Spain: Eyewitness Accounts of Sightings in Castille and León

Source: El Norte de Castilla (newspaper-Spain)
Date: 09.25.2015

Spain: Eyewitness Accounts of Sightings in Castille and León

El Norte de Castilla and other newspapers have carried in their pages some of the unexplained phenomena that have occurred in the community.

J.A. Pardal | VALLADOLID

To speak of UFOs is highly complex from the prism of a serious means of communication, whose work is based on physical evidence and eyewitness statements, and both lacking in the texts discussing such phenomena, where accusations of madness, hoaxing or confabulation are on the tips of the readers’ tongues.

But taking a softer approach to the phenomenon, it isn’t necessarily about aliens visiting naïve humans, or stories of celestial emissaries. A UFO is merely an unidentified flying object to the onlooker. It could be of military origin, a natural phenomenon, an aerial artifact or an atmospheric observation balloon that gives rise to error. Beyond sightings of this kind, which can be explained, there is a small group whose provenance is unknown. There are a few of this kind in Castille and León.

Aside from one that is probably the best-known (which occurred on 16 September 1965) there are other cases which, in recent years, have peppered the pages of El Norte de Castilla and other newspapers.

A segment of the “Radamantis” video program, created by El Norte, tells of the encounter which took place in Matapozuelos in 1974. During this event, several 12-year-old boys claimed having seen some red lights around eleven o’clock at night, flying over the town at low altitude. One of the boys, identified as Fidel, found a 10-meter wide flying saucer behind a wall which reflected the lights.

Behind the object were three silhouettes of a whitish cast. According to the witness, he engaged in “telepathic communication” with the three beings. Fidel asked them about their origin, and they told him something that sounded like “Sim or Simi” to the boy.

In November 2000, a UFO conference was held in Tordesillas by Nacho Ares with the participation of expert Iker Jimenez, among others. At the bottom of the page, beside the information that concentrated mainly on the 1965 case, there is an unequivocal statement by poet Alan Pipo: “I saw an extraterrestrial with antennae in 1975.” In the small text that accompanied the eye-catching headline, journalist Elena García de Castro states that the extraordinary event took place in the month of May, near the town of Renedo. Pipo describes what he encountered: “It was a being standing between 1.85 or 1.90 tall, bulky, leaden-grey in color. It walked for a few meters without putting its feet on the ground, and then it vanished.”

In 1976, specifically on 3 September, El Diario de Castilla newspaper – in its Segovia edition – reported a sighting of an unidentified flying object by four college students on the road linking Segovia proper and Madrona, close to this latter community. The phenomenon was witnessed days later by some of other townspeople and according to Amelia Ayuso, one of the witnesses, it was “a deflated balloon, orange in color, with an opaque light that did not harm the eyes or gave off flashes. I can’t describe its outline. It was undefined. It was less than one meter. At a given moment, the object made a right angle in the air and descended toward our Seat 600 at breakneck speed.”

There are those who come across these unexplained phenomena, and there are others who go out to find them. This is the case of the so-called ‘UFO Skywatches’ – that is, gatherings at which casual fans and students of the subject devote the entire night to looking at the sky and learning more about the phenomenon during such events. For example, during the Primer Encuentro OVNI (First UFO Encounter) held in Villabáñez in July 2003, in spite of there not having been any sightings, there were accounts by some people who claimed having had such experiences.

Miguel Asensio, the event’s organizer, claimed in the pages of the next day’s paper that he had firsthand experience with unexplained phenomena. “On several occasions I’ve seen lights that left a vast wake of light. I’m not sure if they were UFOs, but it was clear that they were neither cars nor airplanes. They were very strange lights.” Likewise, researcher Jose Luis Camacho retold his own experience in 1980 when he saw a device flying over his house on Miguel Iscar Street for approximately an hour and a half. “When I was small, I would look out the window to see the lights of my city.
But something shocking occurred that day. I saw an immense light, with impossible movements and twists, leaving a vast luminous trail in its wake.”

A year later, Camacho himself would say that “Valle del Esqueva is a UFO runway” in an interview as President of AIFEX (Asociacion Para Investigar Fenomenos Extraterrestres – Association for the Research of Extraterrestrial Phenomena). The researcher claims that “there is a theory which places these communities along an “ortothenic line” – that is, a sort of track that crosses the valley, turning it into a highway for UFOs.”

[Translation © 2015 S. Corrales, IHU with thanks to J.A. Pardal (El Norte de Castilla) and Guillermo Gimenez (Planeta UFO)]