The Petit-Rechain Triangle Photograph

The Belgian UFO wave began with the Eupen sightings of 29 November 1989 and ran until April 1990. People kept describing large triangles with bright lights. On the night of 30 to 31 March 1990, F-16s were scrambled. What the wave lacked was a clear photograph.

One evening in April 1990. Presumably 4 April. Petit-Rechain, now part of Verviers. Sabine was letting the dog out when she spotted a series of strange stationary lights in the sky. Her boyfriend, Patrick, fetched his reflex camera. He positioned himself against a wall and snapped two photos. Immediately afterwards the lights began to move and disappeared behind a neighbour's house.

One slide was blackness. The other showed a black triangle close to the horizon. A bright light at each corner. A fourth, reddish light at its centre.

SOBEPS investigators Patrick Ferryn and Guy Bleser visited the house in August 1990, and SOBEPS treated the slide as genuine for some twenty years. Professor Marc Acheroy of the Royal Military Academy concluded that Patrick could never have faked it with the proposed technique. Physicist Auguste Meessen suggested plasma jets. Former NASA scientist Richard Haines endorsed it. Others noted motion blur that seemed mathematically inconsistent with three dimensional space.

The Belgian skeptic Wim Van Utrecht was unconvinced. In 1992 he reproduced the look of the photo with a small model. The image was too sharp for a hand-held zoom shot, he argued. The two witnesses' accounts did not match. And the lights looked about as bright as the full moon, yet nobody else in the region reported them.

26 July 2011. On RTL-TVI news, Patrick Maréchal, anonymous for 21 years, confessed. The object was "un panneau de frigolite peint et équipé de trois spots", a painted styrofoam panel fitted with spotlights. A coworker had cut out a triangle 60 to 80 cm wide. Maréchal added flashlights, painted the middle one red with a marker, and hung the model from wires on a kitchen step ladder. "One has managed to fool the whole world with a silly model made of styrofoam," he said. He had meant to fool his workmates.

Leslie Kean pushed back. His only supporting witness had not been present when the photo was taken. He never produced the 12 photos of the model he claimed to have. He would not give contact details for Sabine. He was in a copyright dispute with journalist Guy Mossay. Her verdict: he was a liar, either then or now, and his evidence had to be discarded.

Skeptics saw it differently. Robert Sheaffer covered the confession, and Brian Dunning of Skeptoid called the photo emblematic of the quality of all the evidence. Then, in late 2024, Roger Stankovic, MUFON director for Australia and New Zealand, said Maréchal had told him in July 2022 that the photo was real and that he had been paid to debunk it. The only evidence is screenshots of a translated chat.

Patrick Ferryn reportedly accepts the confession. Yet the slide remains the best-known black triangle image. It is featured in Kean's book and reused across Wikipedia. The wave around it reached Unsolved Mysteries. One photograph. Two witnesses. Two opposite stories from the man who took it.