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Breaking down the wall of UFO silence
(9272) Wed 17 Apr 91 6:13p
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Date Prepared: April 17, 1991
Contributed by: Antonio Huneeus
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Article as it appeared in UFO Universe, June/July 1991.
BREAKING DOWN "THE WALL" OF UFO SILENCE
FOR THE LAST SIX MONTHS, ALMOST THE ENTIRE EUROPEAN CONTINENT HAS
BEEN PLAGUED BY A WAVE OF UFO SIGHTINGS UNSURPASSED IN HISTORY,
PERHAPS MOST PUZZLING HAVE BEEN THOSE OF A GIGANTIC "FLYING
PLATFORM" SIGHTED NEAR THE GERMAN BORDER IN BELGIUM.
By Antonio Huneeus
© 1991 by A. Huneeus. All Rights Reserved Reprinted with
permission to ParaNet(sm) Information Service No further
reproduction is allowed without written permission from the
author.
In a totally unprecedented move in the history of ufology, the
Belgian Air Force and government has not only carefully
documented the great UFO wave over Wallonia, but shared its
results with civilian investigators and the public, in effect
literally breaking down "The Wall" of UFO Silence that still
stands in the western world.
* * *
For the past year, citizens in the French-speaking region of
Wallonia in Belgium have experienced an extraordinary UFO wave.
Thousands of witnesses, including dozens of gendarmes (national
police) and officers of the Belgian Air Force, have described
triangular-shaped vehicles flying slowly over rooftops, hovering,
shooting searchlights and performing incredible maneuvers. The
objects have been captured on some 25 videotapes and tracked on
both ground and airborne radar by the military.
Few, if any, will doubt that the triangular UFOs have been seen
all over Wallonia since November of 1989. According to a front
page story in The Wall Street Journal published on October 10,
1990 and entitled "Belgium Scientists Seriously Pursue A
Triangular UFO," "since the rash of sightings here began almost a
year ago, more than ]2,600 have been reported of a triangular
object with three huge lights hovering in the night sky over
Wallonia." The question that some are asking is whether these
objects could be explained by the testing of a new top secret
military aircraft. Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPVs), AWACS, the
F-117 Stealth Fighter, and a modified version of the B-2 Stealth
Bomber, are some of the options that have been suggested.
Besides the large amount of well documented data gathered by
the Gendarmerie, the Air Force and civilian scientists from the
Belgian Society for the Study of Space Phenomena (SOBEPS), the
Belgian Map has broken another record. For the first time ever in
the controversial history of UFOs anywhere in the world, the
Belgian Minister of Defense, Guy Coeme, has authorized the Air
Force to fully cooperate with SOBEPS, forwarding their reports,
and even putting at their disposal a Hawker Sideley aircraft
equipped with infrared cameras and sophisticated electronic
sensors.
As the well known French physicist, Jean Pierre Petit, explained
to Paris Match magazine, "we are living in a time that is the
beginning of a period of openness. First the Berlin Wall
crumbled, now the wall of silence about UFOs is falling.
Concerning the UFOs, we are entering a phase completely different
from the earlier ones. It is the end of commercialism and fakery.
The true scientists are finally making their appearance." Dr.
Petit is a senior physicist and director of research with the
National Center for Scientific Research of France. An iconoclast
and a world class expert on magnetohydrodynamcs (MHD), Dr. Petit
has also conducted some rather interesting UFO research of his
own, publishing recently his results in the book, INVESTIGATION
OF UFOS.
Unlike many other UFO groups around the world, the SOBEPS
has a team of respected scientists, including Leon Brenig, a
nonlinear dynamics theorist at the Free University in Brussels,
and Professor August Meessen, a physicist from the Catholic
University at Louvain. Among the numerous UFO witnesses, in fact,
were Lucien Clerebaut, Secretary General of SOBEPS, Patrick
Ferryn, a film producer and founding member, and Jose Fernandez,
another SOBEPS investigator. "Here is an opportunity where we can
apply the scientific method," remarked Professor Brenig.
