Eupen

Eupen and the Belgian Wave

On 29 November 1989 two gendarmes on a road outside this town in German-speaking Belgium stopped in front of a large triangular object with three lights at its corners and a searchlight beam pointing down. It moved over the forest more slowly than an aircraft can fly, and without sound. Over the next year and a half more than two thousand reports with the same description were collected across the country. On the night of 31 March 1990 the Belgian Air Force scrambled two F-16s on ground radar data; their onboard radars locked on to a target that broke lock with accelerations beyond what the aircraft could follow. The Belgian Air Force made the material public — a rare piece of openness. No explanation was ever found.