{"it":{"id":"UFO-BEL1990","name":"Belgian wave (30–31 Mar 1990 F-16 chase)","kind":"ufo","sub":"Historical sighting","place":"Beauvechain Air Base area, Belgium","lat":50.75,"lon":4.77,"date":"1989–1990","rep":"Glons radar; F-16s from Beauvechain.","off":"Radar anomalies (official and sceptical reading).","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Belgian UFO wave","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave"}],"tags":["Sightings"],"sum":"Just after midnight on 31 March 1990, two Belgian F-16s took off to chase radar targets that no pilot ever saw.\n\nMajor Lambrechts of the Belgian Air Force wrote the official report. The jets, AL 17 and AL 23, left at 00:05 after ground radar and witnesses reported lights. Between 00:07 and 00:54 the pilots made nine interception attempts. Three times their own radar briefly locked on. At 00:13 a target 6 nautical miles away at 9,000 feet sped up from 150 to 970 knots while dropping toward the ground. At 00:30 another lock lasted six seconds at 740 knots before a jamming-like signal appeared. Earlier that night a gendarme, A. Renkin, had reported three unusual lights, and the radar centre at Glons sent a patrol to check. Sightings had been reported across Belgium since early December 1989.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is the speed. A change from 150 to 970 knots should have caused a sonic boom, and none was heard. Ground witnesses saw several lights, while the radar showed a single echo. The pilots never made visual contact.\n\nThe report rules out balloons, holograms, optical illusions and the B-2 and F-117A aircraft. It ends without a plausible explanation and sets out what was recorded rather than what it was.\n\nWas something there that night, or did radars and eyes each catch a different thing? (single source)","nsrc":1,"new":1,"qs":["Belgian F-16s made nine intercept attempts in one night. If the targets were radar artifacts, how safe is a NATO air defence that chases ghosts?","A whole country reported sightings for months, then its air force scrambled jets. When does a 'wave' become something governments must explain?","If something real evaded two F-16s for an hour and a half over Europe in 1990, who would have been told, and who wouldn't?"],"yt":"Read the Belgian Air Force report and decide whether the radar returns support the sightings.","rel":["UFO-MAN1979"],"hook":"Two Belgian F-16s locked on to a target that jumped from 150 to 970 knots, with no sonic boom.","why":"An air force put its own radar locks and a no-explanation verdict in an official report."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"UFO-BEL1990","qs":["The jets locked on three times but never saw anything. What would convince you the targets were real?","Witnesses saw several lights while radar showed one echo. How should we weigh eyes against instruments?","The report rules out known aircraft and balloons. Is a no-explanation verdict a finding, or an absence of one?"],"gal":[],"ms":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Belgian UFO wave","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave"},{"id":"VUFO-BEL1990-2","t":"RR0: Lambrechts report on the 1990 Belgian sightings","u":"https://rr0.org/time/1/9/9/0/RapportLambrechts/index.html"}],"pts":[{"p":"30 Mar 1990 ~23:00 Glons CRC; F-16s from Beauvechain made 9 intercept attempts.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Belgian UFO wave","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave"},{"p":"Last lock at 00:40.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Belgian UFO wave","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave"},{"p":"Dunning: Bragg scattering radar artifacts.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Belgian UFO wave","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave"}],"article":{"title":"The Belgian UFO wave and the F-16 chase of 30–31 March 1990","dek":"In 1989 and 1990 Belgians reported triangles of light over their country. On one night the Air Force scrambled two F-16s, logged radar locks at impossible speeds, and wrote a report that ruled out planes, balloons and planets. The most famous photograph of the wave was a hoax.","byline":"The Nommo","updated":"31 Oct 2026","sections":[{"h":"A speed change of 820 knots","p":["At 00.13 on 31 March 1990, a Belgian Air Force F-16 pilot locked his radar onto an unknown target at 9,000 feet [1]. Within moments, according to the Air Force’s own report, the target’s speed changed “from 150 to 970 knots” [1]. Its altitude dropped to 5,000 feet, rose to 11,000, and then fell “down to ground level” [1].","The pilot lost the lock after a few seconds [1]. At that moment, the Glons radar station reported that the fighters were directly above the target’s position [1].","Few UFO cases include an official military report that rules out planes, planets and balloons in its own conclusions. This one does [1]. The account was written by Major P. Lambrechts of the Belgian Air Staff [1]."]},{"h":"The wave","p":["Reports of triangular craft began in Belgium in late November 1989, centred first on the town of Eupen [8]. Wikipedia’s summary records that 143 people reported seeing an object, though many reports came more than a week later and after media coverage [8].","The Lambrechts report says that since the beginning of December 1989 the Belgian Air Force had received many reports, most describing low-altitude visual sightings [1]. The Air Force cooperated with the civilian group SOBEPS, the Société Belge d’Étude des Phénomènes Spatiaux, after SOBEPS asked the defence ministry to support its inquiries [1].","Colonel Wilfried De Brouwer’s summary for a press briefing on 11 July 1990 describes what witnesses reported: “a triangle-shaped platform up to 200 feet wide,” hovering about 100 m up with a “very light humming noise” [6]. Before 30 March, the Air Force had scrambled F-16s twice. The first pair arrived about an hour late and saw nothing; the second found only a laser-beam projector on the ground [6].","The Air Force also said it had ruled out some military explanations. According to its report, the presence of US stealth aircraft or AWACS in Belgian airspace during the events “can be excluded” [1]."]