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CASE FILE / 006 — 1989–1990

The Belgian UFO Wave

At dusk on November 29, 1989, two gendarmes outside Eupen found a meadow flooded with light from a dark triangle hanging overhead, three beams pointing down and a red light pulsing at its center. Hundreds of reports followed, until two F-16s chased radar locks that leapt to 970 knots while their pilots saw nothing. The famous photograph was styrofoam and flashlights. The gendarmes never wavered.

Illustration of two late-1980s Belgian gendarmes beside a patrol car watching three unresolved white lights and one red light above a dark rural field.
1989–1990
Not a real photo.

Three lights beside the road

Late in the afternoon of November 29, 1989, two gendarmes from the Eupen brigade, Heinrich Nicoll and Hubert von Montigny, were driving the N68 from Eupen toward Eynatten, in Belgium’s small German-speaking corner, when they noticed that a meadow beside the road was flooded with light. Above it hung the source. In the account Belgian investigators later assembled, it was a dark triangular platform with cut-off corners, thirty meters or more along its base, hovering motionless perhaps 120 meters up. Three dazzling beams pointed straight down from its underside, and at the center a red light pulsed like the beacon on a police car. The officers told an interviewer ten days later that the glare forced them to look away, and that the underside seemed dark green. It made almost no noise. One of them thought he heard a faint hum; the newspaper Le Soir reported it as something like an electric motor. They radioed the barracks, got out of the car, and watched the thing pivot slowly and drift off toward Eupen. Then they followed it.

Sources: Interview with the Eupen gendarmes, December 9, 1989Vague d’OVNI sur la Belgique — Volume 1The Belgian Wave of 1989–1992: A Neglected HypothesisTriangles over Belgium

A long watch over Eupen

For the next three hours they kept finding it. From about 6:20 p.m. the two men stood on high ground above Lake Gileppe and watched a brilliant white ball hanging over the dam’s lookout tower, nearly five kilometers away. Every few minutes, by their later and fuller accounts, two thin red beams shot out from it horizontally in opposite directions, each tipped with a red ball, and the balls came back to the light like a yo-yo. At 6:45 a second triangle rose from behind a stand of firs; it had a dome with a row of lit windows, and reminded them of a railway carriage at night. At the barracks, dispatcher Albert Creutz could see a light from the window and joked that it might be Santa Claus trying to land. Near Henri-Chapelle, northwest of Eupen, two gendarmes from the Kelmis brigade, Dieter Plumans and Peter Nicoll—no relation to Heinrich— were chasing a lozenge of lights at a hundred kilometers an hour; it made a sound like a turbine, and Plumans saw it spit out a red ball that dropped and shot off at a right angle. The white ball over the dam sank out of sight at 7:23. Venus, skeptics would point out, set eleven minutes later in the same part of the sky.

Sources: Vague d’OVNI sur la Belgique — Volume 1Interview with the Eupen gendarmes, December 9, 198930 years later, we still don’t know what really happened during the Belgian UFO waveThe Belgian Wave of 1989–1992: A Neglected HypothesisTriangles over Belgium

A wave gathers around the first night

The Belgian Society for the Study of Space Phenomena (SOBEPS), a volunteer group in Brussels, eventually logged about 150 reports for that one evening, thirteen of them from gendarmes at eight different spots. Through the winter the sightings spread west, from the Eupen hills to Liège and then to Brussels: slow, low triangles with a white light at each corner, sometimes a dark mass blotting out the stars between them, sometimes a hum, often nothing. SOBEPS interviewed witnesses by the hundred and published two fat volumes. How many reports there were depends on who is counting—about two thousand accounts in two years is the usual figure, while one former SOBEPS investigator says the archive actually held 647. Critic Wim Van Utrecht has noted that the press was primed: the Soviet news agency’s story of giants landing in a park in Voronezh had gone round the world only weeks before. An American television crew that came to re-enact the first night pointed a 140,000-watt projector at the ground. The gendarmes told them the real lights had been brighter.

Sources: Triangles over BelgiumBelgium’s Flying Triangle WaveVague d’OVNI sur la Belgique — Volume 1Vague d’OVNI sur la Belgique — Volume 2The Belgian Wave of 1989–1992: A Neglected Hypothesis

The Air Force chooses to cooperate

Belgium’s military did something unusual: it talked. On December 21 defense minister Guy Coëme announced what the triangles were not—not AWACS aircraft, not remotely piloted vehicles, not ultralights, and not American F-117A stealth fighters, a point his staff had checked with the U.S. Air Force. Col. Wilfried De Brouwer, chief of operations on the Air Staff, became the wave’s reluctant public face, and agreed to share information with SOBEPS. F-16s were scrambled twice in December. On the 5th the object was gone when they got there. On the 16th the pilots found their target: a rotating xenon lamp on the roof of a discotheque in Halen, sweeping the cloud base, which had been generating UFO reports for three weeks and which the public prosecutor then ordered switched off. After that, the Air Force set a stricter rule. Fighters would go up only when police on the ground and radar agreed.

