Yes, I want to believe .... but even more to the point, I want to KNOW!!!

It's coming on the anniversary (again) of one of the more bizarre events and "reports" to have crossed the Commander's desk during the eight or so years during my tenure as the Chief Scientist of US Air Forces in Europe (USAFE).

I was reminded of it as General Wilfried De Brouwer (Belgian Air Force) spoke earlier this month at the National Press Club. I won't go into details; they are amply splashed all over the web and elsewhere. You can read the account (with suggested link) of the NPC meeting by clicking on the "News "Item" button on UFO northwest's website for starters. (It's in chronological order and the news article is dated 12 November 2007.)

The bottom line is simply that over a period of about two months--my final two months at USAFE--the Belgian Air Force was reporting (and asking its NATO partners about) a number of anomalous sightings of triangular airborne lights--fast and irregularly moving (silently) over their airspace. They scrambled F-16s, but could not make contact.

One picture (shown below), taken later that year in Belgium, which I copied from another site on the web, suggests that a dark triangular shaped aircraft was the overall object "carrying" the lights, but no official explanation has been forthcoming in the 18 years since that first report. My memory of General de Brouwer was that of a pretty down-to-earth man (and pilot) with an exceptional scientific mind--and presumably he was a top gun in the Belgian Air Force in earlier years, although I haven't seen him in about twenty years now and don't remember all of the details that were printed on his bio that I was provided at the time of our meeting.

That aside, I certainly echo the sentiments of the generals and senior officials who met at the National Press Club earlier this month: Let's get serious about the UFO phenomenon and at least begin to open some of the (presumably archived) data being held by the US DOD and other US Governmental agencies.