SOBEPS files show that the first sightings occurred on the
night of November 7, 1989, when two gendarmes from Esneux
observed a silent huge craft "with two very powerful white lights
directed downwards and 'a sort of green and red garland.'" The
flap, however, gained momentum and notoriety on the evening of
November 29 when 41 witnesses, including six gendarmes, observed
the huge triangle - sometimes referred as "a stationary platform
" - in Eupen, Verviers, and several other locations in Wallonia
near the border with Germany. As the press speculated with AWACS
and Stealth aircraft on the following days, the Defense Minister
Guy Coeme dismissed these rumors, stating that "all hypotheses
involving the presence of military aircraft in our air space are
definitely to be ruled out. "
It is perhaps because the objects are so far unidentified, that
the Belgian Air Force has undertaken the task of chasing and
investigating the intruders. As Col. Wilfried de Brouwer, the
Chief of Operations of the Belgian Air Force who is coordinating
the UFO investigation, told The Wall Street Journal, "Our
approach is that it's our job to see what's going on." Indeed,
the UFO flap climaxed on the night of March 30-31 of 1990, when
unknown targets were tracked by two radar installations. The one
at Glons, located southeast of Brussels, belongs to the NATO
defense group - NATO Headquarters is in Brussels - while that at
Semmerzake, west of Brussels, is in charge of controlling all
military and civilian traffic in the entire Belgian territory. At
that point, the master-controller at Glons ordered the scramble
of two F-16 interceptors, which also locked the UFO on their
onboard radars.
We have obtained, courtesy of French researcher Jean-Luc
Rivera, a copy of the complete report of this incident, which was
prepared by Air Force Major P. Lambrechts, from the Air Force
General Staff in Brussels, and which was forwarded to the SOBEPS
following the instructions of full cooperation with that group.
The "Report Concerning the Observation of UFOs During the Night
of March 30 to 31, 1990," includes a full chronology of the
events, as well as a thick dossier of enclosures with eyewitness'
descriptions from several gendarmes and maps of where the
sightings took place.
Major P. Lambrechts explains at the inception that, "the
observations both visual and by radar were of such nature, that
it was decided to order the scramble of two F-16 aircraft with
the goal of identifying these UFOs." The report also indicates
that "the presence or testing of B2 or F117 (Stealth Bomber),
RPVs (Remotely Piloted Vehicles), ULMs (Ultra Light Motorized)
and AWACS at the moment of these events in the Belgian airspace,
can be excluded. "
According to the Chronology, the Sequence of events began at
22.50 hours, when the "master controller at Glons " received a
telephone call from gendarme Renquin, who reported he was seeing
from his house in Ramillies, "three unusual lights. . . forming
an equilateral triangle, and with changing colors of red, green
and yellow." At 23.05, the Gendarmerie at Wavre sent a patrol,
which confirmed the observation. At 23.15, Renquin called again
to inform that he was seeing a new set of three lights, while the
radar screens at Glons detected " an unidentified contact moving
at a speed of around 25 knots." (A knot is equivalent to one
nautical mile - 6,080 feet - per hour. )
For the next two and a half hours, an increasing number of
gendarmes and other witnesses continued to observe the strange
maneuvers of up to three sets of triangular lights in the
outskirts of Brussels. By 23.49 hours, the radar screens at
Semmerzake confirmed the targets and the order to scramble two F-
16s was given at 23.56 hours, taking off at 00.05 on March 31.
According to the report, "the aircraft had brief radar contacts
on several occasions." However, each time that "the pilots were
able to secure a lock on one of the targets for a few seconds,
this resulted each time in a drastic change in the behavior of
the UFOs."
During the first lock on at 00.13, continues the report, "the
speed of the target changed in a minimum of time from 150 to 970
knots and from 9,000 to 5,000 feet, returning then to 11,000
feet, in order to change again to close to ground level; this
resulted in a 'break lock' in a few seconds and the pilots lost
the radar contact." In another lock on at 00.30 hours, the "break
lock" was achieved by what the report calls "a jamming signal on
the screen."
Col. de Brouwer explained to Paris Match reporter Marie-Therese
de Brosses, that the change of velocity from 280 KPM to 1,800 KPH
while descending from 3,000 meters to 1,000 meters in one second,
was a fantastic acceleration equivalent to 40 Gs. This would
exclude any human pilot onboard the UFO, since humans can only
withstand 8 Gs. (A "G " is a unit of acceleration equivalent to
the gravitational pull of the earth, 9.81 m/sec/sec.) When the
UFO approached the ground level, continued Col. de Brouwer, "it
was out of the question for the F-16 to catch up with the object
at this low altitude, where the density of the air limits the
speed to 1,300 KMP. Above that speed, the temperature in the
compressors of the jet turbines would cause the engines to burst.
