Spain.Palma–Madrid flight · Iberia pilots see a flashing light

On February 25, 1969 an Iberia Caravelle took off from Palma de Mallorca for Madrid as flight IB-435. At about 21:18 UTC, already over the Mediterranean and climbing to its cruising level, the first officer saw a strange light at their own height, almost straight ahead, between half past twelve and one o'clock, in the clock-face terms pilots use for position (twelve o'clock is dead ahead). The captain, aged 32, described it in his statement: it changed intensity every ten or fifteen seconds, going from bright red to bright white.

They asked Barcelona Control whether there was any traffic on their route; the captain later stated that the answer was no, but the tape records Barcelona pointing out an Iberia coming head-on from Madrid, and then saying it had "nothing else on your route". Barcelona had no knowledge of a Grumman flying from Algiers to Madrid much lower, at 16,000 feet, which reported passing over Sagunto at 21:39.

They tried to talk to the military radars on the emergency frequency, the guard channel. According to the first officer, Kansas, one of the military radio call signs, answered and told them to call Embargo. The Air Operations Command summary of the communications records that contact with Kansas at 21:27. The captain, by contrast, stated that on that frequency they could not reach any radar center, only the civil towers. Through Barcelona they finally reached No. 7 Alert and Control Centre, a military radar center, which placed them 21 miles short of Sagunto and saw no other aircraft on its screen.

According to the captain, the light stayed at their height for about fifteen minutes, dropped suddenly toward the ground, receded until it was a very distant point and came closer again for just over a minute; in that phase it looked to him like a triangle with lit corners. It kept pace with them for another three or four minutes and faded until it disappeared; under questioning he specified that it went "little by little at quite a high speed, apparently heading northeast". According to the captain, the flight engineer and, he believed, a stewardess also saw it. At about 21:33 they said by radio that they saw it far away and close to the ground, roughly over Teruel; at 21:38 they lost sight of it.

The conversation had taken place on a channel many stations monitored, and the Cifra news agency heard about it at once. Over the following days the press, led by the daily ABC, published interviews and headlines, and the Air Minister even replied by letter to a witness who wrote in from the ground. The head of the Valencia Air Sector made a first inquiry: the Civil Guard in a dozen villages between Sagunto, Liria and Chiva asked local residents. A warden said he had seen, at about 19:30 local time, a shape of black smoke like the letter M over the hills, and a pump operator, at 20:00, a luminous object from which a smaller one broke away. The report did not link them to the aircraft and acknowledged that there were aircraft in the area at those times.

The Air Staff appointed a lieutenant colonel as investigating officer, who took statements from both pilots, gathered the recordings of the communications and analyzed the hypotheses one by one. He ruled out the Grumman, which was flying much lower, and another aircraft in general: neither the airborne radar nor the military radars detected anything, the observation lasted some twenty minutes and such a crew had ample time to recognize an aircraft. He did note that the airspace between Sagunto and Valencia had "systematically" produced "many appearances of unidentified objects", which he put down to commercial and military traffic and to the "psychosis" fed by the press.

He was left with two candidates: an artificial satellite, which he judged "one of the most probable" despite the intensity of the light, and the planet Venus, a hypothesis he studied "at the suggestion" of the deputy chief of the Air Staff. He consulted the Madrid Observatory and drew a sketch. The aircraft was flying on a true heading of 282; at 21:19, when the pilots first saw the light, Venus lay in that same direction (azimuth 282), about four degrees above the horizon, dead ahead of the nose. It then sank and drifted to the right, just like the light. And the Observatory gave Venus setting at 21:40, two minutes after the crew lost sight of it.

The conclusion was clear: had it been a satellite, it would have had to be almost in the same position as Venus, and the pilots would have seen two bright points. They saw only one, so that point was the planet. The colored flashes, the changes in apparent distance and the triangular shape at the end he put down to the twinkling and refraction of a very low celestial body seen through humidity and cloud banks, and the sudden drop to a slight pitching of the aircraft with the autopilot engaged.

The report does not discuss the departure "toward the northeast" that the captain described later. The live recording placed the light over Teruel, to the west, and the first officer said it faded; the report concludes that at 21:38 "they stop seeing the object, which disappears not instantly but by losing its brightness very rapidly". The Valencia Air Sector, in its first inquiry, had given a different time, 21:50; the investigating officer kept the one recorded on the tape.

The case was solved in 1969, almost in real time, with the tools of the day: statements, radio recordings, data from the Madrid Observatory and a sketch. The matches are concrete: the light appeared exactly on the aircraft's heading, where Venus was; it sank and drifted as a setting celestial body does, and it disappeared at the time of setting. The satellite argument closes the other door: the pilots did not see two lights, so there was no object besides Venus. Almost twenty-five years later, when the file was declassified in 1993, the Air Operations Command intelligence officer summed it up with a question: if it was not Venus, where had the planet gone, shining at that moment right in front of them?

The case also shows how easy it is to be mistaken from a cockpit. A professional crew with thousands of flying hours described a light that approached, receded, dropped suddenly and changed shape, and the report explained each of those features by the aircraft's own motion and by the atmosphere near the horizon. It did not blame the pilots: it recalled that other veteran pilots had made similar mistakes and judged it logical that they called the radars on the guard channel, even though that spread the news.

Its criticism was aimed at the ministry. It noted that many files had no definitive conclusions, that none showed the people who had made statements being told anything, and that the press filled that vacuum. It proposed publishing from time to time a summary of solved cases, asking airlines for more discretion from their crews and for information to be sent to the ministry at once, telling those involved the results and creating an information and analysis office, and it cited a note submitted to the Chief of the Air Staff on November 14, 1967. None of those ideas was applied at the time; the opening of the archives had to wait until 1992.