Late 1970s UFO Activity in Southern Spain

 

 

Late 1970s UFO Activity in Southern Spain

By Scott Corrales

With the passing of decades we discover that a considerable number of UFO/paranormal cases have fallen through the cracks through no fault of any particular agent: information that did not make it to book form in the days of inexpensive and informative paperbacks (the 1960 thru early 1980s period) wound up either in fanzines redolent of mimeograph ink or else foreign publications that were as hard to get in the Americas as the proverbial hens teeth. But now, the Internet – the hallowed ‘information superhighway’ of the 90s – has allowed us to gain an awareness of entire UFO flaps that went unnoticed by U.S. readers.

While publications like Flying Saucer Review led the way as far as regional case studies were concerned, stateside publications offered columns covering very high profile events – Jerome Clark’s Saucer Central International in SAGA UFO Magazine comes to mind.

Let us briefly examine the flurry of UFO cases that swept across southern Spain in the 1970s, yielding a wealth of eyewitness testimony and compelling illustrations.

The Cabbie and the Saucer

Antonio González Morales, a taxicab operator in the southern city of Seville, thought he was done for the day at 11:30 pm on November 27, 1977 – an onerous winter day like the one before and surely the one to follow. But as he drove out of the city’s Alcosa urbanization, two men and a woman flagged him down – another fare, and not a very welcome one. The threesome wanted to be taken to Carmona, a community that wasn’t exactly a hop skip and jump away. But conscious of the money involved for the ride, he agreed. The passengers boarded and the journey proceeded in silence until around one o’clock in the morning, in the empty stretch of road only a few miles from their destination.

A strange source of light made a sudden appearance on the horizon, crossing the car’s path  and remaining motionless in the ink black sky. One of the hitherto silent passengers declared that it must be a helicopter, to which González replied that such a craft would not remain motionless in the air for such a long period of time. Surely, it had to be one of those UFOs that people had been seeing in the countryside for many years now.

At the mention of “UFO”, the female passenger became visibly alarmed, perhaps fearful at the prospect of being whisked away to some extraterrestrial haven, as these were the days of belief in UMMO and its ultra-progressive, Scandinavian-looking saucermen. She could now see – as did the others – that the shiny object hovering above a nearby olive grove was shaped like two saucers joined at their edges, possibly twenty five feet in diameter, with green and red lights above and below with an orange midsection. The driver did not hesitate to lower his window to get a better look and to check for any noises made by the uncanny device; all the while his passengers urged him to speed up and distance them from the glowing, unknown quantity. When he chose to heed their wishes, it dawned on González that the engine appeared to lack the customary pickup, as if the object’s presence had sapped its vitality.

Within minutes, the taxi reached Carmona. The passengers hurriedly paid the driver and vanished into the night, never to be heard from again. It was now up to González to make the return journey to Seville all by his lonesome, wending his way across the darkened countryside, but no alien craft appeared out of the gloom to waylay him. He headed to the San Pablo Airport where fellow hire drivers congregated, but no one reported having seen anything unusual that evening. Driving along to a filling station, the sleepy attendant also shook his head – no bright lights or Martians as far as he knew. Upon reaching his house, González struggled to convince himself that his experience had been as real as the passengers he’d taken to distant Carmona. He felt wide awake and oddly energized. His wife, however, played down his excitement over the event, and the story amused his relatives. But like David Vincent in that legendary television show, Antonio González had seen a UFO, and he would not be gainsaid.

What the Draftsman Saw

José Luis Romero, an apprentice draftsman, looked up from his work table on May 9, 1980 – a hot, splendid day that presaged the imminent arrival of summer. He had been distracted from his assignment by a strange object in the sky, flying in from the southwest. Thinking at first that it could be something as prosaic as a plastic bag swept along by the prevailing winds, he was surprised when the object remained motionless over a tree before executing a graceful landing. Romero turned to his companion, Fernando González, and asked him to take a look. Now both young men became witnesses to the strange object suddenly rising to treetop level, remaining perfectly still, and then heading toward Cádiz before correcting its course and heading for Seville, gaining altitude and vanishing from sight.

The witnesses agreed that the object had an overall ‘uneven’ structure, having a shiny upper section and a dark lower one. Romero would later say: “As I watched the object, it shone in an odd way. It would shine at times, then become invisible, then shining again.” He expressed the belief that the sheen was not the product of reflected light, but rather self-generated, as the intense sunlight at that hour would have caused the intruder to gleam steadily.

A few days later, members of the Red Nacional de Corresponsales (National Correspondents Network or RNC) visited the area to conduct a visual appraisal of the possible landing site. What was originally identified as ‘landing marks’ turned out to be indentations made by local cattle; no scorched vegetation or broken branches were in evidence either. The intruder had made good its escape.

Doctor Chased By Anomalous Object

But the bizarre objects filling the Andalusian skies hadn’t gone away entirely, and the summer of 1980 proved to be a busy one.

August 11, 1980 would have been an otherwise unremarkable day, but a brush with the unknown turned it into an unforgettable memory for a physician driving late at night from La Antilla to Seville, a ninety minute drive following a nearly straight road (A-49) between both points. What makes the case important is that the object not only followed the good doctor home, but it also hovered over the structure for an extended period of time.

“See here,” said the physician, identified as Jose Luis Torrella López, “I left La Antilla at 2:45 a.m., which I normally do on weekends. Once I passed the town of Niebla on the way to Villarrasa, I became aware of a tiny light, different from a star, that zig-zagged at a height of about 300 meters before it vanished. I saw it again before reaching Manzanilla, where it looked a lot larger. At first I thought it might be a shooting star, but it was too low, and furthermore, shooting stars can’t move like that. I saw it again at around 4:30 a.m. as it flew along the right side of my car. I could now tell that the object was three sided with a yellow light in the middle. Now I started feeling nervous and stepped on the gas, pouring on speed. By the time I reached the Castilleja cemetery, the object had moved away, spinning on its own axis. By the time I got home and pulled up to the gateway, the UFO was practically on top of my car, giving off a pale yellow light. I ran up the stairs and told my father, who was alarmed at the state I was in, thinking something was wrong. I told him about the UFO and he came outside with me. A neighbor also came out to take a look. It was still there and remained until 5 or 6 a.m.. I didn’t think to call the police, since given the amount of people reporting these things; I don’t think they’d be very interested. Now I see these objects exist, and it is necessary to study and analyze them. It’s absurd that governments should conceal their existence.”

Summary

These then were the opening rounds of a nationwide flap that would be the subject of features, papers and books by authors such as J.J. Benítez and scientists like Vicente Juan Ballester Olmos.  It is interesting that these events should have played out toward the end of the astonishingly ‘saucer active’ 1970s, at a time when interest in the phenomenon was declining and much was being written worldwide about the ‘death of ufology’. It coincided with the 1980-1981 flap in the United States, which is often overlooked.