The Belgian Wave, Triangular UFO seen off and on for five month
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| The extraordinary sightings continued for months as the triangular invader was witnessed more than 1,000 times, both day and night. The object dipped low enough to easily be seen with the naked eye, and the event became one of the biggest stories in the Belgian media. |
Another intriguing aspect of this case is that twenty years after the famous picture was taken an "anonymous" person by the name of "Patrick" came forward saying that he took the picture and it was a hoax, of course the likes of Newsweek, Time and a host of the mainstream media jumped right on that bandwagon as being factual. Two things immediately spring to mind, even if the picture is a hoax, who cares it does not change a thing, second how could more then 13,000 people participate in a mass delusion or mistake a helicopter as a UFO.
Richard
The Belgian UFO wave refers to a series of sightings of tiangular UFOs in Belgium, which lasted from 29 November 1989 to April 1990. (read more about the image below)
The Belgian UFO wave peaked with the events of the night
of 30/31 March 1990. On that night unknown objects were
tracked on radar, photographed, and were sighted by an
estimated 13,500 people on the ground – 2,600 of whom filed
written statements describing in detail what they had seen.
Following the incident the Belgian air force released a
report detailing the events of that night.
At around 23:00 on 30 March the supervisor for the Control Reporting Center (CRC) at Glons received reports that three unusual lights were seen moving towards Thorembais-Gembloux which lies to the South-East of Brussels. The lights were reported to be brighter than stars, changing color between red, green and yellow, and appeared to be fixed at the vertices of an equilateral triangle. At this point Glons CRC requested the Wavre gendarmerie send a patrol to confirm the sighting.
Over the next hour the two scrambled F-16s attempted nine separate interceptions of the targets. On three occasions they managed to obtain a radar lock for a few seconds but each time the targets changed position and speed so rapidly that the lock was broken. During the first radar lock, the target accelerated from 240 km/h to over 1,770 km/h while changing altitude from 2,700 m to 1,500 m, then up to 3,350 m before descending to almost ground level – the first descent of more than 900 m taking less than two seconds. Similar manoeuvres were observed during both subsequent radar locks. On no occasion were the F-16 pilots able to make visual contact with the targets and at no point, despite the speeds involved, was there any indication of a sonic boom. Moreover, narrator Robert Stack added in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, the sudden changes in acceleration and deceleration would have been fatal to one or more human pilots.
During this time, ground witnesses broadly corroborate the information obtained by radar. They described seeing the smaller triangle completely disappear from sight at one point, while the larger triangle moved upwards very rapidly as the F-16s flew past. After 00:30 radar contact became much more sporadic and the final confirmed lock took place at 00:40. This final lock was once again broken by an acceleration from around 160 km/h to 1,120 km/h after which the radar of the F-16s and those at Glons and Semmerzake all lost contact. Following several further unconfirmed contacts the F-16s eventually returned to base shortly after 01:00.
The final details of the sighting were provided by the members of the Wavre gendarmerie who had been sent to confirm the original report. They describe four lights now being arranged in a square formation, all making short jerky movements, before gradually losing their luminosity and disappearing in four separate directions at around 01:30.
What do the skeptics say:
In April 1990, a photograph of a triangular shaped hovering UFO by an eighteen year old man named Patrick became one of the most sensational photographs that perplexed even scientists at NASA.
After almost two decades, the mystery of the photograph was supposedly resolved as the man behind the hoax admitted the picture was a fake.
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Picture supposedly taken by
the infamous and anonymous Patrick
Very early on (in 1992), the Belgian skeptic Marc Hallet wrote an essay about the Belgian UFO wave being mostly mass delusion.
In The Belgian UFO Wave of 1989–1992 – A Neglected Hypothesis, Renaud Leclet & co. discuss the fact that some sightings can be explained by helicopters. Most witnesses reported that the objects were silent. This report argues that the lack of noise could be due to the engine noise in the witnesses' automobiles, or strong natural wind blowing in the direction of a witness, combined with the wind due to driving a vehicle.