---
title: "We Chased The F-16 Tapes For Four Years. They Were Wiped For 340 Francs."
dek: "Three appeals and a tribunal established that the one-inch reels existed, went to a regional records office in 1991, and were degaussed in 1993 under a media-reuse schedule. What survives is a fourth-generation VHS, re-recorded twice."
kind: nullresult (The Null Result)
desk: Off-World
author: Ambrose Teague and Dr. Ilse Vantongeren (fictional)
published: 2026-08-18T06:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/f16-tapes-degaussed
tags: Belgium, radar, F-16, records management, freedom of information, 1990
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# We Chased The F-16 Tapes For Four Years. They Were Wiped For 340 Francs.

*Three appeals and a tribunal established that the one-inch reels existed, went to a regional records office in 1991, and were degaussed in 1993 under a media-reuse schedule. What survives is a fourth-generation VHS, re-recorded twice.*

Certificate 93/RD/1187. Two pages. Dated 17 June 1993.

Two one-inch open-reel tapes, degaussed and reissued to a signals unit. Reason code 07: media reuse. Valuation, for the state's property register, 340 Belgian francs a reel. About eight euros now.

Those two reels are the primary record of the strongest radar-visual case in Europe, and there is no other.

> **Figure:** The descent of the recording — see https://theyburied.com/article/f16-tapes-degaussed

## What we were after

On the night of 30–31 March 1990 two F-16s locked onto a target that went from 150 to 970 knots inside a second, and an air force said so at a press conference, on the record, with a printout in the room.

Thirty-six years of argument have followed. Every side of it quotes the same figure.

Nobody in those thirty-six years had checked the figure against the recording — which is a strange sentence to write about the most-cited case on this continent, and we spent four years establishing that it is true.

## What four years produced

Three refusals. Three appeals. One hearing before an administrative tribunal, in a room with eleven seats, at which the state's representative said, accurately, that the newspaper was asking for something that no longer existed and had not for a very long time.

The tribunal ordered disclosure of the surrounding paperwork on 14 March 2025 and we had it on 6 May.

It establishes three things. The reels existed and were logged into the wing registry on 31 March 1990 as items 9 and 10. They were transferred to a regional records office in November 1991 on a note that describes them as "radar registration", with no case reference and no retention marking. And on 17 June 1993 they were wiped, under a schedule written in 1988 for range telemetry.

## The schedule

Directive 88/ARCH/12 is eleven pages and we have published all of them.

It says that magnetic media held for more than twenty-four months without an active retention marking is to be assessed for reuse. It contains no exception for a case file. It contains no field in which a person can write *this one might matter*.

The man who signed the certificate held eleven thousand reels and reused nine hundred and six that week, most of them telemetry from the Ardennes. His reply runs at the foot of this page. We asked him whether he wanted his name kept out and he wrote back declining, which is more than we expected.

## What survives

One VHS cassette, made for a staff briefing, dubbed from a U-matic working copy that itself came off the reels. The U-matic has been missing since 1994.

The cassette was then recorded over twice at its tail and copied again for a documentary.

We paid Dr. Rosalind Okonjo-Vermeulen €4,100 to examine it for eleven weeks. She counts at least four generations of loss, finds the burned-in timecode unreadable after eleven minutes forty, and reports that the ten seconds in dispute sit inside a dropout.

> I can tell you what the cassette shows. I cannot tell you what the tape showed.
>
> — Dr. Rosalind Okonjo-Vermeulen

## The number

So we cannot substantiate 970 knots.

We also cannot knock it down, and we want that said as loudly. Colonel Lucien De Brouwer-Haesaert, who gave the figure in 1990, still gives it, and told us plainly that he read it off a printout he handed back at the end of the briefing.

He is not lying. He is remembering. Thirty-six years on, a remembered number and a copied number are the same kind of object, and neither is a measurement.

## What this desk takes from it

Nobody suppressed anything. That is the finding, and it is duller than either of the stories that have been told about this case.

Tape cost money. Storage cost money. A records schedule written for range telemetry made no allowance for a case that would still be argued about in 2026, and no allowance was the correct engineering decision in 1988 and the wrong one by 1991, and the person who could have noticed the difference was a warrant officer with a list.

There is no document at the foot of this story. Our Vault holds the transfer note, the certificate and the schedule, and it does not hold the thing this newspaper spent four years asking for, because that thing is now somebody's signal traffic from 1994.

