Spain.Northern Spain · the fan of light of 23 February 1971

On 23 February 1971, a few minutes after sunset, the sky over north-eastern Spain filled with reports. At 18:15 UTC the captain of flight IB-841 from Barcelona to Madrid asked Barcelona control whether it had any traffic crossing perpendicular to them at about 20 miles; the answer was no. Five minutes later IB-867, from Barcelona to Murcia, confirmed that it saw to its right a very large trail, slightly north of Lérida. A passenger on flight AO-204, from Mahón to Barcelona, who turned out to be the manager of Menorca airport, reported on arrival that at about 19:00 local time he had seen a luminous object moving north well above the aircraft; the captain spoke of a very clear, symmetrical trail heading south-east to north-west at a level far above his own.

On the ground, the duty officer at Barcelona airport received several calls. At 20:00 someone from a monastery at Olesa told him the Civil Guard had seen an object fall between Monistrol and Olesa de Montserrat, and at about 22:10 he learned that an Air Defence radar had news of an object that had passed north of Huesca. The Abbot of Montserrat forwarded the statement of a member of his community, who at 19:15, from his car at Monistrol, saw towards Manresa a spectacular fan of white smoke, about 60 degrees wide, lit in orange tones by the setting sun, moving towards the ground at a speed like a jet's, more than a hundred kilometres away. A Civil Guard at Monistrol described a luminous point with growing smoke moving west, and drew three sketches.

At Recruit Training Centre No. 10, an artillery captain and 44 soldiers and recruits filled in the official questionnaire, almost all with drawings: a luminous point, a trail opening into a fan, a descent in S-shapes and disappearance before reaching the ground. An Air Force soldier gave the same description from C.R.I.M. No. 3. And in the Bay of Biscay, 25 miles north of San Sebastián, the skipper of a fishing boat stated that he had seen a large silver jet fall burning into the sea about two hundred metres away; he went closer and saw a ring of fire that soon went out, and found nothing.

The Third Air Region entrusted the investigation to a lieutenant colonel, who gathered the Barcelona control tape, the reports of the three captains, a map of the trajectories, the statements and the aeronautical almanac. He found that the sun had set between 18:29 at Mahón and 18:48 at San Sebastián, and that the phenomenon had been seen across a band running from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay, between the Ebro valley and the Pyrenees. On 13 April he concluded that the event was real, that it had happened at great altitude, beyond the reach of any aircraft, and that it might be a meteorite that fragmented on entering the atmosphere, or the re-entry of a satellite or a rocket stage. The Region's lieutenant general forwarded it to the Air Minister with his agreement.

Twenty-two years later, in 1993, the intelligence officer of the Air Operations Command reviewed the file for declassification and found the answer. The same phenomenon had been seen in central and southern France and northern Italy, and matched the launch, from the Landes Test Centre at Biscarrosse, of a Tibère rocket of ONERA, the French aerospace agency, as part of Operation Électre, whose aim was to study how rocket re-entry into the atmosphere disturbs radio communications. The file includes the sketches of the Popular Astronomy Society of Toulouse, which match those of the Spanish witnesses exactly.

The case of 23 February 1971 is the European sibling of the Canary Islands phenomena of 1974–1979: a rocket climbing to great altitude just after sunset, whose exhaust gases are lit by a sun no longer visible from the ground and form a huge, symmetrical, changing shape visible hundreds of kilometres away. Every witness describes it the same way, a falling point and an opening fan, and that is exactly what a rocket plume does in twilight. Tibère was a three-stage rocket designed to send a warhead back into the atmosphere at high speed and study its re-entry, so the impression of 'something falling in S-shapes' is no illusion: the payload really was coming down.

The interest of the file lies in the distance between the two readings. In 1971 the investigating officer did good work: he gathered the control tape, the pilots' reports, the almanac and some fifty statements, established the observation band and ruled out an aircraft. But he did not know where to look for the source, and his two hypotheses, a meteorite or a satellite re-entry, pointed to the sky when the cause was on a beach in the Landes, a few hundred kilometres away. France did not warn Spain of a launch visible from half the country, and the Spanish military had no channel to ask. Twenty-two years later it was enough to cross-check the file with the French press and the amateurs in Toulouse, who had already done the work.

The case also shows how accounts drift. The fishing skipper saw a burning aircraft fall into the sea two hundred metres away, with a ring of fire on the water; none of that could have happened with a rocket more than a hundred kilometres up over France. Faced with a huge, unknown phenomenon, an isolated witness fits it into something familiar, an air crash. Among the statements from the camp there are almost identical drawings, confirming that most described the same thing; the fisherman is the reminder that individual testimony, however sincere, can distort a great deal.

That is why the case enters as Tier B with a low probability: the phenomenon is identified by date and place. Its value is one of method and context: it documents a French military-scientific launch seen from Spain, and the lack of communication between two neighbouring countries that turned an experiment into a UFO file classified for twenty-two years.