Spain.Gallarta · the La Florida landings

On 24 March 1977 La Gaceta del Norte, of Bilbao, ran on its regional page a report by J. J. Benítez headlined '"UFOs" over Gallarta': on a landfill in the La Florida area, within Gallarta (Biscay), 'more than eighty marks' had appeared, most of them forming circles, local residents heard 'strange buzzing' at night, and 'the technical director of one of the most important shipyards in Bilbao' had seen one of the objects 'as it rose at great speed'. That article opened Spanish Air Force file 770213. On 11 April the colonel commanding the Basque Air Sector sent the cutting and the journalist's description to the chief of staff of the 3rd Air Region; on 15 April Zaragoza sent it back to be redone in line with the regulations in force.

The investigating officer, a captain and aeronautical technical engineer from Industry Territorial Zone No. 4 appointed by the Bilbao Air Commander, asked Benítez for the addresses of the witnesses, who did not wish to be identified. According to the file's summary he found two, who 'turned out to be father-in-law and son-in-law'. The son-in-law, a naval engineer and technical director of a company in Santurce, stated that on 13 February, at a distance he put at one kilometre, he saw 'an artefact rise, almost vertically and at enormous speed, which without making any noise at all disappeared into the sky'. He described it as shaped like 'a flattened mushroom', with a dome on one face and a kind of legs on the other, steel grey and surrounded by a very bright halo 'which could well have been a reflection of the sun'; he estimated it at 20 to 25 metres across and the sighting at one to two seconds, and said it left in the air a kind of thread that vanished in fractions of a second. The time does not match across the papers: his statement says 'around 4 in the afternoon', the form records 14:00 Z and the Air Operations Command summary 'around 1700 local'. The officer wrote that the witness 'seems to offer every guarantee for believing his statements'; asked about the neighbour who, according to the report, had seen UFOs four times, the engineer replied that it was his father-in-law.

The father-in-law, a 50-year-old formwork carpenter living in the La Florida district, described in an interview of some two and a half hours five appearances between mid-February and 29 April, the last one after the press report. In the first, at around two in the morning, he heard a call with his name, went out, crossed a small wood and saw on the open ground a saucer that rocked and pushed out and drew in some legs; a sliding door opened and two beings in overalls came down, told him not to be afraid and said they had to leave because they had been detected. In the second, two other beings told him they had come to help the Earth because it 'was leaving its orbit and was tilting too much'. In the third a small, almost cubic 'tankette', one metre a side, came down from the saucer and seemed to take soil samples; he touched the craft, whose metal surface had a kind of welded scales, and shook hands with one of the beings, whose hand was 'terribly cold'. On 29 April, at around 11 at night, while he was watching the programme 'Un, dos, tres', the saucer landed some 35 metres from his house and three beings shook his hand. The officer noted that the open ground held 'countless marks' that confirmed nothing, because the rain and the hundreds of sightseers who came after the report had churned everything up; only a few, which he drew, could form an arc of a circle 40 to 50 metres across. He dated his first report in Bilbao on 20 May.

On 10 June the 3rd Region sent the information back because it considered the investigation insufficient. The expanded report, dated 27 July, added a METAR from Bilbao airport for 14:00 Z on 13 February (wind from 190° at 26 knots gusting to 48, visibility over 10 kilometres, 2/8 stratocumulus at 1,200 metres and 6/8 altostratus at 2,700) and concluded that, with known craft ruled out, what the son-in-law saw had to be included 'among the Unidentified Flying Objects', while the father-in-law's cultural level, 'the impression he gives of being somewhat "out of the ordinary"' and the lack of any proof made it impossible to credit him, 'attributing it to his imagination'. On 4 August the acting general commanding the 3rd Air Region sent the Air Staff his interpretation: the information did not seem to offer enough guarantee of reliability 'because of the small number of witnesses, because they are moreover related, and because the state of one of them offers no guarantee of mental balance, whereas the one of greater human standing offers an observation in which the fleetingness of the object contrasts with the details he noticed at a considerable distance'. He concluded that 'the present information should not be taken into consideration'.

The file grew two years later. On 15 May 1977 the daily YA had published Benítez's report 'Marks in a mining area', the fourth instalment of a series titled '"UFOs": official documents of the Spanish Government'. The Stendek team of consultants wrote to the 3rd Air Region that the article presented the case as 'ratified by the Air Ministry, which we do not believe', and sent its study, dated San Sebastián 1 September 1979, with the list of its consultants, among them the telecommunications engineer Félix Ares de Blas and Vicente J. Ballester Olmos. According to the study, over nearly ten visits the witness gave two very different versions; neither his wife nor his children witnessed any of the landings, and at the first interview he identified as the craft he had seen the emblem of the Centre for Cosmic Fraternity Studies, which reproduces Adamski's ship. The operator of a small backhoe told them he had made the marks months earlier while pulling out ferrous carbonate stones, and the measurements matched his machine; moreover, lorries passed the spoil heap day and night, one every three minutes or less, and their drivers had seen nothing abnormal. The conclusion was: 'It is therefore a hoax.' On 10 September the 3rd Region thanked Ares de Blas for the information, and on the 11th it forwarded the study to the Air Staff. The file was declassified in January 1995.

Gallarta is a case of landings with occupants, handshakes and a sample-taking tankette, and for that very reason it serves as a contrast. The file preserves the whole path: a press report that reaches the command, an inquiry that Zaragoza sends back twice, an investigating officer who ends up separating his two witnesses, an air region that dismisses the information and, two years later, a civilian study that traces the origin of the marks. It also shows how the case circulated outside the barracks: YA presented it in a series of 'official documents of the Spanish Government', and the Stendek study notes that the press called it 'a case beyond all doubt' because the Air Ministry had investigated it, when the air region had concluded that it should not be taken into consideration.

The prosaic explanation covers the main layer well. The marks, which the press presented as proof of the landings, have according to Stendek an earthly origin acknowledged by the backhoe operator himself and checked against the measurements of his machine; the account changed from one interview to the next; nobody in the family saw anything, and a lorry passed the edge of the spoil heap every few minutes. The official judgement had come earlier and by another route: two related witnesses, the father-in-law's account put down by the officer to his imagination and the son-in-law's reduced by the general to a fleeting sighting with too many details.

A smaller layer remains that the hoax does not fully explain: the son-in-law's daytime sighting, an object that climbed almost vertically for one or two seconds. Stendek sets it aside, writes that the engineer made it together with his wife and that it 'presumably has nothing to do with the ones that concern us'; the officer listed it among unidentified objects. Against it weigh its brevity, which the general set against the details the witness said he made out at a kilometre, the three different times given in the papers, the sky the form describes as 'almost clear' against the 6/8 altostratus in the METAR, and the Stendek study's statement that the Official College of Naval Engineers had no one with the son-in-law's name in its records. Nor did Stendek fully close its own judgement: after concluding that the story did not happen, it asked whether the witness invented it consciously or unconsciously, and wrote that its opinion of a conscious hoax 'is not definitive'.

The two witnesses belong to the same family, each describes different events that nobody else corroborates, and their official statements were taken about three months later.