Spain.Canary Islands · thousands see a huge bell of light in the sky

At about 18:30 UTC on March 5, 1979 a witness on La Palma saw what he described as a reflection in the air heading toward the sea. He took it for a jet, which shortly afterwards seemed to leave trails over the horizon that rose and formed colored 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.

According to the transcript of the exchanges between air traffic control and the crews of several aircraft, the phenomenon was in view between 19:47 and 20:38: 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 signal on its radars. On March 23 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. In the report he wrote that the hypothesis of craft of unknown origin moving freely through the skies of the Canaries had to be considered seriously, and 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.

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.

Every piece was in the file itself: the Canaries general was right that it was a missile launched west of the islands, the judge had listed rockets from Cape Canaveral among the possible explanations and proposed checking with NASA, 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 closed his report without identifying the phenomenon.

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 nuclear ballistic-missile submarine USS Kamehameha (SSBN-642), on the U.S. Eastern Test Range, at 18:47, 18:48, 20:07 and 22:25 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The two phases described in the file match the first three: the iridescent cloud, which the first witness saw forming at about 19:00, with the launches at 18:47 and 18:48, and the rising object at 20:08 with the one at 20:07.

The fourth, at 22:25, came after the last transcribed radio exchanges. In 2001 Ricardo Campo Pérez and Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos published in the Spanish Defense Ministry'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 technical and political as well. 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.