Spain.Ferrol · the light over La Carreira

According to the letter the station commander wrote months later, on the night of 2 April 1966, between 23:30 and 00:15 on the 3rd, the leading electrician on duty at the La Carreira radio receiving station, a communications facility of the El Ferrol del Caudillo Naval Department located between Narón and Valdoviño, saw in the sky, together with the line keeper and two sailors, 'a luminous object of very intense, non-reflective opaque light, changing shape approximately every 5 minutes'. The object was 'to the left of Mount Campelo', a coastal height that lies to the north-west of the station. Because it caught his attention, the corporal went to fetch a camera and took a photograph with a 68-second exposure at f/1.9, which according to the letter corresponds to 'the last phase of the sketch'. The same document adds that at 23:00, half an hour before the time at which the station's observation begins, a sailor posted there who was off duty saw 'the same luminous object' over the station from Jubia, in Narón.

The file holds no witness statements: everything known about the sighting comes through that letter and a hand-drawn sketch. The sketch shows a series of figures: a crescent of about ten metres labelled 'stationary', with a shaded area marked 'bluish'; a kind of horn whose tip is also 'bluish'; a thinner crescent; a circle and a rectangle of about two metres. Below it notes 'intense opaque light' and 'approximate height 200 metres', and separately, under the heading 'phase of the photograph', three further, smaller figures with the exposure time. The witnesses' names are blanked out in the published copy. The photograph survives only as a photocopy: an almost black sheet on which, with the contrast pushed, one can make out an isolated light spot and, lower down, a vertical row of small spots. The file's summary had already warned that 'both the photo and the photocopy are very dark'.

The most striking thing about the case is how it reached paper. The corporal, 'considering that the matter was of no importance', did not report it to his superiors, but he did tell comrades and civilians and showed them the photograph, and that is how the La Voz de Galicia correspondent in Ferrol heard of it; he phoned that day to ask for authorisation to publish the story, because its author was a Navy corporal and the corporal would not agree without his superiors' permission. That call prompted the letter from the lieutenant commander in charge of the department's radiotelegraph station, addressed to the admiral captain general of the Naval Department and dated 8 August 1966, four months after the events, with the sketch and the photograph attached. The Intelligence Section of the Air Operations Command summarised it at Torrejón on 24 May 1993: the letter described 'an apparent observation period of 45 minutes', with the object's shape, colour and size in the sketch, but 'no movement of any kind is mentioned'. Its conclusion was that 'there is no record of any later investigation' and that 'the lack of the most elementary data makes it impossible to venture any kind of hypothesis about its possible explanation'. It proposed declassification; the file was declassified on 31 May 1993 and entered the Central Library of the Air Force on 23 June.

Ferrol 1966 is a small case with two lessons. The first is documentary: the file shows a military sighting that entered the chain of command not through the proper channel but through the press. The witnesses were Navy personnel at a communications facility, but the letter was written four months later, with no separate statements, no measured bearing or elevation and no independently checked date. That is why the Air Operations Command, reviewing it in 1993, declined to put forward any explanation. The four witnesses at the station saw the light together and count as a single testimony, the Jubia sailor's account arrives second-hand through the same letter, and the photograph, whose photocopy is almost black, does not allow what they describe to be checked.

The second lesson is about explanations. Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and the physicist Julio Plaza del Olmo analysed the photograph and concluded that the object seen and photographed could be the Moon, and that the date of the event would be different from the one the report gives. In the Spanish version of that summary they present it as 'an unexpected outcome that explains everything', but the summary does not say which date they propose or on what grounds. That proposal meets an obstacle in the file itself: it does not fit the letter's date. An ephemeris calculation for La Carreira puts the Moon at 23:30 on 2 April 1966 nearly full, about 59 degrees high and to the south, in the opposite direction from Campelo, which lies to the north-west of the station. By contrast, at the end of March and the end of April that year a crescent Moon stood low in the west-north-west at those hours, that is, to the left of Campelo, and a crescent setting through cloud or haze, about which the file says nothing, changes shape and brightness from one minute to the next, like the series of crescents in the sketch. That the letter's date could be wrong is plausible, since it was written four months later without anyone having reported the sighting at the time; but the proposal depends on that correction. Nor does it on its own account for the Jubia sighting: from there the station lies to the north-north-west, and a crescent Moon at that hour would have stood some 60 degrees further to the left, not 'over the station'.

The case also illustrates how a modest file gets inflated. Years later, several publications tied it to the story of an object said to have fallen into the sea near Ferrol, picked up by fishermen and kept at the La Graña naval station with the letters NASA on its fuselage. The file says nothing of the kind: it mentions no movement, no fall and no wreckage, and El Confidencial Digital, which spread the NASA-prototype version in 2012, placed it on 'that winter night of 1966'. Ballester Olmos, Plaza del Olmo and Mercedes Pullman concluded that the story mixed a minor sighting with the finding of some NATO buoys in the North Sea and other events from the 1970s, and the Navy's Central Archive replied to them that there was no record of the finding at sea of a NASA device in 1966.