The Vilvoorde 'vacuum-cleaner' humanoid

Autumn 1973 brought a worldwide wave of humanoid reports. David Webb catalogued them in 1973: Year of the Humanoids for the Center for UFO Studies. Report 50 came from Vilvoorde, about 12 km north-northeast of Brussels. The witness was a man of 28, known only as "V.M." Auguste Meessen, who later met him, described him as honest and well regarded.

About 2 a.m. He got up in the dark house and made for the kitchen with a torch. From outside came a sound like a shovel striking the ground. Through a gap in the curtain he saw a greenish light.

In the courtyard stood a being about 1 meter 10 centimeters tall, in "a shining one-piece suit emitting a greenish luminosity" and a transparent globe-shaped helmet. A red box glowed at its waist. "Neither nose nor mouth was visible", but it had "pointed ears" and eyes "oval and yellow". It was passing an instrument "closely resembling a vacuum cleaner, or a mine detector" slowly back and forth over a heap of broken bricks.

He flashed his torch twice. The being turned round and raised its hand in the "V" sign. Then it went to the wall, placed one foot flat against it, then the other, and "walked straight up the wall with no change of gait except that now he was holding his legs stiff." It arced over the top.

About four minutes later, a round craft appeared beyond the back wall, about 5 m across. Its upper half was orange and phosphorescent, under a transparent cupola where the humanoid could be seen, "bathed in a bluey-green light". The dark claret lower half carried three lights in a row, blue, yellow and red. A black circle with a yellow lightning flash showed on the orange part. Showers of sparks ringed its widest part.

It hovered for about four minutes. Then it rose about 20 meters, rocked gently, and as its chirring became a hiss it "shot straight up into the sky, leaving behind it a luminous trail." The witness felt no fear. He had a light snack and slept normally. In the morning there were "no impressions on the ground."

SOBEPS investigated. Jean-Luc Vertongen and Yves Vézant handled the first inquiry. A 1974 visit brought Professor Auguste Meessen of the Université catholique de Louvain, Vertongen and Maurice de San to the house. SOBEPS rated the case 3 for credibility and 5 for strangeness on the Poher scale. Vertongen's report ran in Inforespace in 1974, and Gordon Creighton translated it for Flying Saucer Review.

No one has alleged a hoax. Revisiting the case in 1978, Franck Boitte wrote that the witness "honestly described phenomena he believed he experienced." He also claimed Meessen had stayed away because the story was "far too incredible" and the witness not "publicly presentable." Meessen, in an open letter, called this "false and defamatory."

Meessen said his objection was psychological. In 1974 he learned the witness had earlier seen a vision of Christ wearing a crown of thorns. The witness said he had felt as if he were at the cinema. Meessen proposed a waking dream, hypnopompic imagery, and noted how hard it would be to walk up a brick wall with the body held horizontal. He advised against publication, but the report appeared anyway, without the vision.

No photographs. No traces. No second witness. Only one man's account of a small figure in green, a "V" sign, and a walk up a wall. SOBEPS and Meessen would face Belgian skies again in the Belgian UFO wave of 1989 and 1990.