Wilfried De Brouwer

Biography

A major general (retired) of the Belgian Air Force, with a long career that took him to deputy chief of the air staff and NATO posts. During the Belgian wave of triangular objects (1989–1990), as chief of operations of the staff, he was the one who organized the military response: on the night of 30–31 March 1990, faced with ground radar detections, he ordered two F-16s to scramble; they achieved radar locks on objects with maneuvers and accelerations beyond the known. Shortly after he gave a public press conference in which he presented the radar data to journalists and openly acknowledged that the phenomenon was unidentified —an exceptional degree of institutional transparency. He later contributed his testimony to Leslie Kean's book.