one of Holland’s biggest newspaper published this article today. Translated to English. source
Nowhere in the Netherlands have so many UFO sightings been reported simultaneously by people as in and around the Frisian village of Gorredijk between January and March 1974. The entire village was captivated by UFOs. For weeks, residents saw whizzing triangles, rapidly moving lights, and other strange objects in the sky, which no one has been able to explain. “I would really like to know what that was in my lifetime,” says Theo Haverkamp, who vividly remembers what he saw at the age of 13 in the skies above Gorredijk. On Tuesday, February 19, 1974, early in the evening, a sphere appeared in the sky, initially red in color, changing later to yellow, interspersed with blue.
“The sphere moved incredibly fast from left to right. Then it would stay still for a considerable amount of time before shooting up and down and from right to left,” recounts the now 63-year-old Haverkamp calmly, while stirring his coffee.
“The spectacle went on for more than an hour and a half, and you couldn’t predict its movements. We stood in a large group on the street watching and checking with each other to see if we all saw the same thing.” It left an indelible impression on Haverkamp. “I’ll never forget it for the rest of my life.”
He is one of the eyewitnesses to the wave of UFO sightings that occurred half a century ago in and around Gorredijk. For weeks, residents of the Frisian village saw whizzing triangles, rapidly moving lights, and other strange objects in the sky after nightfall. “The fact that it was always something different made it quite special.”
The UFO wave began in late January 1974, and the reports quickly attracted more and more attention. “We gathered every evening at a school on the edge of the village, next to the meadows. There, you had a nice view,” Haverkamp explains. With binoculars and cameras, both young people and adults peered into the sky. “Sometimes there were just a few of us, sometimes a large group, and not every evening did we see something.”
We have coffee in the living room of Willem Vlietstra, another eyewitness to the UFO wave. From his house in the outskirts near Gorredijk, we look out onto the edge of the forest. Vlietstra shows the notebooks that he filled as a 14-year-old during that period with a diary of his observations, photos, and newspaper clippings.
The conversation soon turns to Geert Meijer, a key figure in the Gorredijk UFO wave and a secondary school teacher. After his first UFO sighting, he decided to conduct serious research into the phenomenon and set up observation posts with students and adults. Gorredijk quickly attracted the attention of the media and curious visitors.
“One evening, a ufologist came to observe with us on a night when there was nothing to see,” Vlietstra says. “He quickly concluded that it was mass hysteria, but that was nonsense. We knew very well when it was an airplane or a satellite. But suddenly, we would see a strange object making a right angle turn.”
There was also another peculiar occurrence. “Whenever we saw something, a fighter jet often flew by about a quarter of an hour before or after. Sometimes five or ten of them. Very striking, because they are otherwise never here. The Leeuwarden airbase always denied that there were fighter jets flying and that they had seen anything on radar.”
On February 24, 1974, Vlietstra had his most impressive UFO experience. Again, there were fighter jets in the sky. “We were standing outside on the street with about twenty people talking. Suddenly, from the west, a very large, gray, triangular thing flew over, just 15 or 20 meters above us, silently and without lights. It was definitely 10 meters wide. It had the shape of a boomerang and a metallic color. The village’s lighting shone against it. It whooshed over us in a few seconds, and we all stood there perplexed, like: wow, what is this?”
Not everyone in Gorredijk welcomed the UFOs. “There was some division. Some dismissed it as nonsense,” Haverkamp says. “Churches were still full fifty years ago, and faith in the Lord was hard to reconcile with flying saucers. But we were completely unbiased. We felt no pressure to want to see something. There was a lot of media attention, but no influence.”
Nowhere in the Netherlands have there been so many UFO sightings by a large group of people over an extended period in the same area as in Gorredijk between January and March 1974. This makes it – along with the large black triangle seen by military personnel above Soesterberg airbase in 1979 – the most intriguing UFO case in the country, says theologian and UFO expert Taede Smedes from Nijmegen. His recently published book “The UFOs of Gorredijk” provides a meticulous day-by-day reconstruction.
According to Smedes, perhaps hundreds of people must have witnessed something of the UFO wave. “Some were convinced it was extraterrestrial visitors, but most people were simply impressed.”
Smedes spoke with eyewitnesses and searched for documents, but was unable to access the personal archive of secondary school teacher Meijer. “His children didn’t want to cooperate. I don’t know why, but there seems to be some fear. Their father may have been pressured by certain agencies. Meijer received letters from all over the country, even from F16 pilots who had seen a UFO but couldn’t report it to their superiors.”
In his book, Smedes explores the wildest theories about the Gorredijk UFO wave. He also came across the story of an elderly man from Leeuwarden, who claimed that he fooled the people of Gorredijk by projecting a searchlight with a screen onto the clouds.
That might have happened, Smedes says, but it doesn’t explain everything. “Take the large boomerang, for instance. There were no drones in 1974, and American spy planes did not glide silently overhead. Something truly mysterious and peculiar took place in Gorredijk.”
But what exactly remains a mystery even fifty years later. “What we saw is unexplainable,” says Willem Vlietstra. “And I would really like to know what it was in my lifetime.”
submitted by /u/fulminic
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