UFO in Spain
The cure of UFOs and other ufology phenomena in Spain
There are places and people in Spain that seem to have a special sensitivity and power of attraction for UFO phenomena. From Cantabria to the Canary Islands, passing through Catalonia and Valencia, witnesses recount in detail stories of sightings of objects or beings of unknown origin in our country. Some of them express their traumatic experiences through art, others become obsessed to the point of dedicating their lives to searching to prove the existence of beings from another planet and the rest just try to assimilate what they experienced. Journalist Lorenzo Fernández Bueno interviews all of them to continue his exhaustive investigation of the UFO phenomenon in Spain in 'Extraterrestrials: they are among us'.
If there is a name within the Spanish Church associated with the UFO phenomenon and its research, it is that of Father Enrique López-Guerrero, better known as the «UFO priest.» In one of the chapters of 'Aliens: they are among us', we access the immense audio, video and documentary archive of this fundamental man in the history of Spanish ufology, who broke barriers and opened minds and who gave an interview to ABC at the end of the sixties that was echoed nationally and internationally.
Known as the «UFO priest», labeled «crazy» by some and «convinced» by others, the parish priest of Mairena del Alcor reflected on the existence of different reincarnations beyond the terrestrial one in the controversial conversation he had with the ABC journalist, whose interview this new season of Fernández Bueno's program echoes. ABC offers you an exclusive clip of the corresponding episode.
Photography of a UFO party on August 5, 1973 from Montjuic
Spanish defense declassifies 80 confidential files on 'UFOs'
In 1991, a process of declassification of documents related to Sightings of strange phenomena, also known as UFO Files, began, since the Ministry of Defense decided to analyze them.
Upon returning from a mission, in broad daylight, an Air Force pilot reports the sighting over the sky of Morón (Seville) of a flying oval object, which when it crossed paths accelerated at high speed «in the opposite direction and He disappeared». After an investigation, the case is closed, stating that he could have mistaken it for a helicopter from the cycling tour of Andalusia.
This is the last of the 80 sightings of strange phenomena that the Ministry of Defense has just declassified, which happened on February 23, 1995 in the town of Morón de la Frontera.
In 1991, a process of declassification of documents related to Sightings of strange phenomena, also known as UFO Files, began, since the Ministry of Defense decided to analyze them and, where appropriate, lower their classification level to make them available to the public. who demanded to be able to consult these documents.
You can now consult files, in some 1,900 pages, of sightings of strange phenomena within Spanish airspace, in which personnel or materials from the Air Force intervene, in one way or another.
They cover phenomena that occurred throughout the entire Spanish airspace from the first observed in 1962 in San Javier (Murcia) to the last one dated in 1995 in Morón (Seville).
Some are sightings in a single place, while others cover several points of Spanish geography, since they are seen from a plane or coincide in date and description in different locations.
To make this possible, in 1992 a physical copy was deposited in the Central Library of the Air Force, at the General Headquarters of this army in Madrid.
Thanks to their digitization, they can be consulted online in the Virtual Defense Library.
Each file consists of summary pages containing the location of the sighting, the date, the summary of the facts, the considerations, the conclusions and the proposal for classification or declassification of the file.
The first sighting declassified by Defense is from August 6, 1962 and is collected along with two more sightings that occurred on the 7th and 13th of the same month in the Murcian town of San Javier.
The Flight Officer of the San Javier Air Base at 10:00 p.m. observes a powerful light on Mount Cabezo at 500 meters high and similar to the landing headlights of an airplane.
At first he thinks it is «a star», but after a few minutes the light begins rapid lateral and vertical movements, «impossible to make by airplanes or helicopters.»
The Ministry considered it an “unexplained phenomenon” until now.
On December 9, 1968 in Almería, «a sighting of a luminous phenomenon» was recorded to the East and Southwest. The file describes how a witness describes said object as a UFO, but «it does not indicate details of shape, color, size, height, distance, speed...»
The file concludes that no subsequent investigation was carried out «other than the fact that the non-existence of air traffic in the area was verified».
On July 20, 1978, in the Rioja town of Agoncillo, a soldier at the airfield reported that he was seeing a strange object in the air that was flying at a height of about 1,000 meters, at low speed and without noise.
In Madrid, the first sighting occurred on December 11, 1968, when two witnesses reported the presence «of a very bright object, with changes in luminous intensity,» to the southwest of the capital.
The file is closed without an investigation and indicates that it was a bright star (Venus)." And he concludes: «It seems much more likely that it was due to the generalized psychosis during 1968 around the appearance of UFOs.»