Sources: Triangles over Belgium, page 2Statement of Maj. Gen. Wilfried De Brouwer (Ret.), National Press ClubBelgium’s Flying Triangle WaveReport concerning the observation of UFOs in the night from March 30 to March 31, 1990

March 30: lights south of Brussels

At 11:00 p.m. on March 30, 1990, the radar control center at Glons took a call from a gendarme named A. Renkin, at home in Ramillies. He could see three lights, far brighter than stars, at the corners of an equilateral triangle, changing from red to green to yellow. Ten minutes later he called again: three more were moving toward the first three. Glons asked the Wavre gendarmerie to send a patrol. Capt. Pinson arrived at 11:28 and confirmed it—points the size of a big star, mostly red, shifting through blue, green, yellow, and white, “very clear, as if they were signals.” Glons had an unidentified contact drifting west at twenty-five knots. A second radar station, at Semmerzake, confirmed it. At 11:56, with both of the new conditions met, Glons gave the order to scramble.

Sources: Report concerning the observation of UFOs in the night from March 30 to March 31, 1990

Two fighters enter the dark

Two F-16s of the 1st Fighter Wing, call signs AL 17 and AL 23, left Beauvechain at five past midnight. Over the next fifty minutes Glons steered them into nine interception attempts. Three times a pilot got a radar lock, and each time, Maj. Lambrechts’s official report says, the lock “induced a drastic change” in the target. At 12:13 a.m.: six nautical miles on the nose at 9,000 feet—and then the speed readout jumped from 150 to 970 knots while the altitude fell to 5,000 feet, climbed to 11,000, and dropped to ground level, all within seconds, and the lock broke. At 12:30: a target at 740 knots, held for six seconds, with a jamming signal on the scope as it broke away. At 12:39: 100 knots to 600. Several of the speeds were supersonic. Nobody in Brabant heard a sonic boom. Neither pilot ever saw a thing. On the ground, Pinson and his men watched the jets pass three times and circle in the middle of the formation, saw the small triangle vanish, and saw the brightest light in the large one move off fast, flashing red.

Sources: Report concerning the observation of UFOs in the night from March 30 to March 31, 1990

The radar readings come under scrutiny

The F-16s landed at 1:10 and 1:16 a.m.; at about 1:30 the last four lights, by then arranged in a square around Jodoigne, dimmed and went out in four directions. Lambrechts’s report did not hedge. The gendarmes were witnesses “whose objectivity cannot be questioned”; the recorded speeds ruled out aircraft, the steady altitude ruled out balloons, and “the geometrical formation tends to prove a program.” De Brouwer was more careful when he showed the radar tape to the press at NATO headquarters in Evere on July 11, and more careful still in later years: the technical evidence, he said in 2007, was insufficient to conclude that anything abnormal had been in the air that night. By then the tape had been taken apart. An Air Force electronic-warfare team under Lt. Col. Salmon found that at least three of the recorded lock-ons were one F-16 locking onto the other. Physicist Auguste Meessen, a SOBEPS stalwart who in 1991 had called the extraterrestrial hypothesis the only reasonable one, concluded by 1998 that the rest were echoes from pockets of humid air, their speeds falsified by the radar’s own Doppler processing. The lights the gendarmes watched for two and a half hours hardly moved relative to the stars. Critics have suggested that is what they were.

Sources: Report concerning the observation of UFOs in the night from March 30 to March 31, 1990Statement of Maj. Gen. Wilfried De Brouwer (Ret.), National Press ClubÉtude approfondie des mystérieux enregistrements radar des F-16Lt. Col. Salmon F-16 Radar Trace Report, Night of 30–31 March 1990Triangles over Belgium

A photograph becomes the icon

Two weeks later, over Easter, the Air Force and SOBEPS ran a four-night national skywatch with two observation aircraft standing by. Nothing came. What the wave still lacked was a picture, and that summer it got one: a color slide, brought to the press by a news photographer, showing a black triangle with a glowing white light at each corner and a red one in the middle. It was said to have been taken in early April at Petit-Rechain, near Verviers, by a young man known only as Patrick M. For twenty years it illustrated nearly everything written about Belgium. Specialists at the Royal Military Academy studied it; Meessen saw plasma jets in the lights; analysts in France and the United States could find no sign of a fake. On July 26, 2011, Patrick Maréchal went on the Belgian channel RTL-TVI and explained. He had been about twenty, a fitter in a factory. A workmate cut a triangle sixty or eighty centimeters across out of styrofoam; they pushed four flashlights through it, colored the middle one with a red marker, hung it by wires from a kitchen stepladder, and shot a dozen frames from a tripod to fool the men at work. They never imagined it would leave the factory. «On arrive à tromper tout le monde avec une bête maquette en frigolite», he said—you can fool everybody with a silly piece of styrofoam. He added that he still believed the wave itself was real.