> **Caution.** **A request.** Second- and third-generation copies of this material were made for at least four briefings between 1990 and 1992. If you hold one, or know where one went, our correspondent would like to hear from you at teague@parallax.press. We will pay for the transfer, we will publish the raw scan, and we will say plainly if it contradicts this story.

## Sources (invented)

- Adjudant-chef (ret.) Marcel Vandeputte-Coene, Named on the destruction certificate as the authorising warrant officer — Traced through the pension register; interviewed at his home near Ghent, twice, the second time with the certificate on the table (February and April 2026)
- The 1991 transfer note and certificate 93/RD/1187, Defence records, released under a tribunal disclosure order — Three refusals, three appeals, one hearing; ordered released 14 March 2025 and delivered 6 May 2025 (2022–2025)
- Directive 88/ARCH/12 — magnetic media retention and reuse schedule, The schedule that governed the reels — Obtained from a defence library catalogue, uncatalogued box 41; photographed and published entire (September 2025)
- Colonel (ret.) Lucien De Brouwer-Haesaert, Present at the 1990 press briefing at which the figure was given — Two video calls; we read him our transcript of his own remarks (January 2026)
- Dr. Rosalind Okonjo-Vermeulen, Video forensics; commissioned by this newspaper — Examined the surviving cassette for eleven weeks; report published in full including the parts unhelpful to us (2025–2026)

## What we could not confirm

- The acceleration figure. We could not substantiate 150 to 970 knots and we could not knock it down. The surviving cassette is fourth generation and the ten seconds everybody argues about sit inside a dropout that Dr. Okonjo-Vermeulen calls unrecoverable by any method she knows.
- Whether the U-matic working copy still exists somewhere. It is logged out to an analysis team in April 1990 and never logged back. Two of the four people who might know are dead, one does not remember, and one declined to speak to us.
- Whether anybody ever asked the records office to hold the reels. No hold request is in the file. The absence of a document is not proof that nobody wrote one, and we have been wrong about that before, in print, on this desk.

## Right of reply

**Adjudant-chef (ret.) Marcel Vandeputte-Coene** (Declined anonymity in writing. Replied on 21 May 2026, by post, four pages. Printed unedited and in full at his request.):

> You have come to my house twice and you have been polite both times, so I will answer you properly, and then I would like you to print all of it and not the sentence you like best.
> 
> Yes. That is my signature. I have not disputed it and I did not dispute it when you first wrote to me.
> 
> Now. In 1993 I was responsible for a store containing something over eleven thousand reels of one-inch tape. The schedule was Directive 88/ARCH/12 and it was not mine, it was written in 1988 by people I never met, and it said what it said: magnetic media held more than twenty-four months without an active retention marking is to be assessed for reuse. That is the whole mechanism. There is no committee. There is a man with a list.
> 
> The reels you are asking about arrived from Beauvechain in 1991 with a transfer note describing them as radar registration. Two items. That is what was written on the note and that is what was written on the boxes. There was no case reference on them. There was no retention marking on them. There was no letter in the file from anybody asking me to keep them, and I want to be exact, because you have been exact with me: in nine years in that store I received forty-one hold requests and I honoured forty-one hold requests. Not one of them was for these.
> 
> That week I signed for the reuse of nine hundred and six reels. Most of them were range telemetry from the Ardennes. I did not know what was on numbers 9 and 10 of a 1991 transfer, I could not have known, and I will tell you honestly that if I had known I still could not have kept them, because the paper that lets you keep something is the retention marking and there wasn't one.
> 
> You have written 340 francs in your headline. I understand why. It is a good line and it makes me look like a man who sold history for the price of a meal. What 340 francs is, is the replacement cost of a blank reel, and the reason it appears on the certificate at all is that the state required me to account for the value of the property I was reissuing. It is a bookkeeping entry proving I did not steal a tape. You have turned an anti-corruption control into the price of your headline.
> 
> The last thing, and it is the thing I would like printed if you print nothing else. Between 1991 and 1993 that store was open to any officer with a request form. Between 1993 and today a very great number of people have written a very great number of pages about this case. Not one of them, in the two years the tapes sat on my shelf, wrote to ask what was on them or to ask me to keep them. Your newspaper is the first to come and look. Four years, you say. I was there for nine, and the telephone did not ring.
> 
> I am sorry the tapes are gone. I am sorry in the way you are sorry about weather. If you would like to be angry at somebody, be angry at a directive from 1988 that had no line on the form for *this one might matter*.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.