Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos & Wim van Utrecht BELGIUM IN UFO PHOTOGRAPHS FOTOCAT Report #7 Cover illustration: Pen-and-ink drawing by German illustrator and painter Heinrich Kley (1863-1945). Image borrowed from The Drawings of Heinrich Kley, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1961. Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos & Wim van Utrecht BELGIUM IN UFO PHOTOGRAPHS FOTOCAT Report # 7 DEDICATION Dedicado para mi hijo Daniel: Todo esfuerzo tiene su recompensa Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos Voor Mieke Wim van Utrecht The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Qui peut garantir l'exactitude de sa mmoire? Pour commencer, qui oserait illustrer de dialogues un rcit prtendument vcu?" Vladimir Volkoff (1932-2005) CHAPTER 1: 1950-1971 When UFOs Were Still Flying Saucers 7 APPENDIX: BELGIUM FOTOCAT SPREADSHEET, 1950-1988 395 By James Oberg (*) anniversary of humanitys encounter with the UFO Mystery has recently passed, and anniversaries are good waypoints in time to assess the current state of understanding of this mass cultural phenomenon that may also hint at a world-shaking scientific revolution. If the most imaginative theories turn out to be true it will be the greatest human discovery in history, and if none of the extraordinary theories turn out to be true, it then would merely be one of the grandest cultural delusions in human history. Either way, it deserves serious attention. Without taking sides on selection of explanations, Vicente-Juan Ballester-Olmos and Wim van Utrecht have been practicing a methodology of research thatwere it far more widespreadcould help determine the better theories from the more extreme ones. They are looking at, and recording, the raw data, in painstaking detail and depth, to provide current and future researchers with the rarest and most valuable resource in any mystery, authentic clues. Their basic assumption, which I share, is that there are potentially important processes and events that are today hopelessly mixed into the soup of misidentifications, mistakes, occasional hoaxes and delusions, that comprises the UFO data base. To focus in on the potential pearls, to identify them and describe them to the detail required to test theories against them, they have generated catalogs of reports covering decades of human perceptions. Unlike most Internet databases, they expend great effort in going beyond cataloguing existing catalogs by quoting from other existing sources and books, passively relying on assumptions of diligence and competence by often anonymous (or, if known, occasionally dubious) previous investigators. Over the decades, thousands of ordinary citizens fascinated by the possibilities of this mind-stretching phenomenon have labored, usually in private, to collect, assess, and record events in their immediate vicinity. They did so in the trust that someday the fragments of the puzzle would accumulate a mass and shape from which an explanation (or several explanations) would become discernable. If and when that happens, these enthusiastic volunteers will deserve a lot of the credit. An example of documentation work done by Ballester-Olmos and directly applicable to my own investigations (space and missile related events and reports) deals with the Canary Island sightings of the 1970s and 1980s. The sighted phenomena turned out to be top secret missile tests by American submarines. In many substantial ways the witness reports showed the same features of reports from other events around the world also sparked by missile launches. There is a significant value to such solutions, far beyond the satisfaction of merely solving a famous story. Most ufologists are quite adamant that when a case is shown to not be a UFO, but an IFO (Identified flying Object), it is no longer of interest to the study of UFOs and ought to be deleted from existing data bases. Ballester-Olmos and Van Utrecht, like me, believe that just the opposite is true; that such IFOs have lessons to teach ufologists that are crucial to making sense of cases that remain in the true UFO databases. Heres why: our understanding of the process between raw perception and ultimate memory formation and recollection remains very shaky. The concept of a trained witness, or of assigning veracity of a witness to their intellectual, academic, or professional level, remains dominant in the UFO Studies universe. The report of a pilot or an astronomer (or a movie star or a politician) is given heavier weight because of their status. So when a medical doctor on the Canary Islands reports seeing a transparent craft a few hundred meters from him, one evening after sunset on a road through a local forest, with two humanoids inside working on control consoles, the presumption is that such a visual manifestation actually existed as described. But when Ballester-Olmoss meticulously documented case files show that many people on the island were at that same date and time, and in the same direction, were seeing the sunlit ascent plume of an American submarine-launched rocket rising above the horizon, there is confusion and disbelief. The two sightings must be coincidental because nobody especially a medical expert!could possibly misinterpret one for the other. If it happened only once, it would be hard to claim it WAS such a perceptual error, but the written record of IFOs show that it is, in fact, a common pattern. In another