The Belgian UFO Wave

Eupen lies in the German-speaking east of Belgium, close to Germany and the Netherlands. In November 1989 it became the starting point of months of sightings. They would draw in gendarmes, radar operators and the Belgian Air Force.

November 29, 1989. About 17:20. Gendarmes Heinrich Nicoll and Hubert von Montigny were on patrol near Eupen. A powerful light lit the ground from the sky. Above a field hung "a dark solid mass in the shape of an isosceles triangle." Three blinding white lights sat in its corners, aimed down. A red light pulsed at its centre. One officer thought he heard a light humming. The other heard nothing.

"We could see it clearly because the headlights were very strong," Nicoll said. It was "like there was someone in that object trying to observe what was happening on Earth."

It moved slowly and low toward the Gileppe dam. Over the dam it hung motionless. Later it rose almost vertically, flew a spiral, then left in a straight line to the north-northeast. By 20:39 it was gone. At the Lichtenbusch border post, Günther Justen placed it 500 metres away and about a hundred metres up. Station commander Albert Creutz watched through an open window. "It looked like a large ship floating in the air."

The sightings spread across Wallonia. Then came the night of March 30, 1990. At 23:00, gendarmerie sergeant A. Renkin called the Glons radar centre from his home in Ramillies. Three lights, brighter than stars, fixed in a triangle, changing colour. A patrol confirmed. Captain Jacques Pinson described points with "the dimensions of a large star" that "change color continuously."

At 00:05, two F-16s took off. Over 49 minutes they made nine interception attempts. Their radars locked on, briefly. In one lock the target's speed went from 150 to 970 knots. Neither pilot saw anything. On the ground, Pinson watched four white points form a square around Jodoigne. Around 01:30 they faded and went off in four directions.

April 1990. Petit-Rechain, near Verviers. A photo of a dark triangle with three corner lights and a light at its centre became the face of the wave. Experts at the Royal Military Academy and CNES found no obvious signs of fakery. On July 26, 2011, Patrick Maréchal told RTL-TVI it was a hoax. Styrofoam cut into a triangle, painted black, a flashlight in each corner, hung from a string. "We never realised that the photograph would leave the factory where we were working." The confession discredited the photo. It did not touch the Eupen testimony or the radar data.

On July 11, 1990, Col. Wilfried De Brouwer held a press conference. The Air Force "could not identify the nature, origin and intentions of the reported phenomena." The USAF said no stealth aircraft were operating in the area. In 1992, an Air Force analysis of the F-16 tapes concluded that some contacts were false echoes caused by a rare weather condition. Skeptics proposed helicopters, blimps, Venus over Lake Gileppe and a wave fed by the media. Researcher Patrick Gross replied that aircraft landing lights point forward, not down, and that planes cannot hover.

The Air Force summary spoke of gendarmes "whose objectivity cannot be questioned." In 2007, De Brouwer presented the case at the National Press Club in Washington. The Belgian wave is still central to the black triangle story, told and retold in books, on Unsolved Mysteries and in podcasts.