UFOs - Leslie Kean [19]
On the evening of March 30–31, 1990, an F-16 launch was initiated after the observation of strange lights by several policemen, and after an assumed flying object was confirmed by two military radar stations. Once aloft, the pilots tried to intercept the alleged crafts, and at one point recorded targets on their radar with unusual behavior, such as jumping huge distances in seconds and accelerating beyond human capacity. Unfortunately, they could not establish visual contact.
The defense minister received many follow-up questions about this launch, but the Air Force needed time to properly analyze the data. We called a press conference about three months later, on July 11, 1990. The activities of the F-16s had been reconstructed, but the technical analysis was not fully completed. I presented one particular radar lock-on that showed extraordinary accelerations well outside the performance envelope of any known aircraft. Nevertheless, I added that this needed further analysis by experts because these types of returns could have been caused by electromagnetic interference.
It turned out that only one F-16 camera had made satisfactory radar recordings, so comparison between the aircraft recordings was not possible. This was a serious problem. A comparison would have allowed us to exclude those returns that were caused by electromagnetic interference, because the data from such interference are never the same on two different radars. Therefore, we couldn’t be sure if the radar echoes were caused by electromagnetic interference or by something unusual.
The conclusion of the Air Force, therefore, was that the evidence was insufficient to prove that there were real crafts in the air on that occasion.
The Air Force’s decision that the evidence was insufficient to conclude that there were unusual air activities during the night of March 30, 1990, was gleefully accepted by the irrational skeptics and the debunkers, who immediately claimed that that whole Belgian UAP wave was a farce. For them, one explainable case is enough to discredit the more than five hundred remaining unexplainable sightings—a position that is still put forward by most of them today.
In 1990, the Air Force stated on several occasions that it had no explanation for the numerous sightings. Today, persistent skeptics, who make a point of publicizing their positions, have come forward with a theory that these were helicopters. At the time of the UAP wave, the Belgian Air Force was working with civil aviation authorities and had more than 300 aircraft—including helicopters—several ground radar stations, 500 pilots, more than 300 engineers, 100 controllers, and thousands of technicians, etc., but we were not able to find the answer.
Even so, a few unqualified debunkers claim to have found that answer. Their real objective is to misinform people, create confusion, and ridicule UAP sightings. Some witnesses who made reports in 1989 are still hounded and discredited to this day. No wonder that several witnesses didn’t dare to reveal their names; some didn’t even take the risk of reporting their sightings. I had personal experience with two different people—a journalist and a NATO employee—whom I knew for many years: They verbally reported two sensational sightings but didn’t want (or dare) to put anything on paper.
The approach to the UAP problem has to be critical but objective. Indeed, we are dealing with