report which Ballester-Olmos discovered, and shared with me (I had NEVER seen it) because he intuitively suspected its significance, the same pattern was displayed. Certain kinds of unusual once-in-a-lifetime stimuli were reported in similar misperceived forms. This case, a nearly horizontal fireball swarm over Kiev, USSR, in 1963, had more than a hundred witness reports and drawings. About half showed various configurations recognizable as a swarm of meteors, but the other drawings showed not scattered fireballs but one enormous structured object covered with lights or rocket thrusters. The fireball swarm was caused by the atmospheric reentry of satellite rocket, as it disintegrated in flames about 100 km high moving at 8 km/sec. Soon it became clear that other particularly large satellite reentries, under good nighttime viewing conditions, were sparking almost identical misperceptions all over the world (France, Estonia, Zimbabwe, Yukon, Florida, all over). People of all ages, cultures, education and professional levels, all were seeing a documented prosaic event (for the first time in their lives) and many of them were coming up with interpretations of uncanny similarity. The implication of this is startling, in that peoples minds jump to quick conclusions about startling sights based on evolutionary shaping and on personal lifetime experiences. But this interpretation depends on the reliability of the detailed reports that had originally been written based on witness interviews near the time of the events. The existence of such data, and its ready accessibility via smart indexing schemes, was crucial to the development and validation of this profoundly important insight. The theory remains controversial among serious UFO investigators. But that it exists at all is a tribute to the original chroniclers AND to the kind of data gathering and documentation that this current book demonstrates. The newfound power of combining GOOD records keeping with Internet tools and search engines can be seen in specific cases discussed by the authors. The Faymonville photos (pages 99-113), together with witness testimony and post-event questioning, is a good example. Note this comment by an early investigator: The object, which was several hundreds of meters away when the sighting began, approached the witnesses at a constant pace following a SSE-NNW trajectory... slowly heading in their direction. An immediate warning signal is to note how the witnesses jumped to a conclusion about distance to the object when there were NO valid clues to how far away it actually was. Such premature interpretation of visual stimuli often leads witnesses to subconsciously edit subsequent perceptions and recollections to fit a hypothesis that was unjustified. The current report proposes an astronomical explanation that is plausible in the cultural context that surrounded this period in the country. But such explanations are not proven either, except to the degree required to demolish the common pro-UFO argument that there is no OTHER possible explanation aside from an unknown stimulus, perhaps alien visitors. THAT theory is not disproven but in terms of scientific proof is shown to be unnecessary to account for the testimony and photos. So it fails to attain confirmation. I was also impressed with similar dogged investigations and plausible reconstructions of other sightings and photos [such as the PAGEOS balloon over Mariakerke (pp. 154-162)], where previous investigations had erroneously eliminated prosaic explanations based on inaccurate assumptions as well as unfamiliarity with common perceptual errors when observing stars and moving objects high in the sky. Particularly impressive was the authors description of brief distraction leading to transfer of reference point from a nearby star to the moving object and the misleading misperceptual consequences. In 1974 while observing a known satellite, EXACTLY the same experience struck me so vividly I was overwhelmed with vertigo and stumbled, almost falling to the ground. In case after case, the authors apply wide knowledge of geometry, optics, meteorology, human perception, and human cultural context (they recognized one impressive-looking UFO photo as actually taken from a popular French science fiction movie), to illustrate that plausible explanations often are found not by dogged cookbook methods but by inspiration and by accident. No wonder, then, that not ALL such prosaic explanations can be found, however dedicated and diligent may be the amateur investigators. The question of alien visitors [who could remain as detectable or not, as they desire, or even disguise themselves as weather balloons as needed] remains unresolved, but the satisfaction of seeing good detective work is worth the reading. The implication of this work is that the body of existing reports and photographs does not unambiguously require the existence of ANY new phenomenon. But there are plenty of HUMAN and natural phenomena of great interest to science, to national security, to psychology, to sociology, that are wrapped up in these reports which makes them worth studying, and they deserve study at the level of this book. As such, the approach shown by Ballester-Olmos and Van Utrecht should serve as an example and as an inspiration to other citizen scientists who have played, and will continue to play, a crucial role in providing the resources that will allow theorists with more data and wider