Spain.Becerreá · the lit-up 'spacecraft' beside the Lugo road

At about eight in the evening on 2 April 1969, a man driving alone along the Madrid to Ferrol road, heading for La Coruña, was passing kilometre 476, between Becerreá and Lugo. As he told it thirteen days later in a letter, on the right of the road there was a stretch with a sign reading 'Vista Pintoresca' (scenic view), because 'countless hillocks of various heights' follow one another there, covered in very green vegetation in which gorse abounds. Between two of those hills, very close to the ground, on the slope of one of them and in a horizontal position, he saw an object some five or six metres long, round in shape and about two metres in diameter, with one end finished 'in the shape of a shell' and the other flat. It was, he wrote, 'entirely lit with a fantastic light', and its exterior seemed to be made 'of little pieces, as if it were Gresite in multiple colours', a mosaic tile.

Because the road has several bends at that point, he drove on a short distance to stop out of danger, and when he got out of the car 'to contemplate the marvellous object' it was no longer there: 'I do not know whether because its lighting had gone out or because it had risen at dizzying speed, since not the slightest sign of light could be seen in the sky or on the ground'. Because it was so close to the ground and lower than the summit of the hill, he concluded that it should not be called a UFO but a 'crewed Spacecraft'. The letter, dated 15 April, is addressed to the Air Ministry, for the attention of an Air Force colonel whom the author calls 'My distinguished friend', and is written on the letterhead of a corrugated cardboard and packaging factory. The author explains that the idea of reporting it came from his son-in-law, an 'Aviation Medical Captain'. The names of the witness and of the colonel are blanked out in the file.

The colonel, posted to the Under-Secretariat of Civil Aviation (Directorate General of Air Navigation and Transport), forwarded it on 22 April to the head of the 3rd Section of the Air Staff, 'considering that it falls within the competence of that Section', as a letter 'which I receive from a friend' explaining that he had seen an object 'that can be considered a crewed Spacecraft'. The 3rd Section logged it that same day as number 3900. The next day, 23 April, the Air Staff sent a copy to the general commanding the First Air Region, in Madrid, 'for the purpose of forwarding the report required by this Staff's circular letter no. 9266-T of 26 December of last year'. That letter was not in the file when it was declassified: it turned up later in the Air Force correspondence archives and was gathered in 1997 into a supplementary file, 690402 Bis, whose summary says the Chief of the Air Staff was requesting that an inquiry be opened and adds: 'There is no record that said inquiry was carried out'.

The analysis the file preserves dates from 1993, twenty-four years later. When proposing declassification, approved on 30 April that year, the intelligence officer of the Air Operations Command (MOA) summarised the case and noted that the witness gave no distance, and that the 'Vista Pintoresca' sign suggested a raised, open viewpoint, but with downward vision limited to short distances unless one stands very near the edge of the lookout, whereas the witness was inside his moving car. For the disappearance he proposed two reasons: that the witness lost his line of sight as he moved and the object was hidden behind one of the hillocks, or the 'loss of the direct reflection of the sun's rays (close to sunset) as the witness's position changed', whose visual effect would be that 'its lighting had gone out'. The dizzying ascent struck him as 'much less plausible' and lacking 'any supporting element'. He added that the area is rich in granite crags with a strong mica content, heavily eroded, with rounded outlines and irregular ovoid shapes, and concluded: 'With the logical reservations, owing to the lack of conclusive data, the phenomenon observed suggests an optical illusion caused by the reflection of the sun on a granite rock. For the same reason, the possibility that the witness's perceptions were objective and accurate cannot be ruled out'. He also wrote that 'the file includes no subsequent investigation'.

The MOA's explanation depends on the sun still shining, and its author placed it 'close to sunset' without giving the time of sunset. In 1969 Spain did not use summer time and its official time ran one hour ahead of universal time, so the letter's eight in the evening was 19:00 universal time. An ephemeris calculation for kilometre 476 puts sunset that day at 19:56 official time, towards the west: at 20:00 the centre of the Sun was almost a degree below the horizon, at 19:45 it was still a degree above it and at 19:35 about three. The margin is narrow, but it does not settle the question: the letter gives a round hour, written thirteen days later, and an error of ten or twenty minutes would be enough to leave a low sun. The relief does not decide it either: hills to the west can take direct light off a low slope earlier, but a west-facing slope higher than the road can stay lit when the road is already in shadow, which is exactly when a pale crag stands out against a dark landscape. The file gives neither the orientation of the slope nor the distance. The time weakens the MOA's explanation, but does not refute it.

At that hour there were two other lights in the sky that the file does not mention: Venus, very bright, some ten degrees above the west-north-west horizon, close to the direction of travel, and the full Moon, rising in the east behind the driver. Neither fits as it stands what the letter describes, an elongated, motionless object almost at ground level and lower than the summit of a hill. But twilight, a witness driving alone on a winding road, an observation from a moving car and the lack of any estimated distance are exactly the conditions in which illusions like the one the MOA proposed occur.

The case is very small as evidence and very clear as procedure. There is a single witness, who writes to a colonel friend almost two weeks later; no statement was taken, no visit made to the site, no distance recorded. But the letter passed within a week from Civil Aviation to the Air Staff, and the Air Staff sent it to the air region so that it would open the inquiry its own circular required, dated barely four months earlier. That no trace of that order remains, according to the 1997 summary, shows the distance between the rule and its fulfilment. And the 1993 analysis teaches two things at once: the care to put in writing that the witness may have seen exactly what he described, and the risk of proposing a cause without putting in writing the check of the physical condition on which it depends.