},{"h":"The night of 30 March","p":["At 23.00 on 30 March 1990, the Glons Control Reporting Centre received a call from a gendarme, A. Renkin, at his home at Ramillies [1]. He said he could see three unusual lights “located at the apexes of an equilateral triangle,” changing colour between red, green and yellow [1].","A second call reported three more lights moving towards the first group [1]. The Glons radar centre saw an unidentified contact about 5 km north of Beauvechain air base, moving at about 25 knots towards the west [1]. At 23.28, a gendarmerie patrol including Captain Pinson arrived and confirmed the sighting [1].","The military radar centre at Semmerzake also reported a clear contact at the same position [1]. At 23.56 Glons gave the order to scramble, and at 00.05 two F-16s, call signs AL 17 and AL 23, took off [1]."]},{"h":"The chase","p":["Between 00.07 and 00.54, the fighters made nine attempts to intercept the targets [1]. They had several brief radar contacts. In three cases, the pilots locked on for a few seconds, and each time the targets changed behaviour sharply [1]. “In no case, the pilots have had a visual contact with the UFOs,” the report says [1].","The Air Force’s two accounts do not agree on the numbers. De Brouwer’s July summary says the pilots locked on six times, at 5 to 8 nautical miles, with break-locks “after 10 to 60 seconds” and speeds “between 150 and 1010 kts” [6]. The Lambrechts report gives three lock-ons of a few seconds and a top speed of 970 knots [1]. The summary adds that on three occasions both F-16s, flying about 2 nautical miles apart, locked on simultaneously “with the same parameters” [6].","At 00.30, AL 17 recorded a contact moving at 740 knots, about 20 nautical miles from Beauvechain [1]. When the lock broke, the report says, “the signal of a jamming appears on the scope” [1]. At about the same time, ground witnesses saw the fighters pass three times and the brightest light in the triangle move off fast [1].","By around 01.00, the last object had gone from view towards Louvain-la-Neuve [1]. The fighters landed at 01.10 and 01.16 [1].","The ground observation lasted longer than the chase. According to De Brouwer, the Wavre police chief alerted four other police stations about 10 nautical miles apart, and all four confirmed the lights [6]. The last visual observation was at about 01.30 [6]."]},{"h":"The official case: an unidentified event","p":["The Belgian report did not explain the event. It concluded that “for the first time a radar contact has been positively observed,” correlated across several Air Force radars and the F-16s [1]. It said the gendarmes’ objectivity “cannot be questioned” [1].","It went on to reject the main conventional explanations. The speeds and altitude changes, it said, “exclude the hypothesis” that the objects were planes [1]. Optical illusion, planets and weather were contradicted by the radar data, and sounding balloons were judged “very improbable” [1].","De Brouwer’s summary reached the same verdict: “The Belgian Air Force was unable to identify neither the nature nor the origin of the phenomena” [6]. It excluded balloons and microlights because of the variable speeds, drones because of the hovering, and aircraft “including Stealth” because there was “No noise” [6]. Laser projections were “Unlikely,” since there were no clouds and lasers do not show on radar [6]. At the press conference he said the Air Force was very cautious and would not float hypotheses such as extraterrestrial visits, Meessen records [7].","Britain’s Ministry of Defence received an account in November 1993 [2]. The UK National Archives describes a four-page account by General Wilfried de Brouwer, chief of operations of the Belgian Air Staff, held in DEFE 24/1960 pages 320 to 324 [2]. It confirms that F-16 pilots obtained “lock-ons” but could not explain what they had locked onto [2]."]},{"h":"The skeptical case at full strength","p":["The skeptical case focuses on the radar. Tim Printy, writing in his newsletter SUNlite, states that a study by Salmon and Gilmard and a paper by the Belgian physicist Auguste Meessen “determined that the radar contacts were erroneous” [4]. He adds that, by his reading, Meessen held that the original police sightings were probably stars [4].","Fast-moving false returns that vanish when a pilot approaches, and that no pilot ever sees, are what radar artefacts look like. The pilots never saw anything [1]. The meteorology section of the report records a slight temperature inversion at ground level and another at 3,000 feet [1].","Meessen himself, who studied the case for decades, rejects the charge that he was only seeking proof for the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and points critics to his published analysis of the ground and F-16 radar signals [3]. His own model of “Pulsed EM Propulsion” shows he took the visual reports of craft seriously [3]. Both sides cite him.","The most damaging critique of the F-16 data came from Meessen himself. In a later, detailed study he wrote that the anomalous echoes on the ground radars came from masses of humid air, “nuages invisibles,” and that the F-16’s Doppler speed reading “peut être faussée” by interference [7]. He also showed that at some moments the second pilot had locked onto the first F-16 to follow it through turns; lock-ons 8 and 10 are among them [7]. On this reading, the dramatic speed changes are partly an artefact of the instrument."]