Spain.Canary Islands · the luminous bell of 5 March 1979

At about 18:30 UTC on 5 March 1979 a witness on La Palma saw what he described as a reflection in the air heading towards the sea. He took it for a jet, which shortly afterwards seemed to leave trails over the horizon that rose and formed coloured clouds; he called it a fantastic spectacle. From the other islands, and even from Safi and the Sahara, other witnesses described this first phase as a strange sunset, a rare atmospheric phenomenon or, in one witness's words, an electrocardiogram in the sky. For most it remained a large iridescent cloud.

At about 20:08 the second part began. A silvery object rose from the horizon, called by witnesses a pyramid, a luminous sphere, a two-headed projectile, a rocket or a fireball, leaving a red trail. It climbed slowly, with a motion several compared to a corkscrew. On reaching the iridescent cloud it began to climb almost vertically, amid small explosions that built up a huge trail shaped like a rounded cone or a wine glass, always with the object at its apex. That gigantic trail lit up the islands after sunset and frightened many. With a final explosion the object broke away from the trail, changed course and vanished into the sky at great speed. Between 19:47 and 20:38 the crews of several aircraft discussed it over the radio with air traffic control: some spoke of an object, others of a rocket, others of a heavily zigzagging trail. The pilot of flight BX-816 said it had gone up at tremendous speed and that, doing 350 themselves, they felt as if they were standing on the ground.

No. 8 Air Surveillance Squadron stated that, with all its equipment operational, it saw no abnormal track. On 23 March the general commanding the Canaries Air Command sent an encrypted telegram to the Air Staff: the investigations pointed to a missile fired from international waters west of the archipelago, and he proposed asking the United States armed forces for information to put an end to speculation, although some data suggested the missile had gone east, which might indicate a Warsaw Pact launch. There was never a reply.

The investigating judge wrote report 01/79, 234 pages long: traffic, weather, radar, witness statements island by island and a photographic section with dozens of photographs supplied by witnesses on Gran Canaria, Tenerife and La Gomera. He went through the explanations one by one: meteors, atmospheric phenomena, nuclear explosions and rockets launched from Cape Canaveral, which he even proposed checking with NASA. He concluded that the phenomenon had existed as described, that its nature was for now unknown and that, with no radar contact, it could not be known whether it was solid; and, before that, that the hypothesis of craft of unknown origin moving freely through the skies of the Canaries had to be considered seriously. The report was lost in Madrid and a copy had to be sent in January 1980; with it, the general commanding the Canaries Air Command added his personal opinion: two very powerful missiles, probably Soviet and aimed at Siberia.

Few official files show so clearly the distance between a spectacular phenomenon and its explanation. Every piece was in the file itself: the Canaries general was right that it was a missile launched west of the islands, the judge was right that the timing fitted launches from the Cape Canaveral range, and the witnesses' description, a rising point, a trail widening into a cone lit by the set sun and stages separated by small explosions, is that of a multi-stage missile at twilight. All that was missing was the United States' reply, which never came, and without it the judge ended up writing in an official document that craft of unknown origin had to be considered seriously.

The answer came later by another route. The astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, keeps a log of rocket and missile launches that records for that day four Poseidon missiles fired from the submarine SSBN-642, USS Kamehameha, on the US Eastern Test Range, at 18:47, 18:48, 20:07 and 22:25 UTC. The two phases described in the file, the iridescent cloud at about 18:30 and the rising object at 20:08, match the first three. In 2001 Ricardo Campo Pérez and Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos published in the Ministry of Defence's own Revista de Aeronáutica y Astronáutica the article that closed the debate, '¡Identificados! Los OVNIS de Canarias fueron misiles Poseidón'. So the explanation came through a publication of the same ministry that had filed the case as unknown.

The case also matters for what it says about the chain of command. A regional command with a correct hypothesis, a request for information to an ally that goes unanswered, a report lost in Madrid and a personal opinion pointing at the wrong bloc: the ambiguity of 1979 was not only technical but political. The United States was testing its submarine missiles in the Atlantic in full view of an allied country with no record of any warning, and the ally did not insist. It is the same pattern the corpus documents for 22 June 1976, seen here from the side of the internal paperwork.

That is why the case enters as Tier A with a low probability: the official documentation is complete and the phenomenon, real and photographed, is identified to the minute. The part that is not mundane is no mystery about the object but an allied military programme left uncommunicated, and the split between explanations reflects that.