Spain.Burgos 1970 · the motionless object photographed from the FOAT light aircraft

On 16 June 1970, a PA-18 light aircraft registered EC-BBS, belonging to the Bilbao company Fotografía Aérea y Terrestre, S.L. (FOAT), was on a photographic flight over the province of Burgos after taking off from Cuatro Vientos. On board were the pilot, a 25-year-old commercial pilot from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and a photographer from the same company; their names are blacked out in the file. At 11:45 Z, at midday, the pilot saw 'an object, strange in its shape, and in a static attitude, some 30 or 40 km ENE of the city of Burgos, and at 30,000 to 40,000 feet of altitude'. He judged its position on airway A-23, near the crossing with B-11, to be dangerous and tried to warn Villafría aerodrome, but could not because of a fault in the VHF set, which according to his statement had just been repaired. He climbed outside the airway to 11,500 feet, and from there they took three photographs. At 12:00 Z they left the area to keep to the flight plan, and the object was still in the same place. Back at Cuatro Vientos, the pilot told the airport officer, and both of them told the base flight officer.

The report that FOAT sent on 27 June to the Directorate General of Navigation and Air Transport put the object at 'a diameter, at its longest part, of some 15 metres' and enclosed one of the photographs, 'enlarged to the maximum'. The Directorate General forwarded it on 16 July to the Chief of the Air Staff, who on 22 July passed it to the 1st Air Region under the rules of a December 1968 directive. In the statement taken by the investigating officer, the pilot described an object of 'variable, preferably lenticular' shape, with a 'largest diameter of 15 to 20 metres', white, 'with a shine', with no noise and no change of size, shape or height, that 'remained static'. He noted that he had no means of judging distance or height, that he saw it with the naked eye, that the observation lasted 'some fifteen minutes', the time they stayed in the area, and answered no to the question of whether it could have been Venus setting. He described stratus and stratocumulus clouds between 3,000 and 10,000 feet, and a flight altitude of 4,000 feet at first. The photographer said he agreed with that account and added that 'he could not be sure that it was a compact object, but rather a sort of gaseous matter, although with a defined and precise shape'. The sketches in the file show an elongated figure, lens- or spindle-shaped, with an area marked 'shine'.

The investigating officer added the weather report from Villafría military aerodrome between 11:30 and 12:00: wind from 200 degrees at 6 knots, sky overcast (8/8) with cumulus or stratocumulus, and pressure of 1,017 millibars. He asked the air traffic control bodies and the Villatobas radar, which replied that on that day and at that time they had picked up 'no trace of the object in question'. In August he concluded that, 'from the study of the statements set out', 'it may have been a meteorological sounding balloon', and the lieutenant general commanding the region signed his agreement. The copy of the photograph kept in the file is an almost black photocopy in which an oval outline and a light patch inside it can barely be made out.

In July 1993, when proposing declassification, the intelligence officer of the Air Operations Command (MOA) summarised that, from the pilot's description, corroborated by the photographer 'as to height, movement and shape, as well as from the study of the photograph', the object 'could be identified as a sounding balloon'. He also cited 'later press reports' of 'a sounding balloon observed for several hours in the sky over Avila' and noted: 'There is no record of further investigation owing to the clarity of the matter'. The file does not include that press cutting or say what day it was from.

Burgos 1970 is one of the few Spanish files in which the witnesses are aviation professionals with a camera in hand and the skill to use it: an aerial photography crew that, on seeing something motionless near its route, climbed to photograph it and reported it in writing to the aviation authority. The paperwork also shows how the 1968 rule worked: a private company's report reached the Air Staff within a month, and the region opened an inquiry with the pilot's statement, the weather report and a query to the radar.

The identification as a balloon rests on features the account itself supplies: a white, shining body, silent, that did not move for a quarter of an hour and that the photographer described as 'a sort of gaseous matter' with a sharp outline. A balloon at great height, lit by the midday sun, fits that description, and it also explains the size: the fifteen or twenty metres come from a distance and a height the pilot estimated with no means at all, so the same object, farther away, would be larger, and closer, smaller. What the file does not do is identify the balloon. The investigating officer speaks of a meteorological sounding balloon, but a radiosonde balloon rises without stopping until it bursts, although seen from afar and from an aircraft that is itself moving a slow ascent can pass for immobility, and the file cites no specific launch. Large stratospheric balloons do float for hours at a fixed height; the Stratocat catalogue of 1970 launches, which is not exhaustive, lists none from the French base at Aire-sur-l'Adour in June, and those from Gap-Tallard, in the French Alps, are listed on 11 and 18 June, not the 16th. The Avila balloon mentioned in the 1993 summary has no date in the file either.

There is a photographic record of known provenance, made by two professionals identified in the file, and the official paperwork began eleven days later, with the company's report. But the two were in the same aircraft, there is no other witness, the crew was civilian rather than an institutional team, and the only image kept is a photocopy in which the object can barely be made out. The official explanation is reasonable and no one disputes it within the file, although it stopped at an identification from the description, without looking for the balloon. The other two photographs and the original of the third are not in the declassified file.