Brussels saw strange lights, screamed "Putin!", and torched 50 million - only to find a police helicopter in the starring role

Hey kids, do you suffer from nightmares about being abducted by aliens? Worried that the fort you make out of your pillows and bedsheets won't protect you? Well, good news: when you grow up, you can get a job as Belgian defense minister and blow 50 million on your efforts.

Bad news for Belgians, though. The aliens haven't picked your country as their landing pad. Not yet, at least. But this is the second time in my lifetime alone that the Belgian government has pulled out the heavy artillery because they saw UFOs. The latest instance was last fall. Drones, they said. If not aliens, then Russians. Because what else could it be? Either way, it was apparently a nice pretext for blowing 50 million in a hurry on weapons.

But now the defense minister, Theo Francken, is squirming in a parliamentary defense committee hot seat, trying to defend the spending spree. He evoked hundreds of sightings, adding that "many colleagues thought that we urgently needed to buy things, that we needed to take action, and that we certainly also needed to have material and that it could not take years. That it was urgent now and that it was actually scandalous that we had nothing." You had nothing, alright. But the scandal isn't that. It's that you acted on that nothing by pelting it with cash.

Francken explained that Belgian military intelligence claimed that 42 of 250 drone sightings were the real deal. Any receipts? Of course not. But there's "no other plausible explanation than a drone," he added.

Blah blah blah. Where did the 50 million go, pal? And why wasn't such a massive contract even put to public bidding?

No time for such minor details when the aliens are about to land, apparently. Or Putin. All this comes after Belgian public broadcasting aired an investigative piece straining to figure out what all the fuss was really about, having found no actual evidence of hostile activity themselves, let alone drones.

So now the defense minister is like, okay, look, turns out that the sightings were just of a helicopter. Operated by the Belgian police.

Oh, look! An "other plausible explanation," the likes of which he literally just said doesn't exist. But even if it was a helicopter, it was still looking for a drone, he says. Not that he can show it to you.

But so what? Minor detail. It's not like the aliens aren't coming SOMEDAY. And also Putin in 2030, as we keep hearing from European officials. So better to blow that cash now on a screwup and be ready for the eventuality. Who could regret doing that? Not this guy, apparently. Not like he's personally paying for it.

Last fall, Francken was saying that the UFOs could be spy drones trying to peep on American nuclear weapons at Belgium's Klein Brogel air base. Spy drones, huh? I guess that was supposed to explain why they were also said to have been loitering around airports, too. To the point of having to close them. All the hallmarks of a great secret spy op: draw global attention to yourself and make a scene. But that's how spying works in the movies. And this guy seems to think that he's a main character in one.

"This is not the work of amateurs, this is something else. This has been a rule of the Russian Federation for many years. They are semi-professional and professional large drones," he said at the time, evoking hybrid warfare. "We see several drones simultaneously, which also fly in formation. Not everyone can do that." Just aliens and Russians, apparently. And the people who investigated all this for Belgian state TV, who did it with one guy.

The last time this kind of hysteria happened was amid the Cold War's denouement between the Soviet Union and the West, in 1989-1990. But they didn't blame Russians back then. Maybe everyone had already blown enough cash on weapons. Unlike today. Which would explain why, on the back of this latest UFO wave reboot, Francken started fantasizing about creating a whole new department and filling it with toys: detection, jamming, and drone-destruction systems. He also said that NATO "will flatten Moscow" if it ever attacked. Sounds like a reasonable guy who should be given blank checks. Even better if they're from the public treasury.

So now the Belgian TV show says that this purchase is being looked into by the prosecutor general's office and implicitly laid out an open invitation for other countries that may have blown cash on this hype to do the same.

In any case, the Belgian public already knew that their government was a hot mess on UFOs 35 years ago. After months of watching mysterious lights drift around, they finally scrambled a couple of F-16s to investigate. But instead of locking onto a UFO, they almost shot each other down in the process.

This new sequel also plays out just like a Hollywood production. One in which the Belgians fund a 50 million prop department budget and the aliens never even make a cameo.