The Sky Above Liège

Four silent objects in the evening sky left a question that never disappeared.

IF — What if…?

February 1982

In February 1982, above Liège, I watched four silent, disc-shaped objects for a long time. I struck my own face to make sure I was awake. The objects remained visible. That evening did not bring me a complete explanation, but it did leave me with a lasting question.

I know how easily people judge one another when someone tells an unusual story. That is why I waited a long time before daring to share this experience fully. The memory did not disappear. The shape, the light, the silence and my astonishment remained within me.

IF gives experiences like this a place too.

Four Objects in a Row

Not to turn an observation into a theory, but to tell honestly what someone saw and felt. The reader can then follow their own thoughts. Freedom works both ways: I may tell my story, and someone else may see it differently. Perhaps the sky above us is not only a space we measure.

Perhaps it is also a mirror of our curiosity. As soon as we look up, we realise how small our familiar world is and how many questions remain open. What I saw above Liège in February 1982 was not simply one vague light in the sky.

The Silence Above the City

It was around 5.30 in the afternoon, at sunset. I had finished my working day and was driving to see my brother Mario, who lived on the third floor of an apartment building in Liège. I was about five hundred metres from his home. There was a clear patch of sky between the clouds.

There, I suddenly saw four objects. Four separate flying objects. They were beside one another in a row. They were round, disc-shaped objects that seemed to be made of shining metal.

Twenty Minutes of Watching

The setting sun reflected off their undersides, giving them different colours. I could see shapes that looked like windows or openings. I estimated that the objects were about twenty metres in diameter. I heard no engines.

They made no sound at all. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. I stopped my car. To make sure I was awake and not imagining things, I struck my own face.

But the objects remained suspended there. Four large, shining metal discs. Side by side. Completely silent.

I kept watching.

Carrying an Experience Alone

It felt as though the observation lasted about twenty minutes. During that time, the rest of the world seemed to disappear. It was as though I briefly became detached from everything around me. My sense of time changed.

I saw only those four objects. What particularly struck me was how they moved. As long as I was moving, they seemed to adjust their position to my movements. When I changed position, theirs changed too.

When I went faster, they seemed to move faster as well. It was as if they were responding to my presence.

Telling Without Judgement

As if they knew I could see them. Their movements were unlike those of an aeroplane. They could change direction suddenly. They made sharp turns in a way I had never seen a flying craft do.

There was no gradual curve. No audible acceleration. No engine noise. And then they disappeared.

Not slowly. Not because they flew behind a cloud. Not because they became smaller in the distance. In a fraction of a second, the four discs were gone.

I was left wondering what I had just seen.

The Unknown Sky

The next day, I searched the newspapers. I expected that other people must have observed the same thing. Surely four objects that size could not simply appear unnoticed above Liège? But I found no report at all.

No one seemed to be writing about it. That made the experience even more puzzling. There was also something that had happened at home about a month earlier. In different places, I had seen four round stains.

They all had the same shape, but had been made by different substances. One seemed to be ink. One coffee. One wine.

Room for Another View

I no longer remember what caused the fourth. At the time, I could give them no meaning. Only after seeing the four discs above Liège was I struck by the resemblance between those four round marks and the shape of the objects in the sky. Was it a signal they wanted to send me?

I do not know. I do not claim I can prove a connection. But I do not want to remove it from my story either. It happened.

Just as the observation above Liège happened in my own experience.

What If We Are Not Alone

When I later saw Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it affected me very deeply. I recognised something of my own wonder and helplessness in the story. The feeling of having seen something outside the ordinary framework, while words and evidence fell short. More than forty years later, I still do not know where those four discs came from or exactly what I observed.

The memory of their shape, their silence and their sudden disappearance has remained. And after about twenty minutes, they disappeared in a fraction of a second. I do not need to convince anyone. But I no longer want to diminish my own experience to make it easier for others to accept.

I simply tell what I saw with my own eyes. Four discs above Liège. An event for which I have found no explanation to this day.

IF — What if…?
What would you tell if you were not afraid of being judged?