The Belgian Wave: The Night F-16s Chased Something the Air Force Never Named

2024-12-21 · Unidentified Objects (UAP) · 4 min read

It was just after half past five on the evening of 29 November 1989 when two gendarmes on patrol near Eupen, a small town on Belgium's border with Germany, radioed in something they could not explain. Hanging over a field was a huge dark platform, roughly triangular, with brilliant white lights at its corners and a pulsing point of red at its centre. It drifted slowly, almost without sound, then moved off toward a nearby lake. Within hours their report was one of around a hundred and forty that reached the gendarmerie that single night — from drivers, families and off-duty officers, most of whom had no idea that anyone else was watching the same patch of sky.

It was the opening night of what came to be called the Belgian wave. For months, from that November evening into the following year, witnesses across the country described the same thing: a large, dark, silent triangle, flying low and slow, its lights unmistakable, sometimes hanging motionless as though parked in the air. By the time the reports thinned out, an estimated 13,500 people said they had seen it. The civilian research society SOBEPS, working alongside the gendarmerie, collected some 2,600 written statements and later published two thick volumes on the affair. Of the cases it examined closely, it judged that several hundred resisted any ordinary explanation.

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