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#belgium
2 articles
The Belgian UFO Wave: The Triangles Over Wallonia
It began on the evening of 29 November 1989 in the hills near Eupen, in the German-speaking east of Belgium, where two gendarmes on patrol reported a large, silent object hanging low in the sky — a dark triangle marked by three bright lights at its corners and a pulsing red beacon at its centre. Over the following months, the sightings multiplied into one of the largest and most concentrated waves in the history of the subject: thousands of reports, most describing the same slow-moving triangle, gathered across the Walloon countryside through the winter and spring of 1989–1990. What made the Belgian wave unlike almost any other was not the reports themselves but the response to them. The Belgian Air Force, instead of dismissing the affair, engaged with it openly, scrambled F-16 fighters on the night of 30–31 March 1990 to chase radar contacts, and afterwards conceded, in public, that it had no explanation for what its instruments had recorded. A single striking photograph of a black triangle became the icon of the whole episode. Two decades later, the man who took it confessed that he had made it with a piece of painted polystyrene. This is the story of the triangles over Wallonia — of a genuine mystery, a genuine hoax, and the difficulty of telling, at this distance, exactly where one ends and the other begins.
The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba
At approximately 9:43 p.m. on Tuesday, January 17, 1961, the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Émery Lumumba, was shot to death by a Belgian-supervised firing squad in a forest clearing outside Élisabethville (now Lubumbashi) in the secessionist Katanga province. He was 35 years old. He had been in office for less than three months before being deposed by a Belgian-and-American-supported coup, held in extralegal detention for two months, transferred to his political enemies on January 17 under explicit Belgian escort, and killed within hours of arrival. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had a parallel plan to poison him with a tube of doctored toothpaste; the CIA plan did not need to be activated because the Belgian-Katangan operation succeeded first. The Belgian government formally acknowledged its 'moral responsibility' in 2002 after a Belgian parliamentary inquiry. The Belgian state returned Lumumba's recovered tooth — the only physical remain that had not been dissolved in acid by his Belgian guards — to his family in Brussels on June 20, 2022, in a formal ceremony attended by Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo. King Philippe of Belgium had earlier, in June 2020, issued the first formal Belgian royal expression of regret for the colonial period. The Congolese state has yet to conduct a comprehensive investigation.
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