Auguste Meessen

Auguste Meessen is a Belgian physicist, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain), where he studied under cosmologist Georges Lemaitre, who became the leading scientific investigator of the Belgian UFO wave of 1989–90 — a months-long series of sightings of large, silent, triangular craft reported by thousands of witnesses, including gendarmes, and briefly tracked on military radar and pursued by Belgian Air Force F-16s. Meessen joined the civilian research group SOBEPS (Societe Belge d'Etude des Phenomenes Spatiaux) as a scientific consultant in December 1989, concentrating his fieldwork on the German-speaking Eupen region near his hometown, where his local language fluency helped him gather witness accounts firsthand. He conducted a technical review of the F-16 gun-camera and radar intercept data from the March 1990 chase, initially exploring conventional explanations such as radar clutter from temperature inversions, but ultimately concluded that the best-documented sightings, including the triangular object tracked and briefly locked by the jets, could not be fully accounted for by aircraft, balloons, or atmospheric artifacts. His technical papers on the case, published through SOBEPS and later on his own website, remain among the most frequently cited scientific analyses of the wave, and he continued to defend the case's residue of unexplained sightings against skeptical reassessments — including a later Belgian Air Force-linked reanalysis — arguing critics had not addressed the full witness and radar record.