Spain.Burgos 1975 · the light four soldiers saw on the Santander road

In the early hours of 1 January 1975, four soldiers of the Army Engineers Academy, in Burgos, were driving back from New Year leave to report for duty. They were travelling in a Mini 850 owned by the driver, a 22-year-old soldier from Torrelavega, a waiter by trade, who according to his statement had been serving in a dance hall until about three in the morning; the others were two 22-year-old soldiers, from Santander and from Polanco, and an 18-year-old from Vega de Pas. At about six, at kilometre 14 of the Burgos to Santander road, at the spot known as El Andrinal, the driver saw through the left-hand window 'an intense light that was falling towards the ground'. He braked and alerted the others; on getting out they saw the light already stopped, on the ground or very close to it, at a distance they reckoned at three or four hundred metres: yellowish white, two to three metres high and wide, shaped like an inverted bell or a truncated cone. They drove on and, a kilometre further on, at kilometre 13, got out again: in the same direction they saw three or four much fainter lights, also stationary and at ground level. Frightened, they carried on towards Burgos. None of them heard any noise, and according to their statements at no time did they see an object, 'only a glow'.

The first written version is an information note from the Academy dated 4 January, graded 'Source C, Content 4', which speaks of 'a craft shaped like a very flattened truncated cone with an extremely strong light' that 'was landing or hovering a few metres above the ground', of lights that went out and came on, up to four of them, for about two minutes, and of two other cars that had supposedly also stopped. The text reached the press: Diario de Burgos and Pueblo published it on 9 January as a note from the Press Office of the Captaincy General of the 6th Military Region, and the next day Diario de Burgos clarified that it was 'a private account gathered without any official involvement, and based on the testimony, also private' of the soldiers.

On 10 January the Chief of the Air Staff ordered by telephone that an inquiry be opened, and the lieutenant colonel who was air military commander of Burgos, with the permission of the captain general of the 6th Military Region, summoned the four soldiers to Villafría military aerodrome on 15 January, two weeks after the events. The statements agree on the essentials and show their limits: the soldier from Santander got out on the right and only saw the light once it was fixed; the one from Polanco only saw it when his companions alerted him; the one from Vega de Pas had been asleep in the back seat, did not get out at the first stop and at the second saw three or four lights without being able to say their size, shape or distance. None of them took photographs or made drawings at the time. When giving his statement, the driver, 'prompted and helped by the Investigating Officer', made some pencil strokes that show 'more or less a balloon'; another drew something like an inverted bell, and the youngest said he could not draw it, but that his companions' strokes resembled what he had seen. Those drawings are not in the file. According to the summary, only the driver saw the light move.

The investigating officer gathered the weather report (clear, hard frost and good visibility, with the Moon, which according to the report rose at 20:08 on the 31st and set at 09:08 on the 1st). At the Civil Guard post at Sotopalacios nobody had heard anything except 'what the newspapers publish these days'. He went to the site with the soldiers, the Academy's adjutant major, the meteorological officer of Villafría and an aeronautical technical engineer, and following the sight lines they showed him he found nothing strange, except that the line of sight towards some hills about five kilometres away is crossed almost squarely by a 120,000-volt high-voltage line, which 'perhaps could have been the cause and explanation of what they saw, both because of the hard frost and because of the moonlight producing reflections on the metal elements'. He then flew over the area in a light aircraft: flat ground, divided into small plots, with tractors working and no sign of a landing or of marks on the ground. His conclusions of 15 January point to suggestion, to the fatigue of a journey that began in Torrelavega at about four in the morning, with two occupants asleep and a third drowsy beside the driver, and to the agreement between the statements as a sign that they had talked a great deal among themselves. The Air Staff also asked the National Commission for Space Research whether the French centre at Aire-sur-l'Adour had launched sounding balloons, because of this case and that of ↗; the reply, dated 11 February, was that it had launched none between December 1974 and 7 January 1975, and that the last had been on 15 November 1974.

In September 1993, the intelligence officer of the Air Operations Command (MOA) pointed out errors in the file: the witnesses gave 06:00 and the Academy's note 06:30; the cars that had supposedly stopped do not appear in the statements; and the press placed the event west of the road when it happened to the east. He noted that the site was inspected the next day without finding anything abnormal and that nobody in the area corroborated the account. And he wrote that, without any other independent statement, 'it is not possible to resolve the doubt whether it might be an excuse by one of the soldiers faced with the prospect of reporting late for reveille', an uncertainty he linked to the differences in time, 'or whether they really saw something, which unfortunately cannot be confirmed from other sources'. In a later note, added in 1997 to a supplementary file, the investigating officer considered that the witnesses' circumstances 'may have forged in their minds some illusory event on the basis of some high-voltage lines, 120,000 volts, nearby, with metallic reflections on the snow'.

The 1975 Burgos case is worth less for what was seen than for how it was built. In nine days it went from four soldiers' account to a note from their academy, from the note to the press as if it were official, and from the press to an Air Force inquiry that stripped away almost everything that had been added. The 'craft shaped like a truncated cone', the lights that came on one after another and the cars that also stopped are in the note of 4 January and in the newspapers, but not in the statements of 15 January, where all four say they saw no object, only light.

The investigating officer's proposal is weak, but it is not refuted. According to an ephemeris calculation for Burgos, at six in the morning of 1 January the Moon, 87 % illuminated, stood about 45 degrees high in the south-west, and there had been a hard frost; a frosted high-voltage line can return glints, but the file does not explain how a reflection would produce a light that falls in a parabola and then rests in the field, and the officer did not check the geometry. Against that weigh the witnesses' circumstances, which he himself recorded: a pre-dawn journey after New Year's Eve, two of the four asleep and the only one who saw the fall at the wheel, with the other accounts resting on his. That the 1975 report speaks of frost and the 1997 note of snow shows how a file gets summarised over the years.

The other reading the file records, the MOA's in 1993, is a conjecture its author did not present as a conclusion: that the story was the excuse of a soldier afraid of reporting late for reveille, or that they really saw something that cannot be confirmed. Nothing in the file proves or rules out the first: the lateness is suggested only by the difference between six and half past six and by the haste with which, according to the Academy's note, they set off again because 'the time for their official reporting was very close'.

The four witnesses were travelling together and count as a single testimony; the official statement came two weeks later; and the only earlier written version, the Academy's note, conveys the account second-hand. The inspection of the site, from the ground and from the air, found nothing. Its interest lies in the file itself: it shows a regional air command that looked carefully into a modest account, separated what the witnesses said from what the press published, and put in writing both its explanation and its doubts.