The Four UFOs Above Angleur
What I saw above Angleur in February 1982 was not simply a vague light in the sky. It was about 5:30 p.m., at sunset. I had finished my workday and was going to visit my brother Mario, who lived on the third floor of an apartment building in Angleur, in the Liège region. I was about five hundred yards from his home. Between the clouds, a clear patch of sky was visible.
There, I suddenly saw four objects. Four distinct flying objects. They stood side by side in a single line. They were round, disk-shaped objects that seemed to be made of shining metal. The light from the setting sun reflected off their undersides and gave them different colors. I could see shapes resembling windows or openings. I estimated the objects were about sixty-five feet in diameter. I heard no engines.
They made absolutely no sound. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. I stopped my car. To make sure I was awake and not imagining anything, I struck myself in the face. But the objects remained suspended there. Four large, shining metal disks. Side by side. Perfectly silent. I continued watching. In my estimation, the sighting lasted about twenty minutes. During that time, the rest of the world seemed to disappear.
It was as though I had temporarily become detached from everything around me. My perception of time changed. I saw only those four objects. What struck me especially was the way they moved. As long as I was moving, they seemed to adjust their position to my movements. When I changed position, their position changed too.
When I went faster, they too seemed to move more quickly. It was as though they were reacting to my presence. As though they knew I could see them. Their movements did not resemble those of an airplane. They could suddenly change direction. They made sharp-angle turns in a way I had never before observed in a flying craft. There was no gradual turn. No audible acceleration. No engine noise. Then they disappeared. Not slowly.
Not because they had passed behind a cloud. Not because they grew smaller in the distance. In a fraction of a second, all four disks were gone. I remained there, wondering what I had just seen. The next day, I searched the newspapers. I expected other people to have observed the same thing. Surely four objects of that size could not appear above Angleur without anyone noticing them?
But I found no article. No one seemed to be speaking about it. That made the experience even more mysterious. Something else had also happened in my home about a month earlier. In different places, I had seen four round stains. They all had the same shape, but had been caused by different substances. One seemed to be made of ink.
Another of coffee. Another of wine. I no longer remember the source of the fourth substance.
At the time, I could make no sense of it. Only after seeing the four disks above Angleur 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 that I can prove a connection.
But neither do I want to remove it from my story. It happened. Just as the sighting above Angleur truly happened. When I later saw Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it affected me especially deeply. I recognized in the story something of my own wonder and helplessness. The feeling of having seen something outside the ordinary frame of reference, while words and evidence were insufficient.
After more than forty years, I still do not know where the four disks 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 neither do I want any longer to minimize my own experience to make it more easily acceptable to others. I am simply telling what I saw with my own eyes. Four disks above Angleur. An event for which, to this day, I have found no explanation.