The Belgian UFO Wave

Summary

From late November 1989 Belgium recorded a wave of reports of triangles of lights in the sky. On the night of 30 to 31 March 1990, ground radar picked up a contact, police confirmed lights, and two F-16s were scrambled from Beauvechain. The pilots achieved radar locks. They never saw anything. The Belgian Air Force reported, in terms, that it could not identify the nature or the origin of what it had recorded.

Two things have happened since. In 2011 the photographer behind the wave’s defining image confessed it was a styrofoam triangle with torches in it, hung on wires. And the physicist who had led the scientific case for an unknown craft acknowledged that the radar echoes were in all likelihood atmospheric.

What is documented

The night, by the clock. From the Belgian Air Force’s own summary report. At 23:00 on 30 March the master controller at the Glons air defence radar received a telephone report of three blinking lights forming a triangle. At about 23:30 police at Wavre confirmed a sighting, and radar showed a contact about eight nautical miles north of them, moving slowly west at about 25 knots at 10,000 feet. At 23:50 a second radar station about a hundred nautical miles away confirmed a matching contact. At 00:05 two F-16s scrambled from Beauvechain. They landed at 01:10. The last visual observation from the ground was recorded at about 01:30.

The intercepts. Nine interception attempts were made. The pilots achieved lock-on on six occasions, at distances between five and eight nautical miles. The locks broke after ten to sixty seconds. Recorded speeds varied between 150 and 1,010 knots. On three occasions both aircraft registered simultaneous lock-ons showing the same parameters while flying about two nautical miles apart.

And nobody saw anything. The report is explicit: "No visual contact could be established by either of the F16 pilots." Ground observers did report lights, and police at four other stations confirmed them.

What the Air Force concluded. The report excludes balloons, microlights, remotely piloted vehicles and aircraft including stealth, and calls laser projection or mirage unlikely for want of a projection surface, there being no cloud. Its conclusion is a statement of failure, not of anomaly: "The Belgian Air Force was unable to identify neither the nature nor the origin of the phenomena."

A technical limit that matters. In his own account, the colonel who signed the report notes that the F-16’s airborne radar rejects objects moving at a relative speed below about a hundred kilometres an hour, so it could not detect a static or slow target at all. He also notes that witnesses at one location said the lights dimmed and went out as the F-16 approached.

The signatory’s own position changed. In his postface to the main Belgian study, which carries the note that it "does not necessarily reflect the official point of view of the Defense", he wrote that the recording of identical data by three different systems "pushes us to not exclude that one or more unidentified flying machines actually evolved in the Belgian airspace", closing: "But it exists, it is real, and this is already an important conclusion." Reporting his later account, published sources render his position as holding that the evidence was insufficient to prove real craft were in the air that night. The two renderings of that later statement differ in wording, so neither is quoted here as his exact words.

The photograph. Taken in April 1990 at Petit-Rechain near Verviers. For twenty-one years it was the wave’s defining image, endorsed as extraordinary by a physicist at Louvain, a former NASA senior scientist, a satellite imagery specialist and a professor at the Royal Military School, who concluded the photographer could never have faked it that way.

The confession, 26 July 2011. Broadcast on Belgian television. A friend cut a triangle 60 to 80 centimetres wide from styrofoam; the photographer fitted four torches into it, coloured the middle one red with a marker, and suspended the model on wires from a kitchen step ladder. About a dozen pictures were taken, of which only two were ever publicly known. In his own words: he "made it, painted it, hung it up and then photographed it", adding, "It’s too easy to fool people, even with a cheap model." The Registry does not print his name: Belgian primary coverage anonymised him, and the surname that appears in English-language secondary accounts could not be confirmed from a Belgian source.

He still believes in the wave. In a later interview: "I believe in UFOs, I believe in ufology and I’m sure the Belgian wave was the real thing." The hoaxer and the believer are the same person.

The physicist who argued for a craft revised his view of the radar. Auguste Meessen, the physicist who led the argument for an unknown craft, later acknowledged that the radar echoes were due "in all likehood to a clutter of rare atmospheric phenomena", together with radar calibration problems and confusion with planets and stars.

The pilot’s own summary. Yves Meelbergs, one of the F-16 pilots: "We never found a clear and satisfactory answer. But we can say what it was not: a temperature inversion or a U.S. stealth aircraft."

The scale of the wave, and its shape. It began on 29 November 1989 at Eupen, where 143 people claimed to have seen the object, though most reports were filed more than a week later and after media coverage. The main Belgian study received as many as 2,600 reports in all; the successor body’s catalogue for 1989 to 1993 records 1,282 notifications and 2,531 witnesses, of which 897 cases were investigated and 78 were photographic. The last quarter of 1989 alone accounts for 444 notifications: twelve in October, 205 in November, 227 in December. Sceptical accounts tie the volume of reports to the media coverage that solicited them.

A count that does not agree. The Air Force summary gives six locks of ten to sixty seconds. Sceptical accounts give three locks lasting a few seconds, with the three the military confirmed being locks the two aircraft achieved on each other. The Registry prints both and merges neither.

Leading explanations

Radar artefacts, misidentified astronomical objects and media amplification (widely accepted). That the radar contacts were not solid targets but clear-air or so-called angel echoes produced by inhomogeneities in air density, compounded by calibration problems, and that the ground lights were stars, planets and ordinary aircraft, with the report volume driven by a fortnight of media solicitation. The decisive fact for this record is not that sceptics say it, but that Meessen, the physicist who formerly led the opposing case, came to attribute the radar echoes to atmospheric clutter himself.

An unidentified physical craft (hypothesis, and partly withdrawn by its own authors). That correlated returns across three independent systems, with speeds from 150 to 1,010 knots, point to a real object of unknown type. This was the reading of De Brouwer’s postface to the main Belgian study and of Meessen’s published analysis. The Air Force’s formal conclusion was only non-identification, and both the colonel who signed it and the physicist who argued it later moved away from it.

An American stealth or experimental aircraft (rejected). The initial attribution. United States authorities denied any such aircraft in the area, the Air Force summary explicitly excludes aircraft including stealth, and the pilot said plainly it was not one.

The photograph shows a real craft (rejected, by the photographer). A styrofoam triangle with four torches, suspended on wires.

Current status

Later explained. The explanation is widely accepted, and the two men who argued most strongly for an unknown craft have both stepped back from it. The defining photograph is an admitted fabrication: a styrofoam triangle with four torches, hung on wires, which circulated as authentic for twenty-one years and was endorsed in that time by several qualified analysts. The physicist who built the radar case now attributes the echoes to rare atmospheric phenomena together with calibration problems and confusion with planets and stars. The Air Force never claimed more than non-identification. What remains unresolved is narrow: the two published counts of the radar locks disagree, the classified analysis of the radar data has never been released, and no official explanation was ever issued to replace the original statement of failure. Release of that analysis would close the record. It would be reopened by a reconciliation of the lock counts that showed the six-lock sequence could not be accounted for by clear-air echoes.

Last reviewed: November 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.