},{"h":"The hoax photograph","p":["The best-known image of the wave is a photograph of a dark triangle with lights at its corners and a glow at its centre, taken at Petit-Rechain near Verviers in April 1990 [5]. It was analysed for years, including by experts at Belgium’s Royal Military Academy [5].","It was a hoax. In July 2011, its author told the Belgian broadcaster RTL that the object was a painted panel of polystyrene with three spotlights, made as a joke for colleagues at work, RTBF reported [5]. He said it went much further than they expected [5].","The hoax reaches into the science. Meessen had used the Petit-Rechain slide to support his model of UV emission from UFOs [3]. The president of the Belgian group COBEPS, Patrick Ferryn, said the fake did not call the wider wave into question [5]."]},{"h":"What is genuinely unexplained","p":["The radar question is not closed in any primary document. The Belgian Air Force did not withdraw its conclusion, and de Brouwer’s account to Britain in 1993 still described the lock-ons as unexplained [2].","Meessen did not conclude that everything was explained. The same study reports “deux traces non identifiées,” the best detected during the F-16 flight, plus an odd echo on the civil airport radar on 18 March 1990 [7]. For the best track he excluded a microlight, an invisible cloud, a balloon and a mirage, and found no option other than a UFO [7]. He also rejected the star explanation for the gendarmes, saying he questioned Renkin several times and never found a flaw in his account [7]. That contradicts Printy’s reading of Meessen on this point [4][7].","Nor has any primary source here published the raw radar recordings for independent checking. The Lambrechts report and De Brouwer’s summary give the speeds and times, and they differ on the count of lock-ons [1][6]. Meanwhile the critics and Meessen are working from recordings and analyses that the public cannot examine side by side in the documents used for this entry [1][3][4].","The ground sightings are separate from the radar. Gendarmes on duty watched lights in triangular formation for more than two hours [1]. The radar explanation, if correct, does not tell us what they saw. The star explanation, if correct, does not tell us why two radar stations and two fighters recorded contacts in the same area [1]."]},{"h":"Related cases","p":["The Belgian case is the European parallel to the 1997 Phoenix Lights (UFO-PHX), another wave of triangle reports with a military explanation. The British Ministry of Defence’s files on it are covered in GOV-UK, alongside the Rendlesham Forest case (UFO-REN). There is no connection to any ancient site."]},{"h":"The triangle on the wall","p":["The single most-shared picture of the Belgian wave was built in a workplace and hung in plain view of a camera [5]. It fooled analysts for more than twenty years.","The Air Force report, by contrast, has been public for decades and has never been retracted [1][2]. A hoax was believed for two decades because it was a picture. A military report has been doubted for three because it was not. Which kind of evidence people find easier to dismiss is part of the case."]}],"sources":[{"n":1,"text":"Belgian Air Force, Major P. Lambrechts, “Report concerning the observation of UFOs in the night from March 30 to March 31, 1990,” English translation reproduced by UFO Evidence (also mirrored by Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight).","url":"http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc408.htm"},{"n":2,"text":"The National Archives (UK), UFO files highlights guide, August 2009 release (DEFE 24/1960 pp. 320–324; DEFE 24/1970).","url":"https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/aug-2009-highlights-guide.pdf"},{"n":3,"text":"Auguste Meessen, “The Belgian Wave and the photos of Ramillies,” 2011.","url":"https://web.archive.org/web/20110723211034/http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Ramillies.pdf"},{"n":4,"text":"Tim Printy, SUNlite, vol. 2 no. 6, 2010.","url":"https://web.archive.org/web/2010/http://home.comcast.net/~tprinty/UFO/SUNlite2_6.pdf"},{"n":5,"text":"RTBF, “20 ans après, le mystère de l’OVNI de Petit-Rechain est enfin percé,” July 2011 (with RTL Info and Belga).","url":"https://www.rtbf.be/article/20-ans-apres-le-mystere-de-l-ovni-de-petit-rechain-est-enfin-perce-6508253"},{"n":6,"text":"Col. Wilfried De Brouwer, Belgian Air Force, “Summary Report on Observations 30-31 March 1990,” press briefing of 11 July 1990, English text reproduced by Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight.","url":"https://www.ufology.patrickgross.org/htm/belrap02.htm"},{"n":7,"text":"Auguste Meessen, “Étude approfondie des mystérieux enregistrements radar des F-16,” undated study, meessen.net.","url":"https://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Etude_des_myst%C3%A9rieux_enregistrements_des_F16.pdf"},{"n":8,"text":"Wikipedia: Belgian UFO wave (used last, for the Eupen witness count).","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave"}],"related":["UFO-PHX","GOV-UK","UFO-REN"]}},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/UFO-BEL1990-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Illustration: setting associated with Belgian wave (30–31 Mar 1990 F-16 chase), Beauvechain Air Base area, Belgium","by":"Illustration made for The Nommo","lic":"","lu":"","p":"","g":true,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":null,"hs":{}}