Spain.Canary Islands

On the night of 22 June 1976, according to the summary of Spanish Air Force file 760622, at 21:27Z the crew of the Navy corvette Atrevida, sailing parallel to the coast of Fuerteventura on a south-southwesterly heading, saw a white light rise from the interior of the island and move slowly towards its airport. On reaching some 15° to 18° of elevation the light became fixed, grew brighter, turned bluish and formed a circular halo. Two minutes later it split: a small part stayed below and formed a bluish cloud, while the upper part climbed in a fast, irregular spiral until it vanished. The halo stayed in view, unchanged, until 22:10Z. The file states explicitly that there was no radar detection.

Three minutes later, at 21:30Z, a similar phenomenon was seen from several points in northern Gran Canaria. In a taxi heading towards La Rosa, the driver and a doctor on a house call said they saw a sphere some 30 metres across, with two red figures inside, stationary very close to the ground at 15 to 20 metres; the third occupant did not see it because the car roof blocked his view. At Boca-Barranco, on the bay of Punta Gáldar, a couple saw a light like a car headlight that grew to three times the lunar disc and faded, leaving a blue arc. At Agaete, a teacher saw a great white circle, so transparent that the stars showed through it. A taxi driver climbing Gáldar mountain, a municipal policeman, a farmer, a labourer and a woman whose television went off described a great luminous circle or globe with a halo, and the woman thought she saw two figures inside. At 21:45 a sergeant on duty at Pozo de las Nieves saw a circular object the size of three full moons appear from behind Tenerife, rise to about 45° and vanish after ten minutes.

On 1 July 1976, prompted by press reports, the Chief of the Air Staff asked the Canary Islands Air Zone by cipher telegram for detailed information; the zone had already appointed an investigating judge on 25 June. Report 01/76 was sent to Madrid on 21 July. It includes traffic data from the Las Palmas Control Centre and a report from radar station EVA No. 8, whose commander stated that no anomalous tracks were seen and the equipment showed no faults; meteorological information; the statements of 13 witnesses, graded by reliability (three military men and sailors in the highest category of the group); the judge's analysis; and an interview and medical examination of one of the witnesses by a physician. The general commanding the Air Zone endorsed the judge: 'It is a phenomenon observed on the islands of Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria and Tenerife by an appreciable number of reliable persons who agree on the fundamental points, and not detected by radar. It has not been possible to determine either its origin or its nature, so it must be given the status of an "Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon".' The judge spoke to the Diario de Las Palmas in May 1977, and that year J. J. Benítez published material from the report. The intelligence officer of the Air Operations Command proposed its declassification on 20 June 1994, and the 107-page file entered the Air Force Central Library on 22 July 1994.

The dominant skeptical explanation is serious and must be stated plainly. Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Ricardo Campo Pérez hold that the phenomenon was the test launch of Poseidon ballistic missiles from a U.S. submarine in the Atlantic: the exhaust gases, expanding in the upper atmosphere, are lit by the sun while the ground is already in darkness and form a luminous bubble visible from all the islands at once, with the spiralling ascent and the lingering halo the Atrevida describes. Jonathan McDowell's launch catalogue records, on that same 22 June 1976, two Poseidon C3 missiles fired by the submarine SSBN-632, USS Von Steuben, on the Eastern Test Range, at 20:16 and 20:17 UTC. There is, however, a gap this entry did not mention: the file dates the start to 21:27Z, some 70 minutes later. The match in day, range and description is strong, and the pattern recurred with exact times on 5 March 1979, but the 1976 time correlation remains to be closed: either the catalogue time or the file's, which may not be true Z time. The sun was 16° below the horizon at 21:27 UTC, so a cloud above about 270 km could still be sunlit.

Among the UFO archives the Spanish Air Force declassified in the 1990s, the Canary Islands file brings together several islands, military and civilian witnesses, a formal inquiry with an investigating judge, air traffic control and radar data, and a written official conclusion. The general commanding the Canary Islands Air Zone, agreeing with his judge, declared in July 1976 that it had not been possible to determine either the origin or the nature of the phenomenon and classed it as an 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon'. Neither the controllers nor the zone's radar added anything: the radar saw no anomalous tracks.

The case pulls in two directions. On one hand, the testimony is diverse and simultaneous, and some details, such as the sphere with two figures described by the Gáldar doctor and taxi driver, are in the official statements, not later embellishments. On the other, the Atrevida's description (a light that rises, stops, forms a halo, splits and climbs in a spiral) is the signature of a ballistic missile seen at twilight, and the launch catalogue records two Poseidons that same day in the Atlantic. The figures inside the sphere are better explained as a reading of a diffuse luminous structure than as the sighting of occupants. What remains open is the time: the catalogue and the file differ by some 70 minutes, and until that difference is cleared up the identification is highly probable but not demonstrated to the minute, as the 1979 one is.

The methodological lesson is that a case can be at once documented in an official file, officially unexplained and reasonably explained from outside. The state investigated, reached an 'unidentified' consistent with the information it had, and the missing piece, an ally's missile tests that nobody reported to Spain, lay beyond its reach. The Canary Islands file is part of the opening of archives in Spain.