The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Dernière Heure des Sports, Mons - Charleroi, Belgium, on August 8, 1998.
FLORENVILLE. Mrs. Nicolas, the wife of the garage owner on Rue de France, is in the habit, especially at this time of year, of looking at the starry sky. The other evening - she cannot specify the date, but it was between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. - she saw, moving at a very low altitude, a sort of triangle with rounded edges. At what height exactly? - "I can't say for sure," she said. "I was busy looking at the stars. The sky was clear and the object was moving much lower. In the dark, it's hard to make up your mind. It might have been a UFO, but it didn't impress me that much because I didn't talk about it to anyone. It was the next day, or even the day after, after seeing a report on the TF1 news about an unidentified flying object in the Sedan - Charleville-Mézières region that I made the connection."
Since then, Ms. Nicolas has continued her observations, but "do you get the chance to observe such a phenomenon twice?" she asks, doubtfully.
According to Jean-Luc Lemaire, the departmental head of the French Center for the Study of UFOs, at least 150 people observed the object between midnight and 2 a.m. near Charleville-Mézières and about thirty in the Sedan region. "The craft, a large triangle with rounded edges and a point turned in the direction of travel, had two red luminous points at the back and a large white one at the front. It was flying at an altitude of around 500 m."
According to Mr. Lemaire, his association has a short film shot that night by young amateur videographers. For its part, the European Centre for the Study of Aerial Phenomena (CEEPA) is launching a call to potential Belgian witnesses of the sighting of an unidentified flying object in the south of the country, on the night of Monday to Tuesday. CEEPA asks that you contact it at its head office where a telephone number is available 24 hours a day (065/56.75.69) or at its general secretariat on 065/79.18.31, which is the number of a telephone/fax line.