There was a logic behind the motions of the object," added the
Colonel.
In any case, the cat and mouse game went on until shortly after 1
am, when the F-16s were ordered to return to their base. On the
ground, however, Captain Pinson and other gendarmes continued to
observe "four white luminous spots forming a square" until around
1.30, when "the four UFOs lost their luminosity and seemed to
disappear in four different directions." Significantly, the
weather conditions on that night were very clear, allowing ground
witnesses to observe the objects in detail, as well as the
pursuit by the F-16s. The pilots, however, did not observe the
objects visually.
Major Lambrechts finally excludes a number of alternative
hypotheses for the UFOs, such as "optical illusions, confusion
with planets or other meteorological phenomena... weather
balloons. . . or meteorological inversions. . . holographic
projections," etc. More importantly, he writes that "the speeds
measured at he moment of the change of altitudes, exclude the
hypothesis that the UFOs observed could be confused with
aircraft. " Still more puzzling was the fact that, "despite that
on several occasions high speeds above the speed of the sound
barrier were measured, the shock wave was never observed. Here,
no explanation can be given." The French physicist Jean Pierre
Petit concurred: "In reality," he told Paris Match, "there is no
machine made by man, either an airplane or a missile, that is
capable of such performance. Specifically, flying at the speed of
sound without making a sonic boom."
Although the Belgian military authorities have insisted that
the UFOs in Wallonia are no secret aircraft, the similarities
between the triangular craft seen in Belgium with the boomerang-
shaped objects reported throughout the last decade in the Hudson
Valley in New York and Western Connecticut, as well as other
triangular UFOs observed in Wytheville, Virginia, Fyffe, Alabama,
and Puerto Rico, among other places, have led some researchers to
suggest that the technology behind all these observations is
terrestrial and not extraterrestrial.
The similarity between the Belgian and Hudson Valley flaps was
noted by SOBEPS investigator Patrick Ferryn. Commenting on the
book Night Siege by the late Dr. Allen Hynek, investigator
Phillip Imbrogno and reporter Bob Pratt, which documented the
Hudson Valley cases, Ferryn wrote that "changing only a few
words, exactly the same could be written to give an account of
the position of affairs here! [in Belgium] The same goes for many
entire pages and excerpts elsewhere in the book."
While nobody doubts that people have been seeing something in
both upstate New York and Wallonia in Belgium, the big question
is whether these sightings are caused by true UFOs or by some
kind of new revolutionary secret military aircraft. Foremost
among the proponents of the secret weapon theory is Tony
Gonsalves, a researcher from East Providence, Rhode Island, who
served as a jet mechanic and plane captain for the U.S. Navy on
three aircraft carriers between 1959 and 1963.
In a number of papers written during the last two years,
Gonsalves has developed his theory of "The American made UFO" -
that the boomerangs of Westchester and Duchess counties, as well
as the triangular UFOs of Belgium, Virginia and Puerto Rico, are
actually a modified covert version of the B-2 Stealth Bomber.
Gonsalves believes this craft has been fully operational since
the early 80s, while the official B-2 bomber that was unveiled in
1988 is a "decoy" to deceive the American public, the media and
the Congress. Furthermore, Tony Gonsalves and a few other
ufologists speculate that this secret aircraft may even
incorporate some alien technology obtained from UFO crashes
decades ago.
Gonsalves' theory seemed to gain some credibility when Aviation
Week & Space Technology magazine reported in its October 1, 1990
edition that, "large, triangular wing-Shaped aircraft" are indeed
being tested out of the Nellis Air Force range in Nevada and the
Tehachapi Mountains near Edwards AFB in California. The well
known aerospace magazine mentioned several sightings by engineers
of "triangular-shaped aircraft, " possibly prototypes for the A-
12, the Navy's new Stealth attack plane, and one or several
versions for reconnaissance aircraft cloaked under the top secret
code of Aurora, to replace the old Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird"
which was recently mothballed. Aviation Week (sometimes referred
by the nickname of "Aviation Leak") also quoted Air Force sources
who "acknowledged that diamond and triangular-shaped vehicles are
'the trend now,'" as well as unconfirmed reports that some of
these aircraft "were designed to operate at speeds around Mach 10
or higher."
