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Sept. 27, 2016 - Skeptoid
18:18
Skeptoid #538: The Belgian UFO Wave

For two years, some say the Belgian skies were filled with triangular alien UFOs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
National UFO Event in Belgium 00:08:02
Sometimes a UFO sighting is an isolated local event, something seen by one person, or maybe just a few.
And sometimes it'll get a mention in the news, and most of the time it won't.
But in other cases, a UFO sighting can be an event of national proportions, involving countless eyewitnesses over a long period of time, and dominates the news for the duration.
This happened in Belgium in 1990.
And we're going to learn all about it right now on Skeptoid.
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The Belgian UFO wave.
Beginning at the end of 1989 and continuing well into the 1990s, the skies above Belgium were, if you believe the stories, filled with triangular UFOs.
They were chased by fighter planes, followed by gendarmes, and the government openly cooperated with UFO enthusiast groups to investigate the unprecedented visitation.
Witnesses numbered in the thousands, and military radar data was publicly produced.
Clearly, it must have been the largest UFO case in human history.
And yet you've probably never heard of it, and the only photograph produced during the year was found to be a hoax.
How is that possible?
It seems impossible to reconcile an event of such massive proportions with so little notice being taken.
Perhaps there is more here to study than just a UFO case.
The fun began on November 29th, 1989, when two gendarmes in Uppen, Belgium, saw something in the sky.
This was described as a perfectly silent, large triangular object at low altitude, marked with three bright lights at its corners.
It was reported that 30 separate groups of witnesses saw it, plus three separate groups of gendarmes, totaling 143 in all.
The peak of the activity came four months later on the night of March 30th, 1990, and extended into the wee hours of March 31st, when accounts claimed that Belgian F-16 fighter planes were scrambled to intercept a number of mysterious objects in the sky.
They obtained radar lock on nine occasions, confirmed by ground radar, but the objects made maneuvers at such high speed that the F-16s could not keep up and lost them.
The incident was witnessed by 13,500 people on the ground, of whom 2,600 made written statements.
The next month, a photo of one of the craft was widely published, clearly showing a massive black triangle with bright lights at each corner.
An image search for Belgian UFO will show it to you right now.
Such an episode can only be described as one of the most mind-boggling and astonishing ever.
With little doubt, we cannot be alone in the universe, and advanced aliens are visiting us even now.
One could hardly conclude otherwise, especially if one takes as gospel the original report of the November 29th event.
The story of the two gendarmes was first reported by a German tabloid, Grinz Echo.
The reporter who interviewed the gendarmes was Heinz Goddessart, a lifelong believer in alien visitation.
The story quickly came to the attention of a group of Belgian UFO enthusiasts called Sobeps, the Belgian Society for the Study of Space Phenomena.
One of their main guys was a professor of physics named Auguste Miesen, who, like Goddessart, had always been convinced that visiting aliens are the inescapable explanation for many UFO reports.
Miesen tracked down the two gendarmes and interviewed them himself, and Sobeps quickly took over as the media's main source of information about UFOs.
Miesen and the one other actual scientist who belonged to Sobeps are virtually the only experts ever mentioned in the many Belgian newspaper articles that followed in the subsequent years.
Nearly all the information about the Belgian UFO wave comes from Sobeps, and so does the version of events that I just related for you.
About a year after these events, Sobeps released a book titled Wagduvnis vur la Belgique, or The Belgian UFO Wave.
Miesen was the lead author, and the book remains the primary source for most of today's articles about the Belgian UFO wave.
Make no mistake, they were very clear in their assertion that these were alien spacecraft.
Miesen wrote, The only reasonable hypothesis is that of unidentified flying objects of extraterrestrial origin.
The only reasonable hypothesis.
Whenever Sobeps said UFO, unlike many other UFologists, they unequivocally meant alien spacecraft.
They had their conclusion long before they ever heard of this event.
Fortunately, a lot of skeptical authors, including some in Belgium and intimately acquainted with the story, have written about it, though their work has not received anything like the attention garnered by the pro-UFO stories.
Among them is Dr. Jean-Michel Ebrassart, a Belgian psychologist who wrote his PhD thesis on the leading science-based explanation for mass UFO sightings, the psychosocial model of the UFO Phenomenon, an interpretive framework in social sciences.
He was kind enough to correspond with me at length about the Belgian UFO wave.
Ebrassar summed it up with a popular quote from the noted UFO skeptic Philip Klass, who wrote in his 1986 book, UFOs the Public Deceived.
Once news coverage leads the public to believe that UFOs may be in the vicinity, there are numerous natural and man-made objects which, especially when seen at night, can take on unusual characteristics in the minds of hopeful viewers.
Their UFO reports, in turn, add to the mass excitement, which encourages still more observers to watch for UFOs.
This situation feeds upon itself until such time as the media lose interest in the subjects, and then the flap quickly runs out of steam.
You read a story in the paper that a UFO was seen flying over your town a night or two ago.
You remember that you saw something you took for a bright star or an airplane, thought nothing of it at the time, but this amazing new story makes you realize that what you saw must have been this UFO.
