The Belgian UFO Flap Revisited – 30th Anniversary

Today marks the 30th anniversary of one Europe’s most well known UFO waves. The Berlin Wall had been torn down in October in neighbouring Germany. While in November of 1989 a flap of triangular UFO sightings was made across part of the nation of Belgium. Not a country well known in the history of ufology.

Black triangle reports date back to the mid 1970s (and occasionally before then). By the early 1980s they were much more common. There was a well known major flap across the Hudson Valley in New York during 1983/4. By the end of the decade there was to be another mass of UFO sightings far across the Atlantic Ocean.

The First Major Wave of Sightings – November 1989

Although a few sightings had already occurred, the Belgian UFO flap began to attract serious attention on November 29th 1989 in the area around Eupen, to the East of the country close to the German border. In the early evening Heinrich Nicoll & Hubert Von Montigny. two Belgian police officers (gendarmes). spotted a large, dark, mysterious triangular object descend slowly and almost silently from the sky. It bore lights at each apex and a pulsating red light in the centre. The shape was barely visible against the fading light as it slowly glided over the local countryside. The two officers noticed only a faint buzz or hum as it hovered above a field in their vicinity. Then it appeared to occasionally shine an intense light down on the area.

The gendarmes decided to give chase in their patrol car. Convinced they were following a structured craft of some sort. As it headed towards the Gileppe Dam the object slowed. It then hovered directly above the water for almost 30 minutes. A second, brightly lit triangular object rose from a ravine about 100 yards from their patrol car during this time on course for the town of Henri-Chappelle. The gendarmes were in shock at what they had witnessed and immediately called Albert Creutz, their dispatcher in Eupen, who was unconvinced something out of the ordinary had been seen. Although the nearby military airfields at Bierset and Elsborn both denied any of their aircraft were in the area.

Hubert Von Montigny said;

"It was twilight but still light enough to see."Below one of the objects I saw three powerful search lights directed to the ground and one orange red flickering light."

His colleague Heinrich Nicoll stated

“We continued to observe the object as it circled over the city of Eupen. It appeared to be heading toward the forest. On each side of the object there was a kind of laser beam and a ball that was leaving the object and coming back as if the ball were to measure something, so it was easy for us to keep track of it in the sky.”

The sightings had lasted hours. Beginning around 5:45pm and ending around 9:00pm when the craft disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared. Ten other Belgian gendarmes also gave statements of their own sightings. A large number of civilians, an army colonel and air force meteorologist Valenzano Francesco also submitted witness statements reporting strange objects in the night skies. The Belgian UFO organisation Société Belge d'étude des Phénomènes Spatiaux [SOBEPS] recorded over 100 reports of the objects on the evening of November 29th 1989.

Sightings continued to be reported throughout December 1989. Including:

Dec 1st 1989: Eupen – Several reports of a lozenge shaped craft approx 30m in length with brightly flashing white lights and an orange or red central light.
Dec 5th 1989 : Aix-la-Chappelle – Driving through the town just before 10pm a couple reported an object emitting bright lights downward onto the road making little noise. It also had an orange light on the underside. Around 11:15pm as they returned home they reported seeing the same object flying low nearby their home.
Dec 12th 1989 : Jupille, 35 miles SW from Eupen – Witnesses claimed to have seen a huge oval object land and appearing to be jammed in the trees. It exhibited small lights that changed from red to blue then rose slightly a few times before settling onto the ground. Eventually moving off shooting a bright light into the night sky. Police later found a circular mark in the meadow where the object had landed.

Various other sightings were made in 1989 and continued into the Spring of 1990.

Some press reports blamed the sightings on secret flights of the F117A. However there was no evidence to suggest this was the case. Officials from the USAF also denied any such aircraft had overflown Belgian airspace.

