Juan Minguela's shining "bus" landing at Viladesuso, Oia (1970)

Juan Minguela was a hairdresser from Vigo, with a salon on Calle Carral. He claimed he had once cut the hair of Juan Carlos, when the future king was a prince living in Marín. He also kept a second home in Viladesuso parish, Santa María de Oia, in Pontevedra. The house stood beside the sea, on the rocks, about 37 kilometres from Vigo. He said he had gone there "a plantar patatas", to plant potatoes.

The date usually given is 27 March 1970. He was asleep. His dogs barked without stopping. One later account says he heard a noise.

"Cuando me incorporé, vi al lado de mi casa, sobre las rocas, algo como un Vitrasa de grande, que brillaba." When he sat up, he saw beside his house, on the rocks, something as big as a Vigo city bus. It was shining. Some accounts call it an immense flying saucer, full of lights. One describes it as green and elongated.

He took his hunting shotgun from the wardrobe. Then he set it down at once. "No sé, noté como que alguien me decía que no tuviera miedo." He felt as if someone was telling him not to be afraid. He went back to bed and fell asleep.

At first he thought it had been a dream. But his dog had disappeared. And on the rocks there was a mark, as if something had settled on top of them. "No era un sueño," he said. It wasn't a dream.

The rocks of that coast were blackened with fuel oil from the tanker Polycommander. Minguela believed the saucer's turbines had evaporated the oil where it landed. An elderly neighbour had woken that night with a strange inner heat. One account says other people saw an unknown object that night, though none are named.

El Pueblo Gallego put it on the front page: "Un ovni a 37 kms. de Vigo". Faro de Vigo carried his testimony too, and magazine covers followed. Weeks later, José María Íñigo had him on Estudio Abierto, and he was invited to the United States to speak with UFO experts and show them the mark. In the summer of 1971, enthusiasts gathered at the Mougás campsite. Minguela raised a UFO monument at the entrance to his house, and he stood by his story all his life.

No official conclusion on the case has been found. Claims that his statement sits in the Defence Ministry files released in 2016 remain unconfirmed.

The date is a puzzle. The Polycommander ran aground at the Cíes Islands on 5 May 1970. A landing in March 1970 would come before the spill. Some later accounts place the event in 1973 or 1974. Either the date or the oil detail is wrong. The case also rests on one main witness, who first took it for a dream, and on a mark in oil-stained rock that was never analysed. One writer floated a possible military prototype. Some ufologists link the landing to the Jesuit Pedro Pablo Requejo's sighting over the Ría de Vigo in the early 1970s.

The case appears in Manuel Carballal's Secuestrados por los ovnis and in Jesús María Reiriz's Galicia oculta y negra. In 2020, fifty years on, Vigo journalists returned to it. The monument is gone. Around 2016, Rosa María Álvarez Blanco, a hairdresser from O Bolo, bought the house. She and her husband Carlos restored it and painted it blue. During the roof work, workers heard footsteps for days. A gardener said it was Minguela.