You and I might not necessarily make that connection, but it's perfectly reasonable that a lot of people will.
Skeptical Conference at Sea 00:03:10
And so they follow the instructions in the newspaper article and send a report to Sobeps.
With so many articles over a period of years in a small country, it's no great surprise that Sobeps reported they eventually received as many as 2,600 in all.
The 143 reports Meeson claims for the original November 29th incident were indeed received, but only after more than a week of aggressive and repeated solicitation in the mass media.
It is only much later retellings of the story that wrongly assume all 2,600 were reported as people were watching the F-16s chase the UFOs, or that all 143 initial reports came independently on that first night.
All the reports were after the fact and were made only after prompting and solicitation by Sobeps and the media.
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It was simply a psychosocial phenomenon, which is why there is no evidence and only the one questionable photograph.
If 13,500 people did all actually see something that they took for a UFO at the time, I guarantee you that more than just a single photograph would have resulted.
But even that single photograph turns out to be emblematic of the quality of all the evidence that characterized the Belgian UFO wave.
No Evidence for Belgian Aliens 00:05:04
In 2011, a guy named Patrick Marichal invited Belgian reporters to his home to show them what he and some buddies had done at work one day when the media hype had been at its peak.
They took a sheet of styrofoam, cut it into a triangle, painted it black, embedded a flashlight in each corner, then hung it from a string.
Marichal still had tons of photographs that they'd taken, trying to get that one that was just right and that fooled the world.
What about the original September 29th incident?
It turns out that the version Sobep reported is different than what the gendarmes actually said.
For one thing, they never said it was silent, but that it made a low noise.
Other witnesses later said it sounded like a motor.
One said it had a stick coming out one end with a turbine on it.
Investigator Renault Locle wrote a lengthy article going into great detail and concluded that it was almost certainly a Bell UH-1 Huey helicopter in the area.
The majority of the gendarmes report concerned a single stationary white light above Lake Gillépe that just happened to be exactly where the planet Venus would have been in the sky from where they were observing.
So let's look at the most dramatic of all the events, the chase by the F-16s.
Informally on alert from all the UFO reports in the media, two fighter planes from Boveshaw Air Base were sent up when a number of reports from local gendarmes came in, saying that odd lights were in the sky that looked like stars but changed color.
Controllers on the ground advised the pilots where to go based on sporadic radar contacts.
The pilots also got intermittent contact with objects, but they appeared and disappeared and moved up and down too fast, including going underground.
The pilots never saw anything at all.
Sobeps reported that they obtained radar lock on targets nine times, but the Belgian military only reported three such locks, and upon analyzing the data, all three radar locks were on each other.
The other contacts were all found to be the result of a well-known atmospheric interference called Bragg scattering.
Bragg scattering is described in airspace surveillance radars, this effect becomes more disturbing.
Random sequences of inhomogeneities in the air density can produce so-called clear-air echoes.
These are referred to as angels and may cause false alarms.
In other words, we need not stampede to alien spacecraft being the only reasonable hypothesis, as did Miesen.
Belgium's chief of operations, Colonel Wilfried de Braua, summarized the night by saying, The technical evidence was insufficient to conclude that abnormal air activities took place during that evening.
An officer on base, a major Lambrechts, wrote a chronological journal that can be found online, and a detailed study was written by Officer Cadet Guillmar of the Belgian Royal Military Academy under the direction of Major Salmou of the Electronic Warfare Center.
The Guillmar-Salmou report is classified, and no skeptical researchers were ever able to obtain a copy.
But we do know that it found angel echoes to be the only interesting thing in the air that night, because Miesen included bits from it in his second edition of Sobepp's book.
And this is where the story got weird.
According to anecdotal claims made by skeptical researchers who say they spoke with government scientists who were involved, a deal was struck.
The government would agree not to release the Guillmar-Salmou report publicly if Miesen would retract the claims he made in Sobepp's first book.
Miesen was given a copy of the classified report.
Soon afterward, Sobepps published their second edition, UFO Wave Over Belgium II, in which Miesen reported figuring out, on his own, that the radar reports were false angel signals, and that the Guillmar-Salmu report backed up his findings.
We don't know for sure whether such a deal was struck or why it would be, but we also needn't conclude that it must have been the government's way of suppressing Meeson's discovery that aliens were visiting.
The government, almost certainly, never had any intention of releasing a classified document.
I suggest that their providing one copy discreetly to Meeson may have been nothing more than professional courtesy.
Meeson was a professor of physics at Belgium's largest French-speaking university.
He was professionally acquainted with the government scientists for whom the Guillemar-Salmou report was written.
They saw their colleague publishing ridiculous nonsense and shared their informed findings with him.
Best Medicine Is Skepticism 00:01:57
Academics share their work with one another all the time.
There were certainly many other sightings and reports over the course of about two years, but none as dramatic as these I've just covered.
And in my opinion, these best cases are not very dramatic at all.
I love to think there was something interesting and undiscovered in the skies above Belgium, but despite the Ideologue's best efforts to weave a narrative proving just that, I just can't find a compelling reason to suspect it might be true.
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