Spain: The Algeciras Humanoids (CE-3, 1980)
By Manuel Ramirez, “Ovnis en Andalucia”
On 12 February 1980, Rafael Tobajas, a resident of the city of Algeciras, accompanied his wife to visit some friends, another married couple in which the wife was bedridden with the flu. From the terrace of that apartment, Rafael Tobajas was able to see some strange lights moving in the direction of “Los Adalides”. This marked the start of a strange story that was echoed by the local press and became the talk of the town in Algeciras.
A strange phenomenon repeated itself night after night in February 1980 along the local highway, known by the name “Botafuego” and linking the towns of Llano de la Vega, Garganta del Capitán and Sierra de Ojen. Around 9:30 p.m. every night, lights resembling white fireballs with violet hues crossed the firmament. Many witnesses agreed that these object, upon descending for closer inspection, resembled inverted teacups with red and green lights, shooting beams of light, with protruding antennae from their upper sections. The objects were able to change position and altitude quickly. Their heading, according to local witnesses, was always the same: from North to South, descending slowly over Sierra de Ojén toward the Algeciras neighborhoods known as “Los Adalides”, “La Granja” and Camino Viejo de Los Barrios. The objects made no noise whatsoever and moved speedily.
Rafael Tobajas and his wife, on their visit to the couple with the ailing wife, were the first to see something strange in the sky when they looked out on the apartment’s terrace at nine thirty in the evening. Tobajas had heard, like everyone else in Algeciras, about the remarks being made in the city at the time, and paid little attention to what he saw. He thought it was a bright flash and re-entered the apartment without further concern. Subsequently, however, driven by curiosity, he decided to focus his eyes on the same spot in the distance. There was no doubt that something was moving in the air, wobbling and emitting readily discernible flashes of light. He summons his host and asks him accompany him to the site for a closer look in order to ascertain its nature and observe it in greater detail. His friend declined, and Tobajas and his wife set off on their own.
Driving their car down the old road to Los Barrios, they passed by the entrance to the Los Adalides school. Standing outside was a group of thirty or forty boys armed with sticks and flashlights. Tobajas exchanged some words with the boys and three of them – as many as he could fit in his car – agreed to join in on the closer look, since they too had seen something odd in the night. José A. Sanjuan, José Rodriguez and Diego Gutierrez boarded the car and guided Rafael Tobajas along the narrow road leading to the area where the strange flying craft materialized.
A few kilometers away, upon reaching a garbage-burning pit in the vicinity, they saw two bright lights on the slopes of the Sierra de Ojen. Stopping the car, they used binoculars to focus on two luminous masses dancing in the air for some ten or fifteen minutes. The light show was attractive, but their curiosity grew apace as they objects descended. Looking through the binoculars and unaided, Tobajas, his wife and the three boys were able to see that the two lights were like “headlights” of a dark grey mass whose outlines could not be made out in the darkness.
Mrs. Tobajas is the first to discover something that will cause fear and uncertainty among the group: She is able to see, through binoculars, a figure emerging from the unknown craft and standing nearly three meters tall, perhaps taller. Rafael Tobajas took the lenses from his wife and confirms the sighting, only it wasn’t one, but two figures standing slightly over three meters tall, clad in form-fitting khaki green outfits and walking in slow motion, as though weighed down by their feet. They saw the figures jumping over some bushes, at which point their limbs became perfectly discernible.
The distance between one figure and the other was about a hundred meters at most, and the vehicle was near a stream on the slides of a small mound. No buzzing sounds are heard. The brightness of the craft became more intense, causing the two figures to cast their shadows over the stream. Walking slowly, they appeared to be headed to where Tobajas and his companions observed the events. The children were starting to panic, but Tobajas, remaining calm, fears that something worse is about to happen, as he cannot bring himself to believe what he is seeing. He chooses to put the car in gear and abandon the area as quickly as possible.
As the car raced away down the narrow road, the boys still feel the sensation that the entities were coming after them, moving slowly. After going around a curve, they lost sight of the humanoids. The experiencers agree on what they have seen, and numerous witnesses in the area corroborate the details of the sighting.
A few hours after the sighting, the main witness [Tobajas] returned to the site, finding an array of strange footprints on the ground. On this second venture, a person having no connection to the first group, in order to insure objectivity, accompanied him. The prints discovered in the vicinity of the stream appear to belong – according to experts from the Red Nacional de Corresponsales (National Correspondents Network) – to mortar rounds fired during exercises by the military brigade at Botafuegos. They dismiss the possibility, however, that the events seen that night could have had any connection to the military. Furthermore, there is another detail that corroborates the strange possibility of a humanoid presence in the area.
It took place a few kilometers away from the scene of the events and has a single protagonist: the watchman of an automobile graveyard near Los Barrios.
On the evening of 12 February 1980, the graveyard watchman was snoozing inside one of the vehicles, which still had its doors and windows, to shelter himself from the cold temperature. Fast asleep, he suddenly felt a hand pounding on the car window. He woke up suddenly and was stunned by what he saw. On the other side of the auto glass, he saw an entity with female features, slanted eyes and greenish skin. Taking hold of a long stake he kept handy to ward off potential thieves, and gripped by a mixture of panic and bravery, the watchman opened the car door to give the strange character a beating. Emerging from the vehicle without the visitor offering any resistance, the watchman was able to see the female figure dematerialize before his very eyes.
Overwhelmed by panic, the watchman deserted his post and never went back.
This event, however, did not seem to be the first one recorded in the area in question: in September 1959 at 2:30 a.m., a worker at a pump house in the city of Algeciras was able to see an oval object surrounded by a “visor”, measuring six or seven meters in diameter and hovering 180 centimeters over the ground. Two human-looking figures stood between the object and the onlooker. He placed their height at one meter eighty, and they fled from him upon being discovered. Twenty-one years later, Tobajas, his wife and companions were able to see a similar situation to the one experienced by the cemetery watchman and the pump house worker – one they could not explain.
(Translation (c) 2012, Scott Corrales, IHU. Special thanks to J. Manuel García Bautista)