The Belgian Wave - A three-cornered affair
By Wim Van Utrecht

Prelude

For nearly a decade all had been queit on the European front until, on October 9, 1989, the Sovjet press buerau TASS launched the story of a UFO landing in a park in Voronezh, some 500 km southeast of Moscow. According to the press report, a couple of three-eyed giants and a mechanical dwarf had emerged from the landed craft and had fired some sort of lasergun at a boy, rendering the kid temporarely invisible.
Details of the story got published in newspapers all over the globe, probably not so much because the editors regarded the bizarre tale as proof of an alien act of agression, but because the publication of this UFO story in the Sovjet's leading paper "PRAVDA" illustated the socio-political changes that were becoming effective in the former U.S.S.R. since the beginning of Gorbatsjov's Peristrojka.

The story of the Voronezh landing was the fires UFO news since long to hit the papers in Western Europe. Gradyally, reports started to come in again.
In the weekend of November 25-26, the situation got a bit out of hand when alarmed citizens from the Dutch speaking part of Belgium reported seeing a luminous disc circling their homes.
It later turned out that the sightings had been caused by a light-show from a disco in Halen, a small community in the province of Limbourg. The owner of the disco had tried to attract youngsters to his business by projecting a rotating xenon lamp into the cloud-deck.
Despite the fact that the culprit had been identified, the disco's light-show continued to cause UFO reports in the area untill, on December 16, when the Public Prosecutor's Office ordered the disco manager to switch off his installation after the Belgian Air Force had sent two F-16 in the air to identify the "mysterious discs".

The coming of the triangles

Four days after the reports had started to trickle in from Limbourg, and only 70 km southeast of Halen, another UFO incident occurred. This time the events were to create waves far beyond the borders of the small Belgian state. On November 29, 1989, two members of the Eupen gendarmerie - we are now in the German speaking part of the country - had the experience of their lifetime. At exactly 5.24 that evening, as they were driving their patrol car from Eupen to Kettenis (province of Liege), the two gendarmes spotted a bright light over one of the fields that bordered the road.
When they noticed that the light followed a straight course parallel to that of their car, the gendarmes quickly drove onto a point that would take them under the object's predicted trajectory. However, as the unidentified aircraft flew over the puzzled witnesses, it stopped, made a full turn and left in the opposite direction.
The two men could now discern "a dark solid mass in the shape of an isosceles triangle".Underneath there were three blinding white lights, one in each corner. A pulsating red light glowed in the center. The two law enforcerers decided to follow the strange craft which was now heading back to Eupen. In the village they payed a quick visit to their headquarters and the rang the nearest airfield and a nearby military base. They were told that there was no air traffic or military activity in the region that could account for the sightings.

It was 6.30 p.m. when the two witnesses returned to the patrol car and decided to head for a place of which they were sure it would offer a clear panoramic view over the area and the nearby lake of Gileppe. Upon arrival they recovered the object. It now seemed to be hovering motionless directly over the watch-tower of the lake.
In an early interview, one of the witnesses said that, at this time, they "had the unclear impression that, every now and then, there were beams of light shooting out from the sides". In later interviews though, the witnesses were quoted as having described "a stationnary white ball which repeatedly, but always simultaneously, emitted two clearly visible but very thin beams of a reddish light in opposite directions.".
The latter source also speaks of "small fire balls that appeared at the extremities of the beams, detached themselves and returned to the object after having circled the white ball a few times."
While observing this unusual display, a series of lights emerged from behind a nearby row of trees. Behind the lights the gendarmes distinguished the dark, greenish silhouette of a trianlge that rose into the air and executed a sharp turn. During this manoeuvre an upper structure could be seen with what appeared to be illuminated windows, "similar to a train wagon lit from the inside.". The object then followed a spiral-shaped trajectory before taking off in the direction of the German border. It was exactly 8.39 p.m. when it disappeared from view.

Throughout the incident, which had lasted a full three hours, the witnesses had stayed in constant contact with their headquarters in Eupen. Much to their relief, the dispatch officer informed them that he too had seen the object and that additional sightings were being received from patrols in nearby communities.
One colleague, patrolling the area northwest of Eupen, confirmed that he had seen not only an object carrying three blinding white lights and a pulsating red light, but that he had also noticed "something at the back of the craft that was turning around, like a turbine.".
Other witnesses - some 150 evewitness accounts were gathered for that night - mentioned a distinct sound that reminded of a ventilator.
Researchers who are distrustful of an extreterrestrial interpretation of UFO reports, emphasize that these descriptions remind of an ultra light motorized aircraft or a blimp. They further point to the fact that three white lights and a red flashing light are consistent with standard lighting configurations for aircraft. During the hours that preceede the event, several independent witnesses had spotted an oval- or cigar-shaped object travelling slowly over the region just south of the lake of Gileppe. These sightings occurred in broad daylight.
It is possible that the unidentified object that crossed the Eupen sky after dark was actually a blimp, but it was described as a triangle merely because of the position of the three "corner lights".

It was only in 1996 when independent researcher Paul Vanbrabant discovered that in the evening of November 29 Venus was in the same area of the sky as the starionary white ball of light that was seen over the watch-tower of the lake of Gileppe. Verification by the author revealed that Venus had reached its maximum magnitude that day and was only 6 degrees above the horizon. The planet's azimuth also closely matched that of the presumed UFO (taking into account an error margin of maximum 15 degrees, i.e. the part of the sky that can be covered by spreading your hand at arm's length). Moreover, the sky was crystal clear that evening and the witnesses had not mentioned seeing a second bright in close proximity of the UFO. These circumstances make it very plausible that Venus was indeed responsible for this phase of the sighting.
The "unclear impression of beams of light shooting out from the sides" may be due to well-known atmospheric effects that occur when light sources are observed low on the horizon. If the Venus interpretation is correct, it implies that there is no longer a reason to believe that there was more than one unidentified object in the air that evening.