Spain.Northern Spain · a fan of light seen from air, land and sea

On February 23, 1971, a few minutes after sunset, the sky over north-eastern Spain filled with reports. At 18:15 UTC (19:15 Spanish official time; the other times in this account are local) 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 a monk from what the 1993 summary calls the "Monasterio de 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 defense 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 toward Manresa a spectacular fan of white smoke, about 60 degrees wide, lit in orange tones by the setting sun, moving toward the ground at a speed like a jet's, more than a hundred kilometers away. A Civil Guard at Monistrol described a luminous point with growing smoke moving west, and drew three sketches.

At Recruit Training Center No. 10, an artillery captain and his 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. The index of the lieutenant colonel who investigated the case speaks of 44 statements; the 1993 summary found only 43 and assumed the captain's had been counted separately.

The captain, by contrast, saw no "clear fall": he saw an object moving from south-west to north-east leaving a cone-shaped trail, which after a few seconds grew brighter and then could no longer be seen. An Air Force soldier gave the same description from C.R.I.M. No. 3, an acronym the excerpt of the file does not spell out. 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 meters 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 April 13 he concluded that the phenomenon 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; he put the fishing boat's "burning aircraft" down to one of the meteorite's fragments, which had reached the sea. 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 Center 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.

What was seen on February 23, 1971 was a rocket climbing to great altitude just after sunset: its exhaust gases, lit by a sun no longer visible from the ground, formed a huge, symmetrical, changing shape visible hundreds of kilometers away. Almost every witness describes it the same way, a falling point and an opening fan, and that is what a rocket plume does in twilight. According to the Air Operations Command summary, the Tibère experiment served to study how rocket re-entry into the atmosphere disturbs radio communications: the rocket went up and came back down, so the impression of "something falling in S-shapes" need not be an illusion.

In 1971 the investigating officer 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: 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 kilometers away. The file records no French warning of a launch visible from half the country. The answer came twenty-two years later, when the file was cross-checked against the French observations, such as the sketches of the Popular Astronomy Society of Toulouse.

The fishing skipper's statement does not fit the rest. He saw a burning aircraft fall into the sea two hundred meters away, with a ring of fire on the water; none of that fits a rocket launched from the Landes, although the 1971 investigating officer, who had a meteorite in mind, put it down to a fragment that fell into the sea. Among the statements from the camp, by contrast, there are almost identical drawings, and most described the same thing.

The phenomenon is identified by date and place: a French military-scientific launch seen from Spain which, with no warning between two neighboring countries on record in the file, ended up as a UFO file classified for twenty-two years.