The Belgian black triangle – Petit-Rechain, 1990

6 min read

A black triangle in the night sky, a strong light in each of its three corners and a reddish one in the middle. For two decades, the best-known photo of the Belgian UFO wave was examined by physicists, image analysts and specialists from a military academy, and none of them could prove it was fake. Then, in 2011, its maker explained how he did it: from Styrofoam, with flashlights, hung on thread. We looked into how a workplace prank became one of the world's most famous UFO pictures.

The picture that held up for two decades

Anyone who has leafed through a UFO book in the past thirty years has almost certainly come across it: a dark background, a flat, black triangle, three dazzling points of light in its corners and a fourth, reddish light in the middle. There is no tree, house or horizon in it, only the object and the night. This picture became the archetype of "black triangle" type UFOs, and for decades it illustrated the Belgian UFO wave, one of Europe's most famous series of UFO events.

1. The background: the Belgian UFO wave

Eupen, November 29, 1989. Two gendarmes reported a low-flying, triangular object with lights on its corners in eastern Belgium. The Belgian UFO research organization SOBEPS began collecting accounts, and following appeals published in the media, it received 143 reports about that evening within a week. According to Skeptoid's analysis, the gendarmes also heard a quiet sound, while other witnesses heard engine noise. Researcher Renaud Leclet concluded that they almost certainly saw a Bell UH-1 "Huey" helicopter. Most of the gendarmes' report, incidentally, was about a stationary white light over Lake Gileppe, exactly where Venus was visible that evening.

The night of the F-16s, March 30–31, 1990. Because of radar returns, the Belgian Air Force scrambled two F-16s. The aircraft spent an hour trying to lock on to the "target," but the pilots saw nothing. According to the military analysis, during the three brief radar lock-ons the aircraft locked on to each other, and the other returns were known atmospheric radar interference. Colonel Wilfried De Brouwer, the Air Force's chief of operations, later put it this way: the technical evidence was not sufficient to establish that anomalous air activity took place that evening.

Over two years, SOBEPS collected some 2,600 reports. But the wave needed a picture, and a few days after the night of the F-16s, one was made.

2. The photo: Petit-Rechain, April 1990

The shot was taken in Petit-Rechain, near Liège, probably on April 4, 1990. According to the photographer's account, his fiancée noticed stationary lights when she let the dog out, and he photographed them from the back terrace with an SLR camera on color slide film.

The slide was obtained by a photojournalist from a Belgian news agency. It was first published by Science et Nature magazine in November 1990, and from then on it became one of SOBEPS's most important pieces of evidence.

3. The experts

The picture received serious scientific attention:

Auguste Meessen, a physicist at the Catholic University of Louvain and a leading figure in SOBEPS, said the lights may have been a craft's plasma beams, whose ultraviolet light affected the film.
Richard Haines, a former NASA researcher, and French image analysts François Louange and André Marion all judged the picture's properties to be extraordinary.
Marc Acheroy, a professor at the Belgian Royal Military Academy, examined the original slide and concluded that the photographer could not have faked this picture in this way.

There were skeptics, too. Astrophysicist Pierre Magain tried to reproduce the picture with a perforated cardboard box. Researcher Wim van Utrecht listed contradictions as early as 1992: the object is too sharp for a body supposedly photographed at a distance with a telephoto lens, there is nothing in the picture against which its size could be compared, the two witnesses' accounts did not match, and no one else in the densely populated area reported anything that evening. These doubts, however, could not break the picture's reputation.

4. The confession, July 2011

21 years later, on July 26, 2011, the photo's maker, Patrick Maréchal, said on the news broadcast of Belgian television channel RTL that the picture was a prank he had made with a colleague. The model was a roughly 60–80 centimeter triangle cut out of Styrofoam and painted black, with four flashlights, one of which was painted red. They hung it from wires and a kitchen step stool. Maréchal also showed the journalists how they did it, and he still had the other test shots from that evening.

He told Belgian public broadcaster VRT that they never thought the photo would ever leave the factory where they worked. The picture then took on a life of its own, he said, and they decided to stay silent.

The most common objections

"But experts examined it and found nothing wrong with it!" That is true, and that is precisely the lesson of this case. In a well-made photo of a model there is nothing to "find": no montage, no retouching after the fact. A real object was photographed, it was just 60–80 centimeters across, not tens of meters, and it was not hovering in the distance but a few meters from the camera. The fact that the examination found no forgery does not prove the picture is genuine.
"And what if the confession is the fake, and someone talked him into claiming it?" The maker did not just claim it, he demonstrated the method, and he had the other shots from the same photo session. The contradictions the skeptics listed as early as 1992 also fit a small model photographed up close exactly.
"The thousands of other Belgian reports are still unexplained." The photo being fake indeed does not explain the entire wave. The best-known events, however, the Eupen evening and the night of the F-16s, each received down-to-earth explanations on their own, and most of the reports came in after the media appeals, after the fact.

The sober take

The Petit-Rechain photo did not seem convincing because it was a particularly clever fake, but because three things were working in its favor at once.

1. Without a point of reference, there is no size and no distance. Only the object and the black sky are visible in the picture. A 70-centimeter triangle seen from three meters appears at exactly the same angle as a 70-meter triangle seen from three hundred meters. If there is no tree, rooftop or horizon in the picture, the viewer's brain scales the object to the "usual" UFO size. That is why any UFO photo in which nothing is visible except the object is suspect.

2. The absence of flaws is not evidence. Image analysis can detect montage, retouching and compositing. A real, photographed model passes every such test, because there is nothing to give it away: the light, the shadows and the film grain are all real. So the question is not "whether the picture is a forgery," but what is in it, and how big it is. The photo alone cannot answer that.

3. The wave built up the picture, and the picture built up the wave. The photo appeared at a time when the news in Belgium had been about black triangles for months. The public and the researchers alike were expecting this, and the picture showed exactly that. SOBEPS treated it as evidence for twenty years, and the expert opinions lent it authority. This feedback loop kept it alive even when the skeptics had already laid out the contradictions in 1992.

The lesson: a UFO photo's credibility does not depend on whether experts find a flaw in it. What matters is whether there is independent confirmation: other witnesses, other footage, radar data. In the case of the Petit-Rechain picture, there was none of these.