Spain.Noia · the green fireball over Mount Iroite

At about 08:15 on 23 November 1993, shortly before sunrise, two cars carrying personnel of Air Surveillance Squadron No. 10 (EVA-10) were climbing Mount Iroite, in the Barbanza range between the Noia and Arousa estuaries, where the radar station occupies the summit at some 680 metres. In the first car, stopped at the entrance control hut, were a warrant officer and two sergeants first class; some two or three hundred metres behind, coming out of a bend in the road, came the official car of the lieutenant colonel commanding the squadron, driven by a soldier. All five saw, for three or four seconds, what the lieutenant colonel described that same day as a 'trace at great speed with a green luminous nucleus, its own light and a trail with white-yellow ignition'. The sky was clear in the direction of the sighting, with cloud and morning haze to the east according to two witnesses; the commander wrote 'CAVOK' and the squadron's own automatic weather station recorded dead calm, about 7 °C and 59 % humidity. The file's table puts sunrise at 07:10 universal time, but an ephemeris calculation places it at about 07:36, and the station's pyranometer records no radiation until after 07:50: at the time of the sighting the Sun was still some four degrees below the horizon, the commander ticked 'twilight' and one of the witnesses wrote that 'the sun had not yet appeared above the mountains'; the Moon did not rise until early afternoon.

The next day, 24 November, the lieutenant colonel sent the report from Noya to the commander-in-chief of the Air Operations Command, at Torrejón, under general instruction IG-40-5. With it went his own questionnaire, dated the 23rd: a trajectory 'rectilinear and uniform, parallel to the ground', about 20° above the horizon, from south-east to north-west, 'speed comparable to that of a meteorite', distance 'inestimable'. He compared the green light to a 'marine flare' and the tail to a 'white-yellowish firework'; he estimated the head as almost the diameter of the full Moon and the trail as five times that size, and he heard no sound. He did not see the end of the trajectory because the squadron's buildings hid it.

On 1 December the Air Operations Command asked the general commanding the Central Air Command (MACEN) to appoint an investigating officer and opened file 01-MACEN-93; on the 3rd a captain of EVA-10 itself was designated. The messages of those days date the sighting and the report to October, and the commander's own questionnaire, dated 23 November, writes 'month 10' in the box for the date of the event; it is an error the rest of the file corrects: the letter reached the Air Operations Command on 29 November, the weather table is for 23 November, the commander's second questionnaire, from December, says November, and on 23 October the Sun would already have risen at that hour. The captain took questionnaires from the five witnesses in mid-December. Those in the first car agree on the essentials: a sergeant in the back seat saw 'a green, egg-shaped body, followed by a sparkling white trail', which 'recalled a flare in its intensity and colours, though with sharper edges and no halo'; the driver, a supply sergeant, at first thought it was a vehicle's reflection on the windscreen and described the trail as 'like that of festival rockets'; the third, beside the driver, saw it come in from the left 'getting bigger each time', cross at an inclination of about 30° and vanish behind a rise, and described it as 'solid', phosphorescent green and cone-shaped. The soldier driving the commander's car compared it to a ball or a tadpole with a tail, one twentieth of the full Moon, and wrote that he thought it 'could be a meteorite', although its colour and direction made him doubt it. According to the sergeant in the back seat, the lieutenant colonel reached the hut at that moment and asked them about the phenomenon, which he too had seen from further back.

The captain added to the file what he could check. MACEN's operations section reported that between 07:00 and 09:00 local time there was no record of military aircraft activity in the area, nor of firing exercises or weapons tests. The warrant officer on duty in EVA-10's own operations room stated that in that interval no anomalous echo was detected and that traffic was light and normal. A sub-lieutenant of the squadron, a night angler on the Barbanza beaches, put on record that he sees many shooting stars, nearly all falling at a slant, that on rare occasions larger ones appear with a horizontal path lasting one or two seconds, and that a few have green or bluish light. On 4 January 1994 the captain closed his judgement by ticking that the phenomena were due to 'probably explicable' causes: from the testimony and the data provided, he was of the opinion that 'it could be a meteorite'.

The general commanding MACEN wrote that the sighting 'may be a natural phenomenon', a meteorite or similar, and attributed the green light to the body's composition and the low viewing angle; he added that 'the speed and the rectilinear trajectory give no grounds to conjecture that it could be some kind of vehicle of unknown origin' and, since there were 'no other nearby visual contacts or contacts of any other kind, nor subsequent reactions or damage to persons or things', he proposed treating it as unclassified information. On 20 January 1994 he forwarded the file to the Air Operations Command on that basis, and on 24 October 1996 the Air Operations Command intelligence officer proposed it for declassification.

The Noia case is valuable above all for how well documented something ordinary is. Five servicemen of an air surveillance unit, in two cars a few hundred metres apart, saw the same thing for three or four seconds, and each left a questionnaire with drawings, sketches and a description in his own words. The versions fit together on what matters: a bright green head, a trail that three of them saw as white or yellowish and sparkling and the other two as the same green, a straight and almost horizontal path, no sound, a duration of a few seconds. They also fit what is known about fireballs, very bright meteors that leave a fragmented trail and often show a green tint. The squadron commander himself, in his same-day questionnaire, compared its speed to that of a meteorite, and the soldier driver thought the same when he saw it, although its colour and direction made him doubt it.

The discrepancies are the usual ones in a four-second event seen without warning. The time ranges from 08:15 to 08:20; the elevation, from 20° to 30°; the size of the head, from one twentieth of the full Moon to the whole lunar disc; one saw it approach and grow, another described it as a solid cone. The squadron's own radar recorded no anomalous echo, which does not contradict the meteor reading either: a fireball burns up tens of kilometres high within a few seconds. And the check that there were no military aircraft, firing exercises or weapons tests rules out the nearest human alternatives.

The classification as a meteor is the conclusion the investigating officer and the general reached with the same data that survive, and which two of the witnesses had already suggested. What the file does not contain is an independent observation of the same fireball from another place, which would allow its trajectory to be reconstructed: the general noted explicitly that there were no other visual contacts. That gap is the only thing that keeps it from being considered fully resolved.

There is contemporaneous official documentation, the lieutenant colonel's same-day questionnaire and his report of the next day, and witnesses identified by rank in two groups who observed from different points (within each car they alerted one another, so they count as two testimonies), but no instrument recorded the object. Its interest is also procedural: it shows how the IG-40-5 system worked in the early nineties, with an investigating officer, standardised questionnaires, weather data, queries to operations and to the radar, and a general's reasoned classification proposal. The same squadron appears in another file, that of the December 1989 radar echo (↗).