Sources: Triangles over BelgiumBelgium UFO that puzzled NASA was polystyrene fakeLa photo d’un ovni belge célèbre était un trucageFamous Belgian UFO photo a hoaxPetit-Rechain: The Current Situation

Helicopters, stars, and a man with a blimp

No single explanation has been offered for the whole wave, and the partial ones are a mixed bag. French researcher Renaud Leclet argues that the Eupen platform was a military helicopter: the Belgian Puma carries three lights in a triangle, the gendarmes did report a hum, road traffic can swallow rotor noise, and dark green is an army color. He makes the same case for the wave’s other celebrated close sighting, by Lt. Col. André Amond at Ernage on December 11. Venus and bright stars account, on this view, for the lights that hung in one place for hours, and excitement for much of the rest. Then there was the inventor, identified only as Michel K., who announced that the whole wave had been his fleet of spotlight-carrying blimps and offered to prove it for the equivalent of €625,000.

Sources: The Belgian Wave of 1989–1992: A Neglected HypothesisTriangles over BelgiumThe Belgian UFO Wave

What the wave left unresolved

Take away the photograph and the radar, and Belgium is back where it began: on a road outside Eupen at dusk, with two policemen squinting up into three beams of light. They never wavered. SOBEPS dissolved at the end of 2007, its files passing to a successor group. De Brouwer retired a major general, still saying that his air force never identified what its citizens saw. If it was a helicopter, whose? Why would it hang over a field with its landing lights blazing, a few miles from the German border, and why has no pilot in all the years since mentioned being the man who started it all? And if it was not, what spent that winter drifting so slowly, and so low, over Wallonia?

Sources: Statement of Maj. Gen. Wilfried De Brouwer (Ret.), National Press ClubTriangles over BelgiumThe Belgian Wave of 1989–1992: A Neglected Hypothesis

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Sources & interviews

Interview with the Eupen gendarmes, December 9, 1989Patrick Vantuyne · Translated and hosted by Patrick GrossReport concerning the observation of UFOs in the night from March 30 to March 31, 1990Maj. Lambrechts, Belgian Air Force · Official chronology · 1990Lt. Col. Salmon F-16 Radar Trace Report, Night of 30–31 March 1990Belgian Air Force engineering study · Archival copy indexed by UFO TransparencyVague d’OVNI sur la Belgique — Volume 1SOBEPS · 1991 · Witness files and opening-wave investigationVague d’OVNI sur la Belgique — Volume 2SOBEPS · 1994 · Follow-up and radar analysisÉtude approfondie des mystérieux enregistrements radar des F-16Auguste Meessen · Inforespace 97 · December 1998Triangles over BelgiumWim Van Utrecht · Caelestia · Critical case reconstructionTriangles over Belgium, page 2Wim Van Utrecht · Caelestia · Revised May 2007 · Official statements and explained casesStatement of Maj. Gen. Wilfried De Brouwer (Ret.), National Press ClubThe UFO Chronicles · Transcript of witness declarations · November 12, 2007The Belgian Wave of 1989–1992: A Neglected HypothesisRenaud Leclet et al. · CNEGU · 2008 · Helicopter hypothesisBelgium UFO that puzzled NASA was polystyrene fakeAgence France-Presse · Phys.org · July 26, 2011La photo d’un ovni belge célèbre était un trucageLe Figaro · July 28, 2011 · Petit-Rechain confession reportingPetit-Rechain: The Current SituationLeslie Kean · The UFO Chronicles · September 2011Famous Belgian UFO photo a hoaxWim Van Utrecht · Caelestia · October 2011Belgium’s Flying Triangle WaveAntonio Huneeus · Open Minds · 2011, republished 2020The Belgian UFO WaveBrian Dunning · Skeptoid #538 · September 27, 2016 · Skeptical analysis30 years later, we still don’t know what really happened during the Belgian UFO waveJeva Lange · The Week · March 30, 2020Belgian UFO waveWikipedia · Orientation and reference trail · Consulted September 16, 2026SOBEPSWikipedia · Organization overview and bibliography · Consulted September 16, 2026

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Connected files

The Phoenix LightsThe next great silent triangle, seven years later, with its own misleading pictures.The Washington FlapJets sent after radar targets that pilots could not see, and the weather explanation that followed.The Tehran InterceptAnother air force, another radar lock, and the same question about what the instruments had hold of.Leslie KeanHer 2010 book carried De Brouwer’s own account of the wave to American readers.
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