Manises UFO incident

The Manises UFO incident took place on November 11, 1979, in which a commercial flight of the Spanish company Transportes Aéreos Españoles, with 109 passengers on board, was forced to make an emergency landing at the Manises airport (Valencia), when he was flying over Ibiza, being chased by some inexplicable red lights. After the emergency landing of the TAE-297, a Mirage F1, piloted by the then Captain Fernando Cámara, and today Coronel, assigned to the 14th Wing of the Air and Space Army, took off from Los Llanos Air Base to intercept the mysterious object.

The Manises incident is considered the most famous UFO sighting in Spain and is one of the most complete and complex cases in the country's UFO history.

Incident Details

Super Caravelle SE-210 of the former French airline Air Inter 1980.

The event was carried out by a Super Caravelle from the company TAE (Transportes Aéreos Españoles -now defunct-). This flight, JK-297, with 109 passengers, came from Salzburg (Austria) and had made a stopover to refuel in Palma de Mallorca, before heading to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Shortly after taking off from Palma de Mallorca, halfway and around 11:00 p.m., pilot Francisco Javier Lerdo de Tejada, co-pilot Ramón Zuazu, and the crew observed a series of lights, with colors changing between the red, white and green, rapidly approaching in the direction of the plane. These lights appeared to be on a collision course with the aircraft, causing great nervousness among the crew and passengers. The commander asked ground control for information on any traffic that could be the cause of the strange lights, but neither the military radar in Torrejón de Ardoz (Madrid) nor the Barcelona flight control center could give any explanation for this phenomenon.

To avoid the risk of a possible collision, the captain raised his plane, but the lights did the same and were placed barely half a kilometer from the plane. The impossibility of carrying out a maneuver to avoid them caused the commander to be forced to divert his course and request an emergency landing at the Manises (Valencia) airport. This was the first time in Spanish history that a commercial plane was forced to make an emergency landing because of a UFO, since the unidentified object was violating all basic security regulations.

The flight crew reported that the lights abandoned the chase just before the landing occurred. However, the radar detected three unidentified shapes, each with an estimated diameter of 200 meters, and was observed by numerous witnesses. One of the UFOs passed very close to the airport runway, and the ground crew turned on the emergency lights in case the object was an unregistered flight in trouble.

While the pilot requested landing permits, the civil air traffic control of Manises requested the dispatch of military aircraft from the Air Force to identify said lights. Around 12:40 a.m., a Mirage F-1 from the 14th Wing took off on a scramble mission (air interception alert) from the nearby Los Llanos Air Base in Albacete, piloted by then-Captain Fernando Cámara, with the aim of identifying The phenomenon. Captain Cámara did not take long to find that big red light, which remained static over the Manises airport:

I saw the light, even though my radar didn't detect anything. I flew about 1,000 km/h, and when I reached it, that light went from being static to flying in front of me at the same speed. I was aware that that object was detecting me, because the threat systems of my plane were shot. But I could only see it with my eyes.

The Mirage F-1 had to increase its speed to mach 1.4, to finally make out a frustoconical shape similar to an inverted cup without the base, which changed color, although the artifact soon disappeared from sight. The pilot received information about a new echo from the radar, which indicated that a new object, or perhaps the same one, was over Sagunto. When he got close enough, the object sped up and disappeared again. But this time, the F-1's radar warning detectors indicated that the fighter was being illuminated or targeted by foreign radar, specifically continuous wave radar like those used by anti-aircraft missiles. In military terms this is considered an aggressive operation. Likewise, voice communications between the pilot and military control, called Pegaso, based at the Torrejón de Ardoz Air Base, suffered interference even when changing channels. Finally, the same thing happened for the third time, and this time the UFO disappeared for good towards Africa.

When I got here, I ran into a white record. It was very different from the other light, but the interferences I produced on my plane were the same. I pursued it to the area of Menorca, but in the face of the impossibility of reaching it and the lack of fuel, I decided to return.

After an hour and a half of pursuit, and due to lack of fuel, the pilot had to return to his base in Los Llanos without results.

The report prepared by the Spanish Ministry of Defense includes a sighting by an anonymous witness on November 11, 1979, the same early morning, from the San Adrián de Besós stop of the Barcelona-Granollers bus, at the confluence with the national road from Barcelona to Mataró, around 8:15 p.m., in front of several other people who were waiting for the same bus. The testimony states that three or four minutes later the area went dark. He included a drawing in his letter to the Ministry. The Ministry of Defense report also includes a reference to a story that appeared in the newspaper Pueblo on November 21, 1979, about an observation of a light by a mechanic from Sóller, with photographs included, taken the same morning of Tuesday, November 12, 1979.

Possible explanations

There are multiple explanations for this event: from those who believe that the UFO phenomenon consists of the visit of inhabitants of other worlds to those who think that those lights were nothing more than nocturnal stars or meteorological phenomena, although the latter phenomena are not there is none known to have the dynamics of the lights in the case of Manises.

One of the proposed explanations attributes the event to the electronic jamming of the Mirage F-1, based on the fact that the United States Sixth Fleet was stationed in the area with a powerful electronic warfare system, pending the events of the crisis of the hostages in Iran.

The official explanation would come thanks to the file of the Air Force, which would be declassified years later, in August 1994. The matter even reached the Congress of Deputies, when in September 1980 the socialist deputy Enrique Múgica asked for an explanation of what happened.

The opinion of the Ministry of Defense ruled out the reflection hypothesis, because there were other lights that should have been reflected as well. Likewise, he discards that of another plane, a helicopter, the Sixth Fleet (the command of the same sends a letter notifying his absence from said airspace, page 17 of the report), and palely contemplates other hypotheses, such as stars, etc. However, there are circumstances such as radar echoes and visual contact from the ground (the Judge Captain himself saw them, since he was on duty) that make these other hypotheses quite weak. The final opinion concludes: "...It has not been possible to ascertain the origin of the aforementioned lights and the hypothesis that they belonged to the possible helicopter mentioned above has been ruled out due to the speed displayed, they confirm the existence of uncontrolled traffic in the area, of unknown origin".

The response that Deputy Múgica received stated that there is no proof of the physical existence of the object, only of 'lights'.

One of the most recent explanations of the events, first proposed by the Anomaly Foundation, states that the lights seen by the crew of the Super Caravelle JK-297 were actually the flares of the combustion towers of the refinery Escombreras, next to Cartagena. That day, the visibility was exceptional, which, combined with a thermal inversion effect, would have made it possible for the flares to be visible from the plane, appearing to be in the sky. The tension and anomalous atmospheric conditions made the Mirage pilot predisposed to chase any light he saw in the sky, remembering that on those dates several planets were visible and bright due to atmospheric conditions. The interference suffered was attributed to possible electronic countermeasures by the Sixth Fleet, which was on alert due to the hostage crisis in Iran. The pilot of that fighter, the then captain Fernando Cámara, concludes that he does not agree with these last hypotheses:

I know very well Escombreras, I've seen hundreds of times his flames from the air. The one who does these conjectures is that he has never blown a plane, nor knows what it is to be in the air. I know very well what I saw! Moreover, that light went towards Zaragoza and not towards Escombreras.