, since it represented a rare instance of the topic passing conventional peer review in an establishment venue. Kayal has also presented IFEX's detection work internationally, including at a May 2024 conference in Paris organized by the 3AF (French Aeronautics and Astronautics Association) Sigma 2 committee — a body that has investigated anomalous aerospace encounters since 2013 — in collaboration with French government agencies including the national space agency CNES. The Paris event placed Kayal's engineering-focused presentation alongside talks on the 2004 Nimitz encounter, a 1976 Iranian jet-interception case, and policy panels featuring officials from Japan, Brazil, and the Netherlands — illustrating how Kayal's academic, instrumentation-first approach sits within a broader and more heterogeneous international UAP research ecosystem that includes military testimony and government-policy tracks he does not himself work in.

The Mars UAP camera

Kayal's most speculative current project extends Sky-CAM's logic off-world. His group is developing a UAP-detection camera intended for the German VaMEx (Valles Marineris Explorer) Mars mission concept, as part of a project component named "Symphony" — described in coverage as the first federally-funded German research project with an explicitly designated UAP component. The reasoning, as Kayal explained it in a 2024 interview, is that a Martian camera would strip away most of the confounding explanations that complicate terrestrial sightings: no birds, insects, weather balloons, or civil aircraft, and satellite positions that are precisely predictable, leaving a comparatively clean background against which a genuine anomaly should stand out. "If there are UAP on Earth," he told the outlet GreWi, "they could also appear in the Martian sky." The camera design builds directly on Sky-CAM and would need automated tracking to capture high-resolution imagery of transient events such as meteors, with onboard AI performing the same known-object filtering used at Würzburg and Hessdalen. As of the 2024 interview, the team planned to begin analog testing in a terrestrial quarry environment in 2025 to stress-test the data and communications pipeline before attempting to harden the hardware for Mars's roughly −63°C average temperature, thin atmosphere, and dust storms — a timeline contingent on the still-unconfirmed VaMEx mission proceeding.

Reception and criticism

Kayal occupies an unusual position in UAP discourse: a credentialed, tenured aerospace engineer running a university-sanctioned lab, which lends his statements a legitimacy that most UAP claimants lack, while the underlying subject matter still invites the skepticism that attaches to the field generally. His own public framing is careful to manage this tension — he consistently describes Sky-CAM's output as detecting "anomalies indicating new events or properties" rather than evidence of extraterrestrial craft, and has not, in available interviews, claimed Sky-CAM or ADEOS has yet captured a confirmed unexplained event of scientific significance. Mainstream aerospace and physics communities have not broadly engaged with IFEX's specific findings, and skeptic forums such as Metabunk have scrutinized the 2025 Knuth et al. review for relying heavily on secondary historical summaries rather than new primary data — a criticism applicable to the paper's genre (a review article) more than to Kayal's own instrumentation work specifically. No independent replication or third-party audit of Sky-CAM's classification accuracy has been published. Within the UAP research community itself, Kayal is generally regarded as one of the more methodologically conservative voices — his emphasis on automated, multi-sensor, false-positive-filtering detection contrasts with witness-testimony-centered approaches — which is precisely why outlets like The Debrief and 3AF's Sigma 2 committee have sought his participation as a counterweight to more anecdotal presentations.

Legacy and current status

As of 2026, Kayal continues to lead IFEX and the Space Technology chair at JMU Würzburg, with Sky-CAM-5 and Sky-CAM-6 both operating continuously in Germany and Norway and the Mars camera concept still in its analog-testing phase pending VaMEx mission approval. His broader significance to the UAP field lies less in any single detection claim and more in institution-building: IFEX is among a small number of formally chartered university UAP research centers anywhere in the world, alongside efforts like UAPx and Harvard's Galileo Project in the United States, and Kayal's continued presence at conferences such as the Paris 3AF Sigma 2 meeting has helped normalize academic engagement with the topic in Europe specifically. Whether Sky-CAM or its Martian descendant ever produces a genuinely unexplained detection remains, by design, an open question — the systems exist to generate a rigorously filtered residue for study, not to confirm any prior hypothesis, and Kayal has been consistent in framing that residue-generation process itself, rather than any conclusion about its contents, as his scientific contribution.