Spain.Zaragoza · the light over the General Military Academy

At about ten at night on 29 March 1980, the colonel who was director of studies at the General Military Academy, on the outskirts of Zaragoza, telephoned the chief of staff of the Air Transport Command. According to the letter that command sent to the Air Staff on 2 April, he reported that for 'about 20 minutes' he had been watching 'with binoculars and with the naked eye a bright object, motionless and with a glow around it'. In the statement he later signed before the investigating officer, the colonel, with 38 years of service and wearing prescription glasses, placed the sighting between 21:45 and 22:15, from a window at the Academy, and described it thus: 'seen through binoculars it seemed to have the shape of a lemon squeezer, very bright because of the intense light it gave off, golden in colour'. Its size was 'that of a large star', with no trail and no sound. He saw it at about 60° of elevation when it appeared and at 30° when it vanished; it 'remained motionless for about 30 minutes and disappeared from West to Northwest'. He added that 'more than eight members of the family' saw it, that 'their comments and those of neighbours agree that it had been appearing for several days', and that 'it gave the impression of a very close star, an impression that faded when it disappeared abruptly'.

The chief of staff passed the alert to the duty captain at Zaragoza air base, asking him to request from the tower and from the ground-controlled approach radar (GCA) any echo in the area of the Academy. According to the captain's report, at about 22:10 the GCA answered that it had two echoes, on radial 090 at 7 miles and radial 095 at 10 miles, moving 'from E. to W. very slowly without transponder and without determining altitude, estimating it was low'; they were seen for three minutes, disappeared for good ten minutes later and were not seen from the tower. At about 23:15 others appeared: one between radials 050 and 060, at 3 to 6 miles, flying circular circuits, and another on radial 220 moving out and in between 10 and 12 miles. Then came interference inside the 7-mile circle which, according to maintenance, 'was not from the radar, so it must have been external'. A handwritten note at the foot of the same report adds that the Academy saw 'the same bright lights' again the next day, over roughly the same place and for a similar time, and that it ruled out military helicopters because none were deployed at the San Gregorio training ground next to the Academy. The letter of 2 April also records that the colonel governor of San Gregorio said the people of the surrounding villages were alarmed and regarded the place as a 'UFO zone'.

On 16 April the Chief of the Air Staff ordered that Circular Order 9.266-CT of 1968 be followed, and on 22 April the Air Transport Command asked Wing 31 to appoint an investigating officer, who was an Air Force captain. He took separate statements from the two witnesses, gathered the list of traffic handled by the Zaragoza control centre on the night of 29 March (two airline arrivals, from Madrid and Barcelona, and one departure to Madrid) and asked the base weather office for the data for the 29th, 30th and 31st. The second witness, the GCA controller, a native of New Orleans with five years and five months of experience, stated that at 21:05 universal time, 22:05 in Zaragoza, he saw on the screen a single primary target 'an eighth of an inch' across, 'the size of a Cessna', which went slowly back and forth between 8 and 4 miles for two or three minutes; he did not know its altitude or how it disappeared. The investigating officer noted that this single echo did not match the two echoes the controller had given over the telephone. His conclusion, dated 3 July, was that the colonel's statement 'provides no clear evidence that it was not an astral body of great luminosity', that the echo 'could well be, from its speed and size, a light aircraft' that was outside approach and tower control, and that 'neither can we affirm that this echo belonged to the luminous body sighted by the first witness'.

On 17 July the lieutenant general commanding the Air Transport Command and the 3rd Air Region signed his personal interpretation: 'there is no reliable evidence to admit the presence of UFOs, and in the case of the first witness's observation it may have been a sidereal body of great luminosity', while the echoes could be 'those of a light aircraft without contact with the air traffic agencies'. The file, classified as confidential, was declassified in November 1995. The summary written then by the Intelligence Section of the Air Operations Command already pointed out 'an ambiguity of dates that is not cleared up in the documents': the two witnesses say the 29th, the Air Transport Command letter and the investigating officer's report say the 30th, and the general's interpretation speaks of the 30th and 31st.

The right date is 29 March. It is given by the two signed statements, by the traffic list the investigating officer requested from the control centre and by the duty captain's own report, which carries '29-III-80' in its heading and is signed on the 30th, at the end of the duty. The Air Transport Command letter of 2 April turned that signature into 'on the 30th', and the investigating officer copied that paragraph word for word into his account of the facts; the handwritten note that speaks of 'the following day, the 31st' was written on top of the same error. If the first night was the 29th, the repeat the Academy reported belongs to the 30th. The confusion changes nothing about what was seen, but it matters for checking it: the three nights had the same sky.

That sky had an obvious candidate. With the ephemerides computed for the Academy, Venus, at magnitude −4.2, near its greatest evening elongation and ten times brighter than any star, stood between 17° and 12° above the west-northwest horizon (azimuth 284° to 289°) from 21:45 to 22:15 local time, exactly in the direction in which the colonel said the object disappeared; it set at about 23:25. It was visible every evening in the same place, which fits the neighbours who said it 'had been appearing for several days' and the repeat the following night at the same time. A bright planet seen through hand-held binoculars and prescription glasses often looks like an object with a shape and flashes, and 'a very close star' is how the witness himself described it. The objection is the altitude: the colonel gave 60° when he saw it and 30° when it vanished, three or four times that of Venus. Jupiter, at magnitude −2.2, was indeed at about 60°, but to the south-southeast and less than twenty degrees from the nearly full Moon, not towards the west. Altitude estimates by eye are usually exaggerated, but the gap is large and remains the weakness of the astronomical explanation. Nor does the abrupt ending have a cause in the file: the base weather office gave 3/8 to 5/8 of cloud at 4,000 feet that night with a west-northwest wind, while the controller recorded an overcast of altostratus at 23:00; a cloud arriving from the west would hide the planet at once, but the file does not allow this to be checked.

The radar does not corroborate the light. The echoes coincide in time with the sighting, but not in place or behaviour: radial 090 from the base, between 4 and 8 miles out, falls to the south and southwest of the Academy, a few kilometres away, where a low aircraft would be seen near the horizon, not at 60° nor towards the west-northwest; the echo moved and lasted two or three minutes, while the light stayed motionless for half an hour. The investigating officer himself refused to link them. The file therefore holds two independent observations that touch only on the clock.

The case is valuable for what it shows of Spanish military procedure at the time: a colonel who calls the Air Staff while he is watching, a radar consulted on the spot, an investigating officer who separates the witnesses, requests traffic and weather data and even records the contradictions of his second witness, and a general who closes with a concrete explanation. Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, adviser to the declassification process, did not include it among the nine cases of the collection's 122 that he considered unresolved in 2016.