The Second Major Wave of Sightings – March 1990

UFO reports continued throughout the winter of 1989/90. Fighters were scrambled on a number of occasions. But each time any positive result eluded them. By the night of March 30th/31st 1990 the Belgian UFO wave hit another peak. An unidentified object was tracked in Belgian airspace on radar and two air force F-16s were launched to intercept from Beauvechain, the nearest airbase.



The F-16s ascended to 3,000 feet and locked on to a target, confirming back to base that they were tracking a "structured UFO". But then suddenly, according to the pilots, it began to behave in an erratic manner.

The on-board radar screens registered a quickly changing diamond shape, which rapidly accelerated to 600mph and then abruptly slowed to 170mph afterwards. Next the object appeared to plunge 3,300 feet in two seconds and accelerated from 170mph to 1,100mph in the same time without any trace of a sonic boom.

During their 65 minute observation, the pilots took 15 photographs. But pursuit in their F-16s, capable of more than twice the speed of sound, proved impossible.

Over the previous months, there had been sporadic sightings of UFOs in the skies over Belgium. But now it seemed there was hard scientific evidence to support them.

According to the instruments aboard the fighters, the craft pulled away at 46G - 46 times the force of gravity – and enough to crush a human skeleton. The object then headed west across the English Channel towards the South Eastern coast of Britain. The British however decided no response was required and no threat was posed (as per released FOI documents. DEFE 24 1970.)

By the time questions were asked of the Ministry of Defence’s response (or lack of) the radar evidence had been wiped.



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The Photo Evidence

In April of 1990 a photograph surfaced showing a triangle shaped object. It appeared similar to the descriptions given by many other witnesses over previous months. There was no background and it was impossible to gauge any size or distance. Some felt the photo was genuine. However others remained suspicious of its origins.

Members of the Belgian UFO organization Société Belge d'étude des Phénomènes Spatiaux (SOBEPS) felt that the picture was genuine. As did Leslie Kean who claimed in her book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record

“....state-of-the-art analysis was provided by a number of laboratories on the superior photograph of a craft, one of the best UFO pictures on record......A team under the direction of Professor Marc Acheroy discovered that a triangular shape became visible when overexposing the slide. After that, the original color slide was further analyzed by Frangois Louange, specialist in satellite imagery with the French national space research center, CNES; Dr. Richard Haines, former senior scientist with NASA; and finally Professor Andre Marion, doctor in nuclear physics and professor at the University of Paris-Sud and also with CNES.” (p. 30)

Alas just a year after her book was published the photo was revealed as a hoax. On July 26th 2011, in an interview on Belgian TV channel, RTL, Patrick Maréchal explained that he’d hoaxed the photo. Telling the audience that it was not a spaceship from a distant galaxy but a panel of painted styrofoam with three spots affixed to it.

Of course that did not negate the sightings by thousands of witnesses but it harmed the story. Many Ufologists, including representatives of the Belgian UFO organization SOBEPS and author Leslie Kean, questioned this hoax story. While the debunkers felt vindication.
 
The Explanations



1989-1990 was of course a time before the age of the internet and digital cameras built into smartphones were still a generation away. So people were hardly likely to be carrying a camera in the dark winter nights. What little photographic evidence came to light is of poor quality (or was hoaxed).

Explanations and theories ranged from F117A test flights (as mentioned earlier), to helicopters, remote controlled blimps, the AWACS surveillance aircraft (which were used by NATO forces in Europe) to a social phenomenon and even a fully orchestrated hoax (although by whom remains unclear). One puzzling factor was that the flap seemed to have been isolated to the French speaking area of Belgium. Neighbouring countries also had very few UFO reports during the Belgian flap.

Major General Wilfried De Brouwer of the Belgian Air Force ,who co-operated with the civilian investigations, claimed in Leslie Kean’s book.

The technology used by these crafts was so advanced that even today, twenty years later, it is not available. The most important conclusion is that there must have been air activities of unknown origin in the airspace of Belgium. The number of cases and the credibility of the vast number of witnesses leave us with an intriguing mystery.

