Spain.Canary Islands · Iberia pilots see an intense white light

At 19:45 on November 24, 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 (about 2,100 m) 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 as it descended. They asked Canaries Control to confirm the traffic. Control replied it had none.

According to the judge, when the light crossed them it was at about 6,000 feet, a little below the aircraft. The pilots kept watching the light, now off to their right (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 toward it to identify it, it vanished toward Tenerife.

By his own statement, at about 19:30 a Spanish Air Force lieutenant colonel driving with his family along the northern highway of Gran Canaria toward 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 toward Tenerife within seconds. In his report the judge placed the sighting at 19:50, twenty minutes later; at that time it would coincide with IB-098's flight, which took off at 19:45. The 1994 review noted the change and suggested it may have been inadvertent.

Canaries Control then called No. 8 Air Control and Warning Squadron, headquartered at Gando, which was watching the area on its radar 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 picked up a signal (an echo) 35 miles out, bearing 023° from the station, heading in a straight line for the squadron's technical area. The squadron put its speed at about 500 knots (35 miles in some four minutes), and on reaching the point directly above the antennas, at 20:24, it 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 maneuvered 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 signal appeared heading south. It turned onto a heading of 336°, stopped close to the airliner's path, waited while it landed on Tenerife and disappeared. The judge himself noted that the characteristics of that signal matched a helicopter's, but the inquiry found no flight that night by Helicsa, the only company authorized to fly at night in the archipelago. Canaries Control said it had no other traffic, neither jet nor piston aircraft nor helicopters. Later the IB-098 captain, by then flying another service, IB-273 to Arrecife, called by radio to ask whether the object had been identified.

On November 30 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 Helicsa flight sheets, the weather report and eight statements. His report of January 1975 separated three observations (the light seen by the pilots and the lieutenant colonel, the signal that headed for the antennas and the one that waited beside IB-281) and ruled out traffic, sounding balloons, rockets, meteors and jet exhausts.

For the pilots' light he also ruled out a reflection and a star: he granted that a first-magnitude star could shine unusually that night, as the technical-area staff's sighting showed, but argued that a pilot cannot mistake for a star a light moving close to him, still less see one below his horizon, standing out against the stratus. 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.

The Spanish Air Force read this case in two opposite ways twenty years apart. In 1975 the investigating judge wrote an enthusiastic report: the witnesses were professionals, the radar could not be mistaken, the Gando squadron sergeant operating it 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.

The pilots' light, bright, white, off the wingtip and, once off to their right, 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. Another fact in the file weighs against that reading: the light descended as it approached and, when it crossed the aircraft, flying at 7,000 feet, it was at about 6,000, below it.

The signal traveling at about 500 knots toward the antenna and fading on reaching the point above it is both the most striking and the most suspicious element, because the blind cone over the antenna itself, the zone the radar does not cover, is where any signal disappears. And the third signal, waiting for an aircraft to land, rests on a single track on the screen 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. 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. The readings left open are a mixed conventional explanation, a star or planet plus anomalous echoes, or a cause the file does not allow to be fixed.

The review also notes that one of the two witnesses who observed the traces on the radar, witness D-03, did not rule out the echoes being anomalous reflections, although a radar sergeant had told the judge that weather-caused echoes were "categorically impossible".

The judge also proposed setting up in the ministry a Center for the Study of Aerial Phenomena, with branches in every air zone and staffed by engineers, astronomers, meteorologists, psychiatrists, physicists, pilots and radar operators: the same idea France put into practice two years later with GEPAN, its official body for the study of unidentified aerial phenomena, and that Spain never adopted.