Because he worked for over 30 years as senior editor of
Aviation Week, where he is still a contributing editor, we sought
the opinion of well known UFO debunker Phillip Klass as to
whether there could be any validity to explain the Hudson Valley
and Belgian flaps with Secret military aircraft, Stealth or
otherwise. "In my opinion the answer is absolutely not,"
responded Klass, adding that only those sightings "in the
vicinity of Nellis Air Force Base" in Nevada could be caused by
military aircraft tests. "If there were a secret airplane,"
continued Klass, "for goodness' sake, the last place in the world
you'd want to fly it is in Duchess County, where people have been
alerted to look for objects."
Although they certainly disagree on the final cause of the
sightings, Klass and Phillip Imbrogno seem to be in full
agreement in their rejection of Tony Gonsalves' Stealth theory.
"l can't see the government testing a top secret device in an
area like this, " said Imbrogno. "Number one, what if they have a
problem, what if they crash?" Imbrogno said he had considered
this possibility when he first looked into the boomerang
sightings, but that "I am convinced right now that the Hudson
Valley UFO is not an aircraft, Stealth or otherwise. Number two,
I am not totally convinced that it's from outerspace. Number
three, I don't know what the hell it is."
Meanwhile, sightings continue to pile up in Europe. The latest
case before we go to press was reported in early November, when
"mystery shapes in the sky, variously described as orange balls,
triangles and points of light," were reported in France, Belgium,
Germany, Switzerland and Italy, according to a newswire report
from the Reuter's news agency. Police phone lines were flooded
across the continent with calls about unidentified flying
objects. Experts in Munich speculated the sightings could have
been triggered by the explosion of a meteorite. However, this
explanation could hardly satisfy the familiar sightings in
Belgium, where "dozens of people reported a triangular object
with three lights flying slowly and soundlessly to the
southwest," according to the Reuter report.
The Belgian Air Force was studying once again the case, and so
was France's Service for the Investigation of Re-entry Phenomena
(SEPRA), which is attached to the French National Space Agency in
Toulouse and was formerly known as GEPAN. One Air France pilot
told a radio interviewer: "We were on a flight to Barcelona
(Spain) at about 33,000 feet at about 7 pm when we first saw the
shape. It couldn't have been a satellite because it was there for
three or four minutes."
If the sightings in Belgium and elsewhere turn out to be secret
aircraft, the mystery will become pubic sooner or later, but if
they are indeed caused by true UFOs, then we may be debating them
for a long time to come. Perhaps a summary of the whole Belgian
flap and its meaning was best expressed by SOBEPS Scientist
August Meessen, Professor of Physics at the Catholic University
at Louvain. He told the French magazine Paris Match: "There are
too many independent eyewitness reports to ignore. Too many of
the reports describe coherent physical effects, and there is an
agreement among the accounts concerning what was observed. If all
of these witnesses are lying, then it is a mental disease of such
novelty and proportions that it must be studied."
"But of course," continued Prof. Meessen, "there are also
physical effects. The Air Force report allows us to approach the
problem in a rational and scientific way. The simplest hypothesis
is that the reports are caused by extraterrestrial visitors, but
that hypothesis carries with it other problems. We are not in a
rush to form a conclusion, but continue to study the mystery."
The last word about the UFO flap that has brought down "The Wall"
of UFO Silence has yet to be uttered.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Chilean-American journalist Antonio Huneeus
was born in New York in 1950, the son of a Chilean diplomat and
United States official. After studying French at the Sarbonne
University in Paris in 1970 and journalism at the University of
Chile, he worked as science editor for a weekly magazine in
Santiago and was a contributor for a number of newspapers.
Huneeus' UFO investigation began in 1977 with the bizarre "time
warp" incident of Chilean Army Corporal Armando Valdes. Since
then, he has written hundreds of articles on UFOs and related
subjects for such publications as Omni, UFO Report, and the MUFON
JOURNAL in the U.S., as well as for magazines throughout South
America and Europe. Last year he won the UFOlogists of the Year
Award given by the National UFO Conference. The photographs and
art that accompany this article are part of Antonio's UFO
CHRONICLE lecture and slide presentation. Readers may reach the
author directly at Box 1989, New York, NY 10159.
END
PARANET FILE NAME: BELGIUM1.UFO
* Origin: ParaNet -- Leading UFO Research Network (1:104/428.0)
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