Spain.Canary Islands · the Fokker IB-098 and the Gando radar echoes (1974)

At 19:45 on 24 November 1974 an Iberia Fokker F-27, flight IB-098, took off from Tenerife for Las Palmas. The captain had some 9,000 flying hours, 2,500 of them in jet aircraft, and held a reserve commission as a captain in the Spanish Air Force; the first officer had about 5,000. The night was cold and clear, with a layer of stratus below. Level at 7,000 feet and about 35 nautical miles from the Las Palmas beacon, they saw slightly above them and a little to the left of their nose a very intense white light approaching from the opposite direction. They asked Canaries Control to confirm the traffic. Control replied it had none. The pilots kept watching the light, now at their three o'clock at ten to fifteen miles, for more than a minute; they described it as three times brighter than Venus, standing out against the clouds. When they turned towards it to identify it, it vanished towards Tenerife.

At about 19:50, by his own statement, a Spanish Air Force lieutenant colonel driving with his family along the northern motorway of Gran Canaria towards Arucas saw with his daughter a whitish point of light leaving a short trail and crossing from south-east to north-west, low and at what seemed to him a very high speed, until it was lost towards Tenerife within seconds. The 1994 review would later note that the judge had moved the time of this statement by half an hour; in the original it was about 19:30.

Canaries Control then called No. 8 Air Control and Warning Squadron, headquartered at Gando, which was watching the area and saw nothing unusual on its screen. They established radio contact with IB-098, whose pilot repeated what he was seeing. Shortly afterwards the radar detected an echo at 35 miles on radial 023, heading in a straight line for the squadron's technical area. It covered those 35 miles in about four minutes, some 525 knots, and on reaching the vertical of the antennas, at 20:24, disappeared from the screen. The duty officer alerted the technical area. The captain there said he saw a star; a warrant officer, a bright star with flashes; the soldier on guard, a strange light that did not look like a star to him and that manoeuvred slowly in circles over the site.

At 20:30 the radar was following an Iberia aircraft, IB-281 from Madrid to Tenerife, when another unidentified track appeared heading south. It turned onto 336, stopped close to the airliner's path, waited while it landed on Tenerife and disappeared. Canaries Control said it had no other traffic, neither jet nor piston aircraft nor helicopters. Later the IB-098 pilot, now flying as IB-273 to Arrecife, called by radio to ask whether the object had been identified.

On 30 November the general commanding the Canaries Air Zone forwarded the squadron commander's report to the Ministry of the Air, which appointed an investigating judge. He gathered the civil traffic list, the flight sheets of Helicsa, the only company authorised to fly at night in the archipelago, the weather report and eight statements. His report of January 1975 separated three observations and ruled out, for each, traffic, sounding balloons, rockets, stars, reflections, meteors and jet exhausts. He concluded that it was an object with enough mass to give a radar echo, probably metallic, of unknown nature, and classified it as a UFO. He added a proposal: to set up in the ministry a Centre for the Study of Aerial Phenomena, with engineers, astronomers, meteorologists, psychiatrists, physicists, pilots and radar operators.

File 741124 is one of the best examples of how the Spanish Air Force's own view of its cases changed. In 1975 the investigating judge wrote an enthusiastic report: the witnesses were professionals, the radar could not be mistaken, the radar sergeant held the highest level of training, and everything other than an unknown object was ruled out. Almost twenty years later, when the file was declassified in 1994, the intelligence officer of the Air Operations Command read the same papers differently. He noted that the observations did not fit together; that the judge had changed a time until two episodes coincided; that the Fokker pilots saw a light, not an object, and that the light never gave a radar echo; and that the three people in the technical area, looking at the same sky, described three different things, one of them a star. On the echoes, he recalled that there was a slight temperature inversion that night and that a second-time-around echo, a distant return the radar wrongly places nearby, was a possibility nobody checked.

That difference in reading is what makes the case valuable. The pilots' light, bright, white, off the wingtip and always in the same position, fits the profile of many confusions with planets or bright stars seen from a turning aircraft; the judge ruled it out on the grounds that a pilot cannot mistake a star, but the aviation literature records exactly that many times. The echo travelling at 525 knots towards the antenna and fading on reaching its vertical is both the most striking and the most suspicious element, because the blind cone over the antenna itself is where any echo disappears. And the third echo, waiting for an aircraft to land, rests on a single track with no visual confirmation.

None of this makes the case solved. The 1994 review does not identify the stimulus: it only says there is no basis for asserting a physical object and that the cause cannot be established either, and it leaves the door open to scientists and researchers. That is why it enters as Tier A: there is a professional crew, a military witness on the ground, military radar and a complete official file, but the independence between those elements is smaller than it seemed in 1975. It is split between a mixed prosaic explanation, a star or planet plus anomalous echoes, and genuine indeterminacy.

The file also holds a little-known institutional detail: the judge's proposal to set up a Centre for the Study of Aerial Phenomena with branches in every air zone, the same idea France put into practice two years later with GEPAN and that Spain never adopted.