Source: Planeta UFO and Alicante Press
Date: July 21, 2017
Spain: Ministry of Defense Investigated at Least 8 UFO Cases in 70s-80s
The Ministry of Defense was aware of at least eight strange phenomena in Alicante's airspace during the 1970s and 1980s. These cases were part of the Spanish Air Force's (Ejército del Aire) UFO Files. Today, 80 of those files, which include the events at Aitana, may be freely perused in the Ministry of Defense's website.
The first UFO incident linked to the Escuadron de Vigilancia Aérea (Air Surveillance Squadron, EVA) in Aitana was dated July 28, 1975. A number of non-commissioned officers witnessed an object performing a fly-over of the EVA military facilities at 05:30 hours. The report discloses that shortly before the sighting, the radar had picked up a 'motionless echo' over the sea.
On February 6, 1979 at 21:17 hours, EVA 5 picked up radar echoes over the sea. At that very same time, the fuel ship Tamames' witnessed 'multiple lights'. The Ejercito del Aire's report indicates this could have been a 'parachuting' exercise. A month later, on March 13, 1979, the Aitana Base's radar picked up an 'unknown echo' heading toward the Iberian Peninsula. The Defense Ministry then scrambled a Mirage III fighter out of the Manises Base to find out what was taking place in Spanish airspace. There would be another scramble months later, this time from the Los Llanos airbase in Albacete. Captain Fernando Cámara took off in his Mirage F1 searching for lights reported by the pilot of a TAE Airlines flight from Mallorca to Tenerife, seen over the city of Valencia. The date was November 11, 1979 and it would become known as the Manises Incident, the most significant one in Spanish ufology.
Another of Ministry of Defense file that has been digitized and is available for review concerns an incident that took place on April 26, 1986. An object was seen plummeting into the sea into the waters near Benidorm at 18:00 from the Sierra de Aitana's EVA 5 facility. The Guardia Civil (state police) was advised and the military did not pursue the investigation. The last UFO case recorded by the EVA 5 facility took place on July 26, 1986 when radar picked up an unknown echo on the Baleares-Cádiz route.
Among the declassified documents now available to the public we also find the letter written by a resident of Alicante on June 25, 1981 to the Spanish Air Force, advising it of a UFO sighting from the terrace at his place of residence. The citizen attached drawings of the alleged object to his letter, showing a boomerang-shaped object. Another of the Ejército del Aire's digitized files concerns the sighting of "strange phenomena" during Iberia Flight 435 from Palma to Madrid on February 25, 1969.
The story concerning these recently scanned documents begins in 1991, when the Ministry of Defense engaged in a document declassification process involving sightings of strange phenomena (the "UFO Files) with a view toward analyzing them and if necessary, to lower their classification level and make them available to the public. The declassification request was issued by Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, who had presented the report entitled "El fenómeno OVNI y el Ejército del Aire" to the Air Force high command. In 1992, the Intelligence Sector of the Mando Operativo Aéreo (Operational Air Command - MOA) kicked off the declassification process, a task entrusted to Lt. Col. Angel Bastida. A physical copy of the files was deposited with the Ejército del Aire's Central Library at the Madrid Headquarters, and it is the scanned version of this copy that is now freely available to the citizenry.
[Translation (c) 2017 Scott Corrales, IHU with thanks to Guillermo Giménez and Alicante Press]