Canary Islands: Unidentified Objects Over Tenerife (2002)

 

 Unidentified Objects Over Tenerife

by José Gregorio Jiménez

 On April 17, 2002, a couple and their son witnessed the strange maneuvers of a variety of lights from their home in Tenerife's Barrio El Cardonal. The objects were even caught on tape for a few brief secodds. That night and at the same time, another sighting occurred on the island, which when added to recent cases, leads us to consider that UFO activity in the Canary Islands has re-ignited.

 The first observation took place to the northeast of Tenerife, specifically in the region of Acentejo, at 22:40 hours. At that time, a married couple witnessed the presence of two very bright lights for approximately 15 seconds. The lights were situated vertically and linked by an arc of light which "simulated the curvature of the Moon. The upper one had a yellowish-white hue, emitting a curved focus of lower intensity, which in turn linked to the other object, which was whitish-blue in color," as they told Año Cero magazine. The witnesses claimed that after seeing the sudden appearance of the lights, they also noticed that the lights appeared to form part of the same body or structure. This sighting would have remained merely an anecdote had it not been for the emergence of other witnesses who claimed having witnessed--at the same time and day--a spectacular phenomenon on another part of the island. In this case, a video recording almost 5 minutes long was obtained.

 A Set of Lights

 The witnesses to the event, a family made up of Lorenzo, Oana and their son Stefan, became aware at 22:50 hours  of some strange lights located 20 degrees above the horizon of Santa Cruz. From their window they could see--between the mountains of Taco and the San Matías neighborhood--the swift maneuvers of up to a dozen lights, some of them which remained visible for long periods of time, while others barely remained visible for one second.

     "The first to notice was my son, just as I got home. We watched them unaided for a while, then we went to find the video and still cameras. We passed binoculars to each other, and my son recorded those lights which were by no means natural," said Lorenzo, the head of the household.

     In short, the observation had a total duration of seven minutes. No photographs were taken although the aforementioned video recording was successful; numerous details were made out through the binoculars and the camcorder's eyepiece.

     The recording is sufficiently good so as to allow us to envision the swift movements of some lights, and the singular appearance and disappearance of others, with no more than two lights being visible at the same time at any moment. The video further shows good points of reference, discarding the possibility that the lights could be headlights, steamship floodlights or conventional aircraft. In any event, the witnesses claim that the video only barely captures the movement of the lights, which they claim was far more complex. The drawing shown to us by the son illustrates what he could see through the camcorder eyepiece, and which his parents could confirm through the binoculars: it consisted of a conical shape with an amorphous, poorly defined upper section, whose interior contained up to six sources of high intensity.

 In Search of an Explanation

 The investigations carried out have allowed us to discard the possibility that weather balloons or conventional astronomic phenomena were found. This last possibility is important, since an unusual alignment of five planets was visible during the month of May. The phenomenon does not jibe with the trajectories of satellites nor with the observation of the International Space Station. The observation remains unexplained.

(From Inexplicata #12 - Summer 2003)