On June 22, 1990, French Paris Match magazine reporter Marie-Thérèse de Brosses, with a Paris Match photographer, SOBEPS secretary general Lucien Clerebaut and French scientist Jean-Pierre Petit, who had a long interest in the UFO question, met with Colonel Wilfried de Brouwer, then Chief Operations in the Air Staff, later Major General, of the Belgian Air Forces.
The meeting was arranged by SOBEPS as an interview session, about the night from March 30 to 31, 1990, when two Belgian Air Forces F-16 jets were scrambled to intercept one or more UFOs seen from the ground and tracked by ground radar sets. De Brouwer explained what happened in these intercepts. It resulted in a Paris Match article. Also, Jean-Pierre Petit soon told of the meeting in his book "Enquête sur les OVNIS" in 1990 [1].
Jean-Pierre Petit explained that as he is a former aeronautics engineer, former French Air Force officer, former head of radar control during interception operations, he obtained the sympathy of Col. De Brouwer, did his best to obtain detailed information, and thus he and the others could get to see the recordings of the jets mission at a BAF control room, as relevant extracts from the F-16 radar recordings.
Jean-Pierre Petit later specified that he urged the Paris Match photograph to take pictures of the displayed recordings, "take pictures, dammit! (Prenez des photos bon sang!)" - but the young man did not, arguing that "it would show nothing" (due to the lack of light etc.), Jean-Pierre Petit explained [2] that he thus took three photographs himself, and those were published in Paris Match. Then the French popular science magazine Science et Vie published an article by Bernard Thouanel that claimed the all these UFOs in Belgium were the "invisible secret plane F-117 from the US", and many people, including myself - I was not interested in UFOs back then - believed it at the time.
Petit indicates that there were 9 intercept attempts, i.e., 9 radar detections prompting the F-16 to try to approach the UFO. At each attempt, the UFO accelerated down to or below 200 meters altitude, (thus escaping radar tracking), then the UFO took height again, of course reappearing on the radar, and the F16's made another interception attempt.
Petit indicates that in 3 of these 9 attempts, the pilot locked on the radar-detected UFO for 3 to 6 seconds before the UFO escaped down.
Petit also provided three sketches in his book [1], with explanation, showing HUD (Head Up Display) data from one of the 3 intercepts when there was a lock on. They are not those on the three photographs in Paris Match that I will show in a further article, but might be part of the same lock on episode - the heading is the same.
The 3 picture that appeared in Paris Match look like below and provides the following data, with comments.
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