What happened
At the height of the Belgian wave in April 1990, an anonymous photographer produced a slide showing a black triangular craft against a dark sky, with a bright light at each corner and a glowing centre. Known as the Petit-Rechain photo after the village where it was said to have been taken, it became the defining image of the wave and one of the most reproduced UFO pictures in the world. SOBEPS backed it as genuine for two decades, and it was examined by specialists including NASA, the French CNRS and the Belgian Royal Military Academy without obvious signs of fakery being found, although some analysts questioned the lack of reference objects and inconsistencies in the light blur. On 26 July 2011, a man named Patrick Maréchal told the Belgian broadcaster RTL that he had made it at the age of 18 with workmates, as a joke: a triangle of polystyrene painted black, with lights fixed in the corners, hung on a thread and photographed. He demonstrated the method on camera.
The official explanation
Patrick Maréchal stated in July 2011 on RTL that he and colleagues built the object from polystyrene, painted it, attached lights and hung it from a string before taking the picture, intending to fool friends; Reuters reported his account. He reconstructed the model for the broadcast. Earlier doubts had already been raised over the anonymous origin, the absence of any reference objects, and apparent inconsistencies in the motion blur.
The anomalous case
The photograph itself is now a confessed fabrication and offers no evidence of an anomalous craft. What remains open is the broader Belgian wave it came to illustrate: the photo was released months after the first gendarme reports and weeks after the F-16 scramble, so its unmasking does not touch the radar data or the police sightings. Before the confession, the image was examined by bodies including NASA, France's CNRS and the Belgian Royal Military Academy, none of which could identify it or find obvious signs of fakery, a reminder of how well a simple staged photo can survive expert scrutiny.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- Belgian UFO wave (Patrick Maréchal photograph) Wikipedia
- Belgian hit UFO image was polystyrene, says forger (Reuters) The Jerusalem Post
Witness reports elsewhere
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