An unknown luminous object in the sky above Ghent has provoked dozens of phone calls to the hotline about unidentified flying objects. It is reported by the Belgian edition of Standaard. According to eyewitnesses, the transparent white and slightly luminous object in the sky was disintegrating into pieces, as after an explosion. “My wife and I were in the yard and saw a bright white glowing spot. It could not be a star as a satellite. This white spot was too large and too close to the Earth. After a while, it split into several smaller white dots, which headed north. After a while, everything disappeared. The phenomenon lasted from 15 to 20 minutes,”says one of the messages.
According to experts from the Ghent Observatory, Arman Pien, most likely it was a burst meteorological balloon. Such meteorological devices fly 35 kilometers above the Earth to observe the weather. Ghent is the capital of the province of East Flanders, where most UFO sightings have been recorded. In 2019, there were already 198 such messages. In total, since the creation of the hotline for UFO reports in 2007, more than 2.5 thousand calls about flying saucers have been received.