Belgian wave 1990: radar locks, no visual contact and no identified craft

On the night of 30–31 March 1990 two Belgian F-16s were scrambled after gendarmes and two ground radars reported lights south-east of Brussels; the pilots locked on three times for a few seconds but never saw anything. The Air Force's report could not identify the source, and a physicist later traced the extreme speeds to the radar itself.

50.6333° N · 4.9167° E · Ramillies, Belgium · 30–31 Mar 1990

Source: Belgian Air Force · U.S. DoD

A wave of reports from November 1989

A U.S. Defense Department information report on Belgium, with information dated 26 March 1990 and sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency on 30 March, summed up the situation in four sentences: numerous UFO sightings had been made in Belgium since November 1989, the credibility of some of the people reporting them was good, some had been explained by natural or man-made phenomena and some had not, and the Belgian Air Force was still investigating ^[3].

One of the earliest entries in the Belgian sighting catalogue is from Eupen on the evening of 29 November 1989. A gendarmerie chief, on the advice of his colleagues Von Montigny and Nicholl, phoned Bierset airport; Bierset later called back to say it could not detect any target on its radar and that the object had to be moving below 1,000 m ^[8]. The physicist Auguste Meessen, who investigated the wave, wrote that it began on a massive scale that evening and that by 30 March 1990 visual reports had grown to about 500 ^[6].

The Belgian Air Force's own report notes that strange phenomena had been reported regularly in Belgian airspace since the beginning of December 1989, mostly through the gendarmerie, but that before the night of 30–31 March its radar stations could in no case confirm these visual observations, and interceptors sent up had never established that anything was there ^[1].

Some sightings have been explained by natural/manmade phenomena, some have not.

— U.S. Department of Defense information report IIR 6 807 0136 90, March 1990 [3]

What Belgium told the Americans

The Defense Department report draws on two Belgian newspapers. The first quoted Léon Brenig, a 43-year-old professor at the Free University of Brussels, who said that at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday 18 March 1990, on the Ardennes motorway in the Beaufays area east of Liège, he saw a triangular object about the size of a ping-pong ball, with a yellow light around it and a reddish centre, moving slowly and silently at an apparent 500 to 1,000 m; it did not move or behave like an aircraft ^[3].

The second covered a television interview with Colonel Wilfried De Brouwer, chief of operations of the Belgian Air Force. De Brouwer noted the large number of sightings, particularly in November 1989 in the Liège area, and said the Air Force and the Ministry of Defence were taking the issue seriously. He addressed the idea that the objects were U.S. B-2 or F-117 stealth aircraft, saying that no U.S. Air Force overflight requests had ever been received for such a mission and that the reports did not match the observable characteristics of either aircraft ^[4].

The report's comments add that the Belgian Air Force had attributed some sightings to inversion layers, laser beams and other high-intensity lighting hitting clouds, but that a remarkable number occurred on clear nights with nothing else nearby to explain them. A field comment records that the U.S. Air Force confirmed to the Belgian Air Force and Ministry of Defence that no U.S. stealth aircraft were operating in the Ardennes area during the periods in question ^[4].

BAF experts have not been able to explain the phenomena either.

— U.S. Department of Defense information report, summarising Col. De Brouwer [4]

The night of 30–31 March 1990

The Belgian Air Force report on the night was established by Major P. Lambrechts of the Air Staff. It records that at 23:00 the master controller at the Glons radar centre (CRC) took a call from A. Renkin, a gendarmerie sergeant, who could see from his home at Ramillies three unusual lights above Thorembais and Gembloux. They were brighter than stars or planets, stationary, set out as an equilateral triangle and changing colour between red, green and yellow ^[1].

Glons asked the Wavre gendarmerie to send a patrol, which confirmed the lights at 23:28; Captain Pinson described points the size of a large star, changing colour continuously. Glons had meanwhile picked up an unidentified radar contact about 5 km north of Beauvechain, moving west at about 25 knots, and the Semmerzake radar confirmed a contact at the same position between 23:49 and 23:59. At 23:56 Glons gave the scramble order, and at 00:05 two F-16s on quick-reaction alert took off from the 1st Wing ^[1].

Between 00:07 and 00:54 the pilots made nine interception attempts under Glons control. They had brief radar contacts several times and in three cases locked on for a few seconds, each time followed by a change in the target's behaviour. On the first lock, at 00:13, the target was recorded changing speed from 150 to 970 knots and altitude from 9,000 to 5,000 feet, back up to 11,000 feet and then down to ground level, before the lock broke ^[1]. The radio transcript has the pilot reporting a contact at 9,000 feet, heading 250, at 970 knots ^[2]. The same transcript shows how uncertain the chase was: a blinking orange light the pilots were directed toward turned out to be on the ground, and another contact was identified as civilian traffic ^[2]. The jets left the Glons frequency at 01:02 and landed at 01:10 and 01:16 ^[1].

The pilots never had a visual contact with the UFO.

— Belgian Air Force report by Major P. Lambrechts (English translation) [1]

What the Air Force concluded

The Lambrechts report states that this was the first time a radar contact had been correlated across several Air Force sensors, including the ground radars, the Beauvechain approach radar and the F-16 radar, in the same area as visual sightings. It judged the on-duty gendarmes objective, held that the speeds and altitude changes measured during the locks ruled out aircraft, and rejected optical illusions, planets, sounding balloons and hologram projections. It also excluded the presence of B-2 or F-117 stealth aircraft, remotely piloted vehicles, ultralights and AWACS ^[1].

The report was just as plain about what it could not explain. Although supersonic speeds were measured several times, no shock wave was reported; and although ground witnesses eventually reported eight points of light, the radars recorded only one contact at a time. The weather that night was clear, with 8 to 15 km visibility and slight temperature inversions at ground level and at 3,000 feet ^[1].

On 11 July 1990 De Brouwer held a press conference on the F-16 intervention. According to Meessen, he cited a recorded sequence in which the target went from 280 km/h to more than 1,800 km/h in a few seconds, and said the studies carried out had not determined the nature of the object ^[6]. The UK Ministry of Defence files released in 2009 include De Brouwer's own account and an official Belgian Air Force statement sent to the MoD in November 1993; a letter from Malcolm Rifkind states that the MoD was not informed of the incident at the time and concluded there was no threat to the UK ^[5].

F-16 pilots obtained “lock-ons” with their radars but were unable to explain the phenomena.

— The National Archives (UK), guide to the MoD UFO files, on DEFE 24/1960 [5]

Later analysis

Defence Minister Guy Coëme gave Meessen personal access to the second F-16's radar recording and to the data from both ground radars ^[6]. Meessen concluded that the anomalous echoes on the ground radars came from masses of humid air, which he called invisible clouds, and that the F-16 radar's Doppler measurement of speed could be falsified by interference between waves returned from different parts of such a mass, which resolved what he called the great riddle of the F-16 recordings. He still maintained that the ground radars had captured two unidentified tracks during the wave ^[7].

Retellings often present the F-16 locks as proof of a craft accelerating far beyond any known aircraft, but the Air Force report records that the pilots never saw anything, and the physicist given the recordings by the Defence Minister concluded that the extreme speeds were an artefact of the radar's speed measurement ^[1][7].

The wave's best-known photograph, taken at Petit-Rechain, was exposed as a fake in July 2011, when its author admitted the hoax ^[9]. And despite claims that AARO treats the wave as a reference case, AARO's 2024 historical record report, which covers U.S. government involvement with UAP, does not discuss Belgium ^[10]. No document found identifies what was seen over Belgium in 1989–90.

Last fact-checked: 2026-10-03. Every claim cites its source.