In 1991 the local Belgian UFO organisation SOBEPS went a step further and published a book called Vague d'OVNI sur la Belgique, (The Belgian UFO Wave). Authored by Auguste Meessen it became a leading source on the case for many media articles and researchers.

The book concluded that

“The only reasonable hypothesis is that of unidentified flying objects... of extraterrestrial origin."

Other analysis produced a different view.

It seems that many of the events that took place in Belgium in 1989-1990 were simply misperceptions of ordinary objects. One can not conclusively state that no alien spaceships were seen during this period but a vast majority of the sightings can be explained.... Looking at the data being presented there appears to be nothing to indicate that anything closely resembling an alien spaceship was actually seen during the wave. There are tantalizing reports but these do not seem to stand up under close scrutiny....

Despite the downplaying by such Europeans as Wim Van Utrecht, Jenny Randles, Peter Brookesmith, Eduardo Russo, Jean-Pierre Pharabod, and others, we discover that American UFOlogists have firmly engraved the Belgian wave into UFO history... The admittance of a classic UFO case as being explained is almost unthinkable... For them, to remove the Belgian wave from the UFO history would be the equivalent of proclaiming a priceless religious artifact a hoax.

Tim Printy – Astronomy Website

In conclusion, there is no proof that Belgium was visited by one or more extra-terrestrial spacecraft during 1980/1990. Yet, despite all the theories and explanations, the events of this Belgian UFO Wave have never been completely explained.

Nice thread MM, I look forward to the discussion.

"there is no proof that Belgium was visited by one or more extra-terrestrial spacecraft"

Certainly true, but like the Levelland case, there were multiple witnesses(police officers in this case) in the Eupen sighting that described the exact same craft at 3 different locations. And as you detail in your OP, the first set of officers had the object under surveillance for an extended period of time.

The last set of officers observed the object leaving like this

The three lights at the corner of the platform shrank inwards so that the whole thing became a single circle of light and shot off into the distance faster than the eye could follow

Not proof, but certainly compelling.

You can hear the officers give the account in this "Unsolved Mysteries" episode starting at 10:20



Jerry Cohen has some good information on his website
Summary
Rebuttal to the radar data

One last thing
One of the primary witnesses usually mentioned in convincing the military to take action was Colonel Andre Amond. There is a video of him giving his account , but cant find it at the moment. Jerry has a synopsis of his encounter on the rebuttal page above.

a reply to: 111DPKING111

The best thing about the case is that it is relatively free from embellishments and mythologising that seems to have infected many cases once they are touched by the American IC community or its closely allied UFOtainment empire.

This is, like Levelland, a case which remains unsolved to this day. It's possible with all the turmoil going on in Eastern Europe as the Soviet Bloc collapsed that some of the sightings were of clandestine military aircraft. But after thirty years is there any real hard data on that being the case?

Somebody in GB took a photo of this a couple of weeks ago:


Pretty damn similar, right down to the oddly-beveled corner. So I guess somebody's still flying them around. Maybe.

a reply to: Blue Shift

Interesting. Any further background on that photo, Blue?

Beautifully written and presented thread, MM.

Despite the many varied stories that span that 1989-90 period, the most compelling account for me stretches back to the very beginning and the THIRTY-minute sighting by officers Heinrich Nicoll & Hubert Von Montigny at 5.45pm (and not fully dark yet). There was no reason for them to lie, and they were observing this object long enough to conclude that it was indeed a structured craft - or so they believed.

It remains a tantalising mystery. The hoaxed photo was an annoying interference and certainly damaged the case as a whole for some folks, but it remains a powerful story without any such pictorial evidence due to the quality of the witnesses themselves. Admittedly, J. Allen Hynek once remarked that uniformed personnel were just as reliable and UNreliable as any other witness, but the Belgian case provides enough such testimony to conclude that something damn strange was occurring over Belgium.

the belgian wave was a great time in ufology. i can't believe it was thirty years ago already!

why am i so old?

a reply to: mirageman

The F-16s ascended to 3,000 feet and locked on to a target, confirming back to base that they were tracking a "structured UFO". But then suddenly, according to the pilots, it began to behave in an erratic manner.

