Spain.Aitana · the three unknowns on the EVA-5 radar

On 11 July 1994, in the middle of the declassification of the Spanish Air Force's UFO files, the commander-in-chief of the Air Operations Command (MOA), a lieutenant general, sent a confidential message, 707-C, from Torrejón to the general commanding the Strait Air Command, copied to several units, among them air surveillance squadrons 3, 5 and 9. The text explained why: although the UFO documentation had been centralised in July 1991 and the commands had been asked once before, in November 1992, information 'generated within Air Force units and shown publicly by journalists in the media' was still to be recovered, 'reinforcing the conviction that the Air Force hides UFO information'. The aim was to enlarge the MOA archive and 'also rebut the unfounded argument of concealment'. To that end it transcribed, unit by unit, the cases the press attributed to each.

To Air Surveillance Squadron No. 5 (EVA-5), the radar station on the Sierra de Aitana, in Alicante, the list attributed five events: on 28 July 1975 at 05:30, an object that overflew the radar installations at low altitude, seen by several non-commissioned officers, shortly after the radar detected a stationary echo over the sea; echoes over the sea near the Balearics and lights seen from the butane carrier Tamames on 6 February 1979, with the note 'probable parachute exercise, to be verified'; an unknown echo heading for the peninsula and the scramble, with no visual contact, of a Mirage III from Manises on 13 March 1979; and two from 1986. According to the list, on 26 April at 18:00 'an object is seen from EVA-5 falling into the sea off Benidorm, the Guardia Civil is notified', and on 26 July at 23:30 'EVA-5 detects an unknown echo on the Balearics-to-Cádiz route'.

The commander of the Aitana post answered two days later, on 13 July, with a telex. For 1975 and 1979, it said, 'no information is available'. For the other years it supplied the information 'collected from the archive of the Operations Flight': three entries from 1986, all of them radar. On 24 April at 06:22Z (universal time): 'manual height, strange objects between 100 degrees and 120 degrees between 100 and 110 miles. Height measured between 8,000 and 11,000 feet. They do not change position'. On 26 April at 19:30Z: 'switched to manual for the height of an unknown at 180 degrees 40 NM. 39,000 feet. 2 Mirages take off from Manises'. And on 26 July at 12:29Z: 'manual height for an unknown at 150 degrees 84NM. 29,000 feet'. By our own estimate from the telex's bearing and range, assuming nautical miles measured from the station, all three points lie over the sea: south of Formentera on 24 April, offshore from Torrevieja on 26 April and between the peninsula and Algeria on 26 July.

The file says nothing more. It does not record how long the echoes lasted, whether anyone saw them, whether an attempt was made to match them to a flight plan, or what the two Mirages found. Nor does the unit's answer mention any object falling into the sea off Benidorm or a call to the Guardia Civil, and the times do not match those of the press list: 18:00 against 19:30Z on 26 April and 23:30 against 12:29Z on 26 July, and they still do not match when universal time is converted to local summer time (UTC+2): 21:30 and 14:29. The cover sheet that opened the file sums up that, of the five cases requested, 'there is information on 2 and information on 1 more is supplied', without saying which. On 7 May 1998 the intelligence officer of the Air Combat Command (MACOM), the MOA's successor, proposed declassifying it because there were no 'aspects that make it advisable to keep it as classified material'. It was declassified on 31 May 1998 and entered the Air Force Central Library on 15 June under the file number EVA-5 JUL 94.

It is a small file, eight pages long, but it shows how the Spanish declassification worked from the inside: it did not consist only of opening folders that already existed, but of asking the units for data on what the press was already reporting, so as not to leave gaps that fed the suspicion of concealment. Aitana's answer is revealing in both directions. It confirms that the station logged three targets in 1986 that it did not identify, and that the entry for one of them records the take-off of two Mirages from Manises. But it does not support part of what had been published: the object falling into the sea off Benidorm does not appear in what the unit sent from its operations archive, and the press times do not match the radar's. Nor was the answer exhaustive: Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, the civilian researcher who collaborated in the process, later documented that the MOA had asked EVA-5 for 1975 reports that were never sent and that turned up in a Ministry of Defence publication in 2000, whereas the 1994 telex said nothing was available for that year.

The data are scarce and do not allow going further. The measured heights, 29,000 and 39,000 feet, are common for en-route aviation, which does not prove they were aircraft but does not make them extraordinary either. The most striking entry is the one for 24 April: several echoes about 100 miles (more than 160 kilometres) away that did not change position, although the telex does not say for how long the operator followed them. Unlike other files in the same archive, such as Usagre or Morón, this one contains no reporting officer's report, no statements and no judgment by the command: the file does not record that the echoes were investigated as a case, and no source we found proposes what they were. That is why the prosaic share of the partition rests on the base rate of similar cases that were resolved, not on an analysis of this one.

For the corpus, the case covers the air-defence radar of the Levante region and completes the map of the surveillance squadrons in the declassified archive. It also leaves a lesson in method: the press account and the unit's record describe different things on the same dates, and only the second comes from the unit's own record, although we know it from the 1994 transcription and not from the original.