Spain.Puente Almuhey · the light in the southwest and the disc that split in three

On 13 December 1968 the military aerodrome at León received a letter from the stationmaster of the La Robla Railway at Puente Almuhey, a village in the north of the province near the border with Palencia. He informed the head of the air sector that an unidentified flying artefact had been seen in the village. The aerodrome opened an inquiry under two captains of the Air Arm, who on 14 December took statements from six people with the same printed questionnaire: day, place, time, size, shape, height, noise, direction, speed, duration, colour, lights and whether the witness knew what a shooting star or a comet was.

The statements describe two different episodes. The first took place on the night of 24 November, at about ten. A 32-year-old woman from the village said that on the road from Cervera to La Magdalena, at kilometre 33, she saw for about ten minutes a disc-shaped object some two metres across, almost level with the road, with a continuous reddish light, silent and moving very slowly; she added that it broke up into three lights identical to the first, which joined back into one, and that it faded slowly. A 19-year-old mechanic stated in León that the same night, at ten, on the road from Guardo to Puente Almuhey, near the border between León and Palencia, he saw a reddish circular object about ten metres off the ground and five hundred to a thousand metres away, for ten to fifteen minutes; it seemed to him to move southwest and to change into a kind of horn with its point upward, whose base slowly rose as its brightness faded until it vanished. According to the aerodrome's report, the first witnesses, a married couple, had stopped the third, who had no connection with them, on the road.

The second episode took up the evenings of 8 and 10 December, between seven and eight, and was seen by several villagers, always in a group. A 44-year-old pointsman spoke of a white light, spherical or ovoid, about thirty centimetres across, four to five hundred metres up, which lasted two hours the first day and an hour and a half the second and left towards the southwest; a 41-year-old woman saw it for a few minutes above a spot about five hundred metres south of the station, between yellow and white; a 42-year-old industrialist saw it for about two minutes on the 10th, round and white; and the stationmaster, aged 46, described it as 'a lantern with six panes', white, with some flashes, coming from the southwest and 'swaying slowly', two and a half hours the first day and an hour and a half the second.

On 14 January 1969 the León aerodrome sent up its conclusions. It placed the observations in the immediate surroundings of the village, between seven and ten in the evening; it distinguished a strong, small light, between white and yellow, motionless for up to an hour and a half and disappearing to the southwest, from a circular object about two metres across that split into three discs and changed into a kind of triangle; and it noted that the aerodrome's meteorologist found no similar atmospheric phenomenon on those days. On 22 January the lieutenant general commanding the First Air Region wrote to the Air Staff that, 'given the confusion in the information and the discrepancies in the statements', the nature of the objects could not be determined, and that, 'in a very remote way', it might be the setting of the Moon in the first case and some planet in the second. In March 1993 the intelligence officer of the Air Operations Command summarised the file with the same reading, naming Venus, and proposed declassifying it.

The file proposes the astronomical causes almost in passing, as a 'very remote' possibility, and did not make the check that would have tested them. Done today with ephemerides, the match is close. On 24 November there was a crescent Moon, 28 % lit, which at ten in the evening local time stood in the southwest less than one degree above the horizon and set at 22:09: a reddish, low light in the southwest that lasts a few minutes and vanishes, as the two witnesses said. The horn with its point upward whose base rises as it fades is the shape of a crescent Moon going down behind the terrain. On the evenings of 8 and 10 December, Venus, the brightest body in the sky after the Sun and the Moon, stood in the southwest about ten degrees up between seven and eight and set at about a quarter to nine; a white light, still for hours, that twinkles and seems to sway near the horizon, in the direction everyone who saw it gave.

Not everything fits as cleanly. The disc that split into three lights and came back together, and the approach the first witnesses described, do not follow from the Moon on its own, though a low Moon seen through cloud or behind the line of a hill can break up and reform to the eye. The heights and sizes the witnesses gave, thirty centimetres or two metres, at three hundred or five hundred metres, are estimates of a light with no reference, which cannot be measured. And the head of the region himself stressed the confusion and discrepancies in the statements. Its interest is above all one of method: it shows the air region taking statements with the same questionnaire for everyone, separating two episodes the village was mixing up, consulting the meteorologist and noting an explanation that seemed remote to it at the time and that the ephemerides support.