The on-board radar screens registered a quickly changing diamond shape, which rapidly accelerated to 600mph and then abruptly slowed to 170mph afterwards. Next the object appeared to plunge 3,300 feet in two seconds and accelerated from 170mph to 1,100mph in the same time without any trace of a sonic boom.

During their 65 minute observation, the pilots took 15 photographs. But pursuit in their F-16s, capable of more than twice the speed of sound, proved impossible.

Over the previous months, there had been sporadic sightings of UFOs in the skies over Belgium. But now it seemed there was hard scientific evidence to support them.

According to the instruments aboard the fighters, the craft pulled away at 46G - 46 times the force of gravity – and enough to crush a human skeleton. The object then headed west across the English Channel towards the South Eastern coast of Britain. The British however decided no response was required and no threat was posed (as per released FOI documents. DEFE 24 1970.)

What you quote above is convincing from the standpoint of these measurements and observations.

During their 65 minute observation, the pilots took 15 photographs

Anything more on the photographs?

Perhaps adding the words "Alien Horror", "Terrible Truth" and "DeLonge" to the thread title (and discussing multi-debunked Dulce dross as stone-cold Fact) will be click-baity enough to triple the number of flags and come close to what a carefully researched thread like this deserves.

What a depressing state of affairs. Is this a forum seeking Facts, or just wallowing in dead fiction circle-jerks?


Now I've got that outta my system...

originally posted by: Willtell

Anything more on the photographs?

I was wondering the same thing; news to me.

a reply to: mirageman

Awesome thread MM as usual... I think the Belgian flap has been in need of a revisit

a reply to: ConfusedBrit

the most compelling account for me stretches back to the very beginning and the THIRTY-minute sighting by officers Heinrich Nicoll & Hubert Von Montigny at 5.45pm

The video I posted above has this starting at 4:15. If you notice, Unsolved Mysteries thinks the same craft they saw was seen by the dispatcher. The dispatcher then says it headed towards La Calamine which they then cut to those officers.

At 13:57 in the video above starts the F-16 cat and mouse discussion. If you read the Radar rebuttal link I posted, you will notice that the military had the object tracked by multiple radars and they broke down the equipment to confirm good working order.

Below is a video interview of General Wilfried De Brouwer who gives a summary of the wave. At 4:12 he starts to talk about his communication with the US who reply they would not conduct operations in a NATO country without prior authorization.

This is common theory, but why wouldnt the US test this craft in their own airspace like Area 51? If it was a stealth blimp of some kind, how would the US military insure Belgium would not take action against it? The local police were able to track it and keep it under observation.

Maybe they were so brazen because it wasnt a blimp, but an advanced ant-gravity craft that could move at both helicopter and jet speeds. If we believe the officers at La Calamine, it sounds like the craft has 2 modes of operation. Still the question remains, why would the US show off(if military, its clear to me they were trying to be seen) their new super secret triangle aircraft in Belgium?

Some more resources:
--Great links page, and really the entire website is worth checking out...
--Meesen paper discussing many aspects of the case including the scientific ridicule, detailed account by Mr. J, and an interesting discussion about radar and its limitations.
--Research article discussing Lt Col. Andre Amond sighting and others

--This video below covers many sightings, but has a long section dedicated to Belgium (from 8:12 - 19:20).
Interviews included 'Lt Col André Amond, one of the F-16 pilots, Gen. De Brouwer, and one radar specialist who thought it was likely extraterrestrial

a reply to: ConfusedBrit

"It remains a tantalising mystery."

@Mirageman
"Yet, despite all the theories and explanations, the events of this Belgian UFO Wave have never been completely explained."


So lets say you two were given a million pounds where you had to bet whether alien or human origin, where would you put your bet? What was the biggest influence on your decision?

a reply to: mirageman

30 years?