insight to someday make more sense about what lies behind this mysterious phenomenon. (*) Born in 1944, James or Jim Oberg, is an American space journalist and historian, regarded as an expert on the Russian and Chinese space programs. He had a 22-year career as a space engineer in NASA specializing in orbital rendezvous. Oberg is an author of ten books (including UFOs and Outer Space Mysteries, published, among others by Donning Company Publishers, Virginia Beach, USA, in 1982) and more than a thousand articles on space flight. He gave many explanations of UFO phenomena in the popular press. He is also a consultant in spaceflight operations and safety. INTRODUCTION Everybody with the least appetite for the mysterious and an appreciation for old pictures finds them charming and intriguing: the often blurred black and white or bleakly-colored pictures from the second half of the previous century that depict strange aerial contraptions against the background of a badly-framed landscape. Typical of the flying objects that are portrayed is their anachronistic circular wing design that hints at the crafts ability to travel in any direction without any visible means of propulsion. While such flight maneuvers can be accomplished by every multirotor drone of today, they were still an exclusive feature of imaginary craft in SF novels and comics in 1947, the year in which actual reports of these Flying Discs or Flying Saucers, as they were then called, started to emanate from the U.S. and later from other countries around the world. Official and unofficial, scientific and not-so-scientific investigative probes were set up to deal with what several years later would be more neutrally designated as Unidentified Flying Objects. But what do these UFO pictures really show? Are they offering us a glimpse of spacecraft from another world? Did these photographers capture intruding high-tech spy devices from enemy countries? Nowadays, it is pretty obvious to most that the majority of these flying saucer photos do not show meters-wide craft, but merely models on strings, hand-thrown kitchenware, birds and insects, lens flares, film defects, and paper cutouts pasted on windowpanes. The million-dollar question, of course, is to know if there are any images left that are not explainable as hoaxes or misinterpretations? It is the main goal of our project to find that out. The present study examines the history and veracity of the photographic evidence for unidentified aerial phenomena by assessing the images themselves. In doing so we opted to focus on Belgian UFO reports that are backed up with photographs, slides, films, or videos. Despite the fact that Belgium is one of Europes smaller countries, its ufological heritage can be regarded as a micro-universe that comprises all the aspects found in UFO archives from other parts of the world. By selecting a subset of reports from one country, we ensure that the local interactions that can influence reporting process (like press coverage and the location of popular UFO groups) are not neglected. Not all collected images show classic saucer-shaped objects. A great many contain little more than fuzzy dark- or light-colored blobs that may or may not relate to an actual visual sighting, not necessarily anything strange. The types of UFO reports we have studied are of a great variety. As such, our case evaluations can be extrapolated to similar scenarios encountered from other countries. In this way, we hope our study will benefit current and future researchers with their own analyses of UFO photos and videos. The cases that are discussed in the present monograph are those that are included in FOTOCAT, a database developed by one of the authors (Ballester Olmos, 2017) . FOTOCAT comprises over 12,000 imaged UFO sightings. As of August 2017, it listed 242 cases for Belgium dating from between 1950 and 2005. We have spread them over two volumes. 2005 is the end year of the catalog. From that year on, the number of UFO photos and videos skyrocketed due to the rise of digital imaging that made the taking and distributing of images easier than ever. A mere look at the number of photographically-substantiated UFO reports from after 2005 a list of Belgian UFO photo cases from between 2007 and 2017 will be published in an appendix to Volume 2testifies to this. This monograph is part of the FOTOCAT Report series, which, since 2004, focuses on exploiting the FOTOCAT database in three different ways: reports by year (Ballester Olmos, 2008), by geography (Ballester Olmos, 2006; Ballester Olmos and Brnne, 2008; Ballester Olmos, 2010; Ballester Olmos et al, 2012), and by type of subject photographed (Ballester Olmos and Shough, 2011). Belgian UFO groups that have been in the business of collecting UFO reports since the 1960s and 70s were willing to collaborate with our project. Without their help our work would have been severely handicapped. Private investigators also freely cooperated. When the only source was a news- paper article, the authors tried to locate the best possible prints through library searches. In several instances we tracked down the photo- and videographers themselves and asked them to provide a current position statement on the images they had taken. In cases where complex visual information was encountered, the authors relied upon international experts in image evaluation for a professional assessment. Besides to painting the evolution of the phenomenon and weighing th