Spain.Cando Event · Galicia

At dawn on 18 January 1994, shortly before 8:15 local time and about 45 minutes before sunrise, many people around Santiago de Compostela saw a very bright luminous object descending from north-northeast to west-southwest, with a small red-orange tail and an apparent size some compared with the full moon. The Ramón María Aller Astronomical Observatory, of the University of Santiago, gathered 34 witnesses and measured the positions given by the most reliable with a theodolite; some followed it for about a minute, and a couple driving by stopped, got out and watched it drop sharply behind the horizon. Unlike an ordinary meteor, it did not burn out in flight. The study published in 1998 by astronomer José Ángel Docobo, physicist Richard Spalding of Sandia laboratories, Czech astronomer Zdeněk Ceplecha and three other authors concluded, from its low, slow trajectory and its brightness, that it was not a meteoric fireball. They also ruled out other causes: the PAM-D stage of a Navstar satellite re-entered that day, but very far from Spain; according to the Spanish Air Force, its radars recorded no anomalies and there were no military manoeuvres, and the authorities excluded a missile impact.

On 22 April 1994 a local woman, E. Dosil, called the observatory to say that something strange had happened in January at A Pedrada, in the parish of Cando, Outes, within a kilometre of the projected 'impact' point: a large amount of soil and trees had been thrown aside, leaving a 'crater'. The investigators measured an irregular gouge about 29 by 13 metres and 1.5 metres deep, with an estimated soil loss of about 200 cubic metres. Numerous trees over 20 metres tall had been thrown 50 to 100 metres down the slope, over a two-metre walkway that stayed clear, while the down-slope edge of the 'crater' remained intact; trees still standing below had soil and plant residues embedded more than three metres up. No meteorites, artifacts or foreign materials were recovered, and nothing showed shock features, so the study judged an impact very improbable. The date of the gouge is uncertain: residents placed it anywhere from late 1993 to February 1994, though the vast majority put it in mid-January, and the Santiago seismograph was not working on 17 and 18 January because of a telephone-line fault. Even so, the authors put at only a few percent the probability that the luminous object and the gouge were independent events.

The explanation they propose is geophysical: an eruption of earth gases would have opened the crater, and the rising gas plume, interacting with atmospheric electricity, would have produced the fireball seen moving across the sky, a mechanism that connects with some of the hypotheses considered for the Sasovo explosion in Russia. The same paper records the opposite reading. About 400 millimetres of rain fell in the area in the first 17 days of January, and in an appendix coauthor Y. Onda, a landslide specialist, proposes that the gouge was a landslide caused by internal erosion from groundwater ('piping') and that the coincidence in time may be casual; another small landslide 300 metres to the northwest, which the landowner said appeared the same day, was judged typical and ordinary by soil scientist F. Díaz-Fierros. The authors present the gas eruption as 'a possible explanation' able to reconcile the observations, not as a closed identification, and the episode remained a small geophysical anomaly cited ever since as the Galician 'small Tunguska'.

Cando matters as a small-scale replica (on European soil) of the problem posed by Tunguska and Sasovo: an event that combines an aerial luminous phenomenon with considerable physical ground damage and yet leaves none of the material one would expect. Its value is that it reinforces, with a third independent case, that there exists a class of genuine terrestrial anomalies (gouges, localized devastation, bolides) whose exact cause may remain undetermined without that implying anything extraordinary in the ufological sense.

The unknown lies in the mechanism, not in the terrestrial nature of the event. The two hypotheses put forward (meteorite impact and an eruption of subsurface gas) are both prosaic, and the study itself ruled out the first for lack of foreign material and shock features, in favour of the same family of mechanisms (sudden gas emissions) invoked for Sasovo; even so, its authors present it as a possibility, not a verdict. Cando serves a coherence function: alongside Tunguska, Chelyabinsk and Sasovo, it delimits a 'genre' of natural energetic events worth characterizing well, precisely so as not to mistake a bolide or a gas vent for an anomalous manifestation.