Another very interesting case mate with similar descriptions from separately located citizens and police - also found reports about the UFO 'hovering directly above the water' pretty intriguing.

 

"On November 29, 1989, a large craft with triangular shape flew over the town of Eupen. The gendarmes von Montigny and Nicol found it near the road linking Aix-la-Chapelle and Eupen. It was stationary in the air, above a field which it illuminated with three powerful beams. The beams emanated from large circular surfaces near the triangle's corners. In the center of the dark and flat understructure there was some kind of 'red gyrating beacon.' The object did not make any noise. When it began to move, the gendarmes headed towards a small road in the area over which they expected the object to fly. Instead, it made a half-turn and continued slowly in the direction of Eupen, following the road at low altitude. It was seen by different witnesses as it flew above houses and near City Hall".

Auguste Meessen, professor of physics at the Catholic University in Louvain

Most of my links are dead now but did find this statement relevant as the Americans were 'positively assuring' people it wasn't them.

"Unfortunately, no explanation has been found to date. The nature and origin of the phenomenon remain unknown. One theory can, however, be definitely dismissed since the Belgian Armed Forces have been positively assured by American authorities that there has never been any sort of American aerial test flight." 

Belgium Minister of Defense - Leo Delcroix

originally posted by: mirageman

Black triangle reports date back to the mid 1970s (and occasionally before then)..


'spotted a large, dark, mysterious triangular object descend slowly and almost silently from the sky. It bore lights at each apex and a pulsating red light in the centre'

Yes occasionally they go back waaay before that (most with extremely similar profile descriptions and light configurations) - David Marler has conducted some sterling archival research on this and it looks like there was another wave of 'strikingly similar' Belgian UFO sightings back in July 1972..

Nice article and insanely valuable discussion in the replies (some detailed I didn't know). I always wanted to meet & interview the people personally (since I'm Belgian). Not sure if this will ever happen, but I do plan to create a video on it on my channel.

You are correct that no sightings happened in the Flemish (Dutch) speaking part of Belgium, but I do remember that it was a pretty big topic in the Flemish news at that time.

a reply to: LifeTec

there were also Flemish and Brussels cases too

cases for 89 to 94, the belgian wave begin in 1989 and ended in 1994 in fact




this job does not include some other cases because cobeps sobeps never give me access to the full files... but I have not compiled all my cases for this particular wave so this map is temporary

I'm a belgian ufologist for decades now , as compiling databases for the entire world and thus in particularly for belgium, my view is that for belgium, the main waves are 1954 1974 and 1989-1994, the same waves as france for 1954 1974 but not for 1989 1994, the french one totally officially debunked was 11/5/1990 to 11/7/1990

there is also a possibility for belgian wave in the 30's and perhaps in the 20's, belgium at this time was a world economic power, 5th in the world score

the uranium for the first nuclear bomb was originating from belgium's congo colony

fr.wikipedia.org...

in the 1989 wave I think "they" search some anti radiation materials too , there are some particular mines in belgium

the troncated lights are more than troncated lights

the skeptical view of the belgian wave is a real pity



anakin_nEo

originally posted by: anakinnEo
the skeptical view of the belgian wave is a real pity
anakin_nEo

So are you saying that the Belgium triangle UFO wave was actually alien UFO's?

originally posted by: karl 12
Yes occasionally they go back waaay before that

The first triangle I know of on record was the triangle that overflew the fleet during operation Mainbrace in 1952.

The Navy said this triangle was flying at 1,500 miles per hour.

Well 1,500 is OVER 900 miles per hour.


"The Danish destroyer Willemoes, participating in the maneuvers, was north of Bornholm Island. During the night, Lieutenant Commander Schmidt Jensen and several members of the crew saw an unidentified object, triangular in shape, which moved at high speed toward the southeast. The object emitted a bluish glow. Commander Jensen estimated the speed at over 900 mph."

www.nuforc.org...