Spain.Bardenas Reales · soldiers on guard see lights over the range

At 22:55 on January 2, 1975, the soldier on guard outside the main tower of the Bardenas Reales firing range, where military aircraft practice weapons firing in the Navarre desert, saw an intense, motionless red light. He thought a vehicle had entered the range and alerted the corporal of the guard, who came out with three other soldiers.

According to the file's summary, all five agreed on the essentials: a very intense red light and another of the same color, fainter, at a distance they estimated at two to five kilometers; none of them "managed to see its shape or size". At first they thought it might be a tractor or a car. After five to ten minutes motionless, it rose to about twenty-five or fifty meters, moved slowly toward the auxiliary tower, changed direction toward the main tower, gained speed and height and disappeared very fast to the northwest.

At about 23:10 the corporal alerted the duty NCO. The sergeant went up with binoculars onto a mound behind the garages and from there described something different: an object shaped like an inverted cup, with white lights on the top and bottom and flashing amber and white lights on the sides, of a size he compared to a truck's. In his statement he added that the object stayed some thirty minutes over the range, until 23:25, and that as it moved "a high-power spotlight lit up the ground from underneath".

The other five witnesses, from their post, saw at that moment a very intense white light that, after some five minutes stationary in the same place where the first had appeared, rose slowly, headed for the auxiliary tower and vanished at great speed to the northeast. In the version the patrol gave the range commander, that second object, with white and amber lights "of incalculable intensity", lit up some hundred meters around it and let the firing targets be seen clearly. Nobody heard any noise or felt any movement of air.

The range commander carried out a reconnaissance from 23:30 and saw nothing abnormal. The next day he wrote that "the reddish patch that came into view was the Moon, which was becoming visible as the mist that existed in that part of the Range cleared", so that "it was thought that the mist hiding the Moon would have been the cause of the Patrol's alarm". In the same report he noted that that morning the Civil Guard post at Arguedas had phoned to ask whether an aircraft had come down during the night; the report came from the Tudela police station.

The chief of staff of the 3rd Air Region ordered an investigating officer to be appointed. He was a lieutenant, who took separate statements from the six witnesses (a sergeant, a corporal and four soldiers) and concluded that from them "it can be deduced that they did indeed see something strange, different in its movements and characteristics from known aircraft"; he noted that the patrol, very agitated, had loaded and cocked their weapons, that the night was dark "because the Moon had not yet risen" and that, when it happened, it had been on duty for some fourteen hours.

A major extended the inquiry with the range commander's report and a sketch of the trajectories, and wrote that in the statements, taken one by one, "there was no contradiction at all", that the witnesses "expressed themselves with firmness and truthfulness" and that the detachment commander found on the site "no remains of any kind nor traces". He also noted that the night was clear but that "there was mist on the horizon", and several soldiers described the first light as red and flashing.

The Calatayud alert and control detachment, the nearest air-surveillance radar station, reported that its screen had shown nothing. The Chief of the Air Staff asked the National Commission for Space Research whether the French center at Aire-sur-l'Adour had carried out any activity that could have had an influence; the commission replied that no sounding balloon had been launched between December 1974 and January 7, 1975. The astronomical data for that night were added, which put moonrise at 22:18 universal time. The positions of Jupiter, Saturn and the Moon in that table match an ephemeris calculation on that time scale, so the waning Moon rose in the east at about 23:18 local time: after the first observation, the one at 22:55, and during the second.

On January 11 the lieutenant general commanding the 3rd Air Region signed his personal interpretation. He acknowledged that the witnesses firmly believed they had seen flying objects and that, although they gave statements separately, they agreed quite closely on the movements, but he noted their disagreements about the weather (a clear night for some, cloudless but dark for others) and the mist that the range commander saw shortly afterwards, clearing as the Moon rose.

He concluded that there was no evidence to accept the passage or landing of UFOs and that the lights could have been the Moon's halo, a star or a nearby tractor seen through layers of fog or mist, in an optical effect that made it seem there was an illuminated body in motion. The file was declassified in 1994. The same range appeared in another file in December 1980, when its range controller saw from the road an object with several smaller bodies in formation.

Six soldiers on guard at an air-weapons range watched lights they could not identify for half an hour, and their chain of command investigated it as a serious incident: an investigating officer, separate statements, a sketch, an inquiry to the nearest radar, another about French sounding balloons, the astronomical data for the night and an interpretation signed by the region's lieutenant general. The lieutenant and the major who handled the inquiry stressed that the witnesses, questioned one by one, did not contradict one another.

The general's explanation has concrete support: nobody heard any noise, the Calatayud radar saw nothing, there were no French balloons, the witnesses disagreed about visibility, and the range commander, who went out at 23:30, saw mist and a reddish patch that he identified on the spot as the Moon, at the same time the second observation ended. Familiar lights (the Moon, a star, a vehicle) seen through moving layers of fog can give the impression of something that rises, stops and moves away, and at night, without reference points, the apparent movement of a light is easily misread.

That explanation covers three things less well. The first light appeared at 22:55, some twenty minutes before the Moon rose, and the lieutenant noted that the night was dark for that reason. The sergeant, with binoculars, did not describe a diffuse light but a structure with colored lights and a spotlight lighting the ground. And the five men of the patrol agreed on the movements even though they gave statements separately. None of the three proves there was an unknown craft there, but nor do they reduce to the Moon seen through the mist.