“Please confirm if we have any traffic close to us on our left. About 4 or 5 miles.” “Negative, no traffic reported.” “We have two red light signals. Now about 3 miles, 10 o’clock from our position. At roughly the same height.” “Are the lights in the sea or are they in the air?” “The plane… is a traffic and is approximately at our height.” “Do you confirm if you are going in the same direction?” “Affirmative. We have it closer and closer (…). Barcelona, ??I have increased the ‘rate’ of ascent through 280 and the traffic rises much faster than us. It gets closer and closer.” “Received”. “I’m heading to Valencia”. “OK. Do you want us to call in a Defense interceptor?” “If possible, yes, information, because the traffic is less than half a mile away and right now it has dropped a lot. It’s down about 3,000 feet below us.” “Okay, we are going to communicate with Defense in case they know anything.”
The excerpt from the conversation between the crew of flight JK-297 and the Barcelona Air Traffic Control Center leaves no doubt that some unusual phenomenon occurred that night of November 11, 1979 on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. . The Super Caravelle of the defunct Spanish company TAE that covered the Salzburg-Tenerife route had made a technical stopover in Palma de Mallorca when, when flying over the vertical of Eivissa, it came across those unexpected threatening lights that followed an inappropriate trajectory for an airplane.
Captain Francisco Javier Lerdo de Tejada and officer Ramón Zuazo did not hesitate for a moment and for safety reasons they decided to make an emergency landing in Manises, the closest airport in which to date has been the only incident caused by an alleged unidentified flying object that has forced a commercial flight in Spain to take this drastic measure. Although the event does not stop there, since the Mirage F-1 of the Air Force that left after midnight from the Los Llanos air base, in Albacete, with the mission of intercepting the hypothetical UFO not only saw its lights, but also that he was unable to reach them to try to identify their origin.
To this is added the sighting of these or other unusual lights by the controllers of the Manises control tower and different ground personnel from the Valencian airport. And even perhaps the most irrefutable proof: the capture by the tower’s radars of three aligned objects, each with a diameter of about 200 meters. In addition to the testimony of various witnesses, such as the people who were at a bus stop that night in Sant Adrià de Besòs or a mechanic from Sóller, who even photographed that same night the light projected by an object that was making erratic movements.
All this appears in the report made by the Air Operation Command of the Intelligence Section of the Defense General Staff over the weeks following the event, which in addition to collecting the episode of that November 11 also refers to other two similar phenomena occurred throughout that same month. The document, declassified in 1994, contains the transcripts of all the recordings of that night and interviews with all the witnesses.
The report also includes the exchange of messages between the General Chief of the Air Staff and the Major General of the United States Air Force, since the Sixth Fleet was stationed in the Western Mediterranean on those days. Although some hypotheses have tried to find explanations for the strange phenomenon in the electronic security measures of the US Navy, none of the documents bear witness to it. To the point that the event remains without a convincing explanation more than four decades later.
He tried to give it to them, downplaying an issue that quickly appeared in all the media, the Minister of Transport and Communications, Salvador Sánchez-Terán. He did so just four days after the sighting in an already scheduled appearance before the Public Works and Urban Planning, Transport and Communications Commission in the intervention that we reproduce in its entirety from the session diary.
It was the first time that the UFO issue reached a Spanish parliamentary chamber. He would later do it to Congress, after the question that parliamentarian Enrique Múgica asked a year later on behalf of the socialist group and to which the reserved Defense report also tried to give a vague answer.
In the Senate, without more information than had appeared in the media, the issue was addressed tangentially, in the final question period, interspersed between one referring to the La Gomera ferry and another to the Madrid-Guadalajara rail corridor. The minister, who had played a fundamental role in the return of Josep Tarradellas to Catalonia and the recovery of the Generalitat and was called upon to play it in the coup d’état of 23-F, only knew about the issue from the testimonies he had been able to gather in Manises.
Fate had made him visit the then-dumpy Valencian airport facilities just a few hours after the event, although to discuss its expansion and improvement on the occasion of the 1982 Soccer World Cup, a shock to the infrastructures of all of Spain in full transition. And what happened is that he came across the unexpected Manises UFO, which he then lost all credibility.
“On the subject of UFOs, I would say that the most sobering thing about it is the series of movies that television did. I’m not kidding; I say this because there are flying objects.
”Most of them have a scientific explanation: either they are meteorological probe balloons or they are refractions in certain conditions of the atmospheric layers, but certainly there is a percentage of those so-called lights that exist in the firmament that have not been identified, which it does not imply that there are aliens or all those things that are more in the field of science fiction. It is true that, worldwide, not all flying objects have been identified, although many have been identified.
”What happened on the flight to which the senator refers (some newspaper has said that I took the UFOs taking advantage of the trip to Valencia; I have to say that I arrived in the morning and the subject of UFOs had been the night before ) is that some lights were seen, the pilot or the co-pilot saw them; he did not see the passage. The air traffic control tapes record the pilot’s concern at seeing those red lights.
”There is the possibility that they are refractions of the plane’s pilots themselves in the atmospheric layers that, due to their density situation, produce that refraction that makes some red lights appear that in the background are the reflection of those of the pilots. This is merely a working hypothesis.
“I am not certain and I am speaking privately that the reconnaissance plane that left (not from Manises, but from the Albacete base) found nothing, which may support the hypothesis that either it was a high-speed object that disappeared or it was a phenomenon of refraction in certain conditions of the atmospheric layers.
”The secondary radars of the nearby airports (Barcelona and Valencia) did not detect the object. It is being verified whether or not a spot that was seen on the primary defense radars actually corresponds to an object in that place.
“This is under confidential investigation by the Air Force and I would say that there is no need to be frightened by the issue of UFOs because there is no record that there has been the slightest aviation accident caused by a UFO. As I said, most of them are research flying objects, meteorological aeronautics, sounding balloons, etc., and there is only a small percentage of possible signals that have not been identified, if those signals actually existed.
”It is not a worrying problem from the point of view of air traffic. What happens is that the pilot decided to crash the plane. Some said the plane had its flaws; but the pilot crashed the plane, which is kind of spectacular. Going to 25,000 feet he went down to 15,000 and worried about it. He said: ‘I’m not going on’, and decided to land. There is no proof that there was any physical object up to the present.”