Another of the declassified files is located in Galicia. It happened in Ferrol on April 2, 1966, when at 11:30 p.m. at the A Carreira radio station, a corporal who was on guard, a guard and two sailors «observed in the sky a voluminous object with opaque light that varied from „It forms approximately every five minutes.“
In Bardenas Reales (Navarra), in December 1980, a range controller saw a flying object that „appeared to have a large central body, with a very powerful retropropulsion system and two or three smaller bodies next to it.“ flying in formation with the central one.
The object disappeared behind the mountains leaving a „large trail of smoke much larger than that of a commercial airliner.“
The Community of the Canary Islands is the one that has had the most sightings in this period, with at least 10 of the 80 declassified.
On November 24, 1974, an „observer“ while driving along the road on the island of Gran Canaria with his family, saw a whitish luminous point, which left behind a short luminous trail.
'UFO files' that occurred in Spain between 1960 and 1995
Among those 1,900 pages is a report in which Adolfo Suárez, then president, was on board the plane that saw “a strange light”.
In Spain there are no UFOs
In 30 years we have not detected any inexplicable phenomenon
This does not happen in Spain. There are no UFOs here. «By having the day and night sky monitored we can give a scientific explanation to phenomena that the public, sometimes, is not able to interpret. You should ask NASA why they are not able to do this. But in almost 30 years we have never detected an inexplicable phenomenon, nor has anyone presented us with conclusive photographic or video evidence in that sense,» says Josep Maria Trigo, Principal Investigator of the Meteorites and Planetary Sciences Group of the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC).
Trigo, who is also a member of the Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC), declares himself an «unconditional admirer» of NASA's work, and is «infinitely grateful» for having participated in two of its space missions. But he believes that it was not necessary for them to create a panel on UFOs: «The videos shown are not conclusive at all. Some could be optical reflections or objects that the optical resolution cannot resolve. They have given too much importance to an inconsequential issue. «There are only UFOs or UAPs for those who do not know how to interpret them.»
30 years monitoring the sky
In 1997 Trigo's doctoral thesis inspired the creation of the Fireball and Meteorite Research Network (SPMN), which aimed to study, catalog and explain the meteoric phenomenon seen from Spain. Since then they have been in charge of recording all the luminous phenomena in the sky. The list is endless: meteor fireballs, artificial fireballs produced by the re-entry of satellites, sounding balloons, Chinese lanterns — the kind carried by the wind once lit -, electric discharges known as sprites and even the launch of ballistic missiles in the Mediterranean.
According to the expert, the rocks that cross the region close to the Earth encounter the atmosphere at typical speeds of between 11 and 72 km/s. At that moment they produce a fireball or bolide. And only those that are massive and consistent enough reach the ground as meteorites. But those are precisely the ones that scientists are especially interested in.
The interplanetary matter that reaches us comes, mostly, from the main asteroid store, the so-called Main Belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. In Spain, the SPMN registers and stores in order about 5,000 meteor balls per year. They do it through observatories (80% amateurs and 20% professionals), although they also have the help of some citizens who can contribute to the count if they capture any of these phenomena.
But they also go further, reconstructing the real trajectories of the cars. «We do it from images and videos in which the fireballs are recorded in front of the background stars, because no one knows where they will appear, given that they are rocks generally smaller than one meter. We astrometrically measure these records and, thanks to unique software developed in our research group, we can know their trajectory. Finally, from them and after measuring the speed and deducing the radiant point in the celestial vault, we obtain their orbits in the Solar System," details Trigo.
Recover meteorites
«Recovering fresh meteorites, unaltered by the elements when briefly exposed to the elements, is one of our objectives. Until now we have recovered a meteorite every ten years. It is a scientific milestone, but also a challenge that we want to overcome in the future. In fact, now one of our doctoral students is applying a model that takes into account aerodynamic braking and precisely calculates the distribution ellipses where the meteorites end up. This allows us to be prepared to identify the cases where they occur and minimize the time to search for them," Trigo emphasizes.
Once they are collected, they are studied in clean rooms, using multiple analytical techniques in order to know their chemical, mineralogical composition and physical properties. And meteorites have something especially interesting: they are samples that preserve the properties of their parent bodies, such as asteroids or comets, and even planetary-sized bodies such as the Moon, Mars or Vesta.
The fascination with UFOs
«The existence of life outside of Earth fascinates all science lovers. But it would be another thing if intelligent life showed itself in flying objects in the middle of such a stormy world and in the face of a species as 'aggressive' as ours," says Trigo, who sees «nothing realistic» about the possibility that NASA discovers extraterrestrial signs in the investigations that it will begin to develop from now on. «Why are they going to detect it in the United States and not in Europe?» reflects the expert.
«Our sensors detect a wide variety of phenomena that never go unnoticed by continuous monitoring of the sky,» insists Trigo, who details that they are collaborating with the Department of Defense to explain some of these phenomena and develop automated systems. «We are always available to anyone who wants to give a rational explanation to everything that happens in the sky,» he concludes.