The Manuel Soto ferry sighting, Spanish Air Force file 851223

In late 1985 the Trasmediterránea passenger ferry Manuel Soto was working the line between the Spanish mainland and the Canary Islands. Built by Unión Naval de Levante in 1976, she was 140.8 metres long and could carry 1,080 passengers. On the night of 22 to 23 December she was sailing from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to Arrecife, on Lanzarote.

At 03:10 the third officer on watch, known in the file only by the initials I.R.F., saw a light rising just above the horizon ahead of the ship. He identified it as the star Antares. At 03:20, after checking its bearing, he concluded it could be neither Antares nor any other star or planet. He measured the light's altitude and azimuth, then took them again at 03:23. The light had stayed in roughly the same position.

Around 03:25, the light moved. In the words of the file, it went suddenly toward the ship at great speed. In about two minutes it climbed from the horizon to the zenith, the point directly overhead.

From below, the watch made out an approximate silhouette. It did not resemble any of the usual aeroplanes or helicopters. A very intense white light sat at the centre, a somewhat weaker red light close to it, and another white light set further apart. Nobody heard the noise or hum of an aircraft.

The second radio officer, the helmsman and the deck watchman saw it too. How the object finally left was never recorded in the file. One newspaper account later said it paused overhead before departing at high speed, and that the captain also made out the silhouette.

The captain entered the event in the logbook as folio 218. The shipping company sent a photocopy to the Navy Staff. The Vice Admiral serving as Second Chief of the Navy Staff forwarded it, through the Intelligence Section of its Strategy Division, to the Air Staff. The Air Staff passed it to the general commanding the Canary Islands Air Command, MACAN, and asked whether an investigation had been carried out.

In March 1986 MACAN replied. Its enquiries "have given a negative result; no UFO was observed on the date in question." There was no further investigation.

The Spanish Air Force file, numbered 851223 after the date, was declassified as JEMA 493 on 1 February 1996. The analysts saw no aspects that made it advisable to keep it classified. In October 2016 it went online in the Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa with the other 80 files, about 1,900 pages in all.

Researcher Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, writing from the file in 1997, noted that the behaviour would be compatible with a possible aircraft approaching the ship from the horizon at constant height and speed. But the lack of details, including the object's actual silhouette, made any specific hypothesis impossible to test. His verdict was that it remains unidentified. The famous Canary Islands sightings of 1974 to 1979 were later matched to US Poseidon missile test launches. No source has applied that explanation to the Manuel Soto. A silent light that approaches and passes overhead looks nothing like a launch.

Ballester Olmos called it the third Canary episode in the files, after the cases of 1974 and 1980. No interview with the crew has ever been published. In January 2026, forty years on, Vozpópuli marked the anniversary with a feature by José Luis Jiménez. The ship became Moby Fantasy in 1992 and was scrapped at Aliağa, Turkey, in December 2013. What crossed above her bridge that night is still, officially, unidentified.