Spain.Usagre · two travelers see a lit object in a field

On Sunday, October 10, 1993, at about 00:15, two people were driving along the road from Zafra to Llerena, in the province of Badajoz. About three kilometers from the Usagre junction they saw with absolute clarity, for several seconds, something one of them later described, for want of a better term, as a kind of spacecraft. It appeared lit up about a hundred meters to the left of the road, in open country. It was oval; the lower part was hidden by trees or a mound, but they saw three quarters of its body, outlined by numerous orange, yellow and white lights. In the questionnaire he filled in later, the author of the statement noted that the apparition lasted three to five seconds, that the object was stationary and that "there were no movements, the lights went out."

They stayed in the area for about half an hour, torn between curiosity and fear, and roughly every five minutes they saw a flash that lit up the outline of the horizon in all directions. They thought of a distant storm, but it did not seem easy to equate with lightning. At 00:45 they drove on to Llerena. The next day they went back to the spot and found "nothing special."

On October 13 the witness wrote his statement, which reached the Government Delegation in Extremadura through the Civil Guard's 131st Command. He closed it with a personal paragraph: he had always held a dismissive, skeptical attitude toward such phenomena and intended to keep it, but he was absolutely certain that it had been there, and denying it to himself would be stupid. He asked for it to be considered and explained, although he also thought some discretion was advisable. The Delegation forwarded it to the Air Operations Command, which informed the Air Staff, and the Strait Air Command opened file 931011 and appointed an investigating officer to look into it.

The officer asked air traffic control about activity in the area that night (Seville control replied that no overflight of the area and no activity at the air bases was on record), checked the weather report, marked the route on the map and took statements from the witnesses using the standard questionnaire. Of the second witness he noted that she was not so sure of what she had seen, but had talked a great deal about it with the first. Of the first, that he clearly distinguished the apparition from the later flashes and that, while admitting everything might have an explanation, he "under no circumstances" believed what he saw could be "something human or terrestrial": the craft appeared, he insisted, "perfectly outlined by its clearance lights," the lights that mark the outline of a vehicle.

Three or four days after the officer spoke to the mayor of Usagre, a third witness turned up, not through a statement of his own but because he had mentioned the event to a Civil Guard. He had seen the lights in his rear-view mirror near Villagarcía de la Torre, about twelve kilometers to the south. At first he thought they were fairground rockets ("actually correct," the officer noted) and paid no attention; he became convinced they were UFOs after talking to the first witness, a friend of his.

The explanation came from the mayor himself. A wedding was being celebrated in Usagre that night, and around midnight the guests set off firecrackers and rockets for at least twenty minutes. They then moved on to Bienvenida, about five kilometers away, and carried on the party with more firecrackers, which explained the flashes the witnesses later saw at different points on the horizon. The investigating officer's finding, dated November 16, ticked the box "explicable."

On December 1 the general commanding the Strait Air Command signed his assessment. An almost overcast, very dark night with a distant storm full of lightning favored the illusion; the rear-view-mirror witness had correctly identified the rockets at first; the duration the first witness gave, three to five seconds, matched that of a rocket, and the second witness described it as a "fairground wheel with lights" (the author of the statement had himself written in his questionnaire that it looked like "a kind of fairground wheel, profusely and aesthetically lit"). He concluded that the event had nothing to do with a UFO and proposed keeping the file classified as confidential only to protect the identity of the second and third witnesses, who had asked for it. The file was declassified in October 1996.

The main witness was not credulous: he called himself a skeptic and was still sure he had seen a craft. The night was overcast and dark, with no reference points; there was a distant storm; the object appeared at a distance impossible to judge, and for a few seconds the rockets of a wedding, bursting in colored sprays, drew an oval shape full of orange, yellow and white lights. The person watching supplied the rest: the lower part hidden by trees, the object's body, the word "craft."

The third witness shows how a memory changes as it is talked over. He had correctly identified what he was seeing, fairground rockets, and only after talking to his friend did he begin to think of UFOs; the second witness, according to the officer, was not sure either and had talked about it a great deal with the first. The military file dates each statement, so that shift is recorded step by step.

The investigation was settled by a local fact. The officer did not stop at the questionnaire: he talked to the mayor, and the wedding with firecrackers explained both the initial sighting and the later flashes at other points on the horizon, which matched the party moving on to Bienvenida. The command left nothing anomalous unexplained.