Madrid, Toledo, Cuenca and Pamplona Mass Sightings (Spanish Air Force File, 1968)

In May 1968, tetrahedral balloons had already set Madrid and Barcelona talking. Four months later, the Spanish Air Force opened another file. It would cover two days, about a dozen official observers and a crowd the press counted in thousands.

Thursday, 5 September 1968. About 11:00. Radar squadrons EVA 1 and EVA 2 tracked an object near Barahona at about 75,000 feet. An F-104 was flying an intercept exercise at 51,000 feet. Its pilot saw the object far above and could not close in for lack of fuel. A tetrahedron. Three bright balls on its lower part.

Around 18:00, the Gran Vía in Madrid stopped. Drivers and pedestrians stared at a bright, motionless object high in the sky. Witnesses spoke of a pyramid, a bell, three balls of light giving off silvery flashes. Schools, monasteries and scientific institutions turned telescopes on it. "Se mueve." "No. Está quieto." J.J. Benítez later wrote of a floating pyramid giving off blinding light for 65 minutes. At 19:50, EVA 2 held it on radar for 20 minutes, between 81,000 and 90,000 feet, at an average 15 km/h. Madrid Control saw two echoes over Toledo. Then it was gone. A spokesman for the Meteorology Observatory was blunt. "Indudablemente se trata de un ovni."

Friday brought more. Iberia crews reported a bright round object east of Castejón and an elongated, bright one over Cuenca. Two sergeants at the Cuenca meteorological station saw a metallic, bell-shaped, very bright and very high object. At 11:45, an F-104 at Mach 1.8 went after it. The pilot reported a parallelepiped-shaped body with one vertex pointing up, at about 70,000 feet, moving at Mach 1 at most. Over Pamplona, a Lufthansa crew saw objects that Bordeaux control called weather balloons.

At 13:00, a balloon came down at Tudelilla. An hour later, at El Carroñal near Murillo de Río Leza, the Colonel in charge of the Agoncillo control tower watched another descend. Beneath it hung an octagonal white box, about 1.30 m by 1 m. Its label read "Centre National D'Etudes Spatiales (CNES)" and "OPERACION LIMBUS nº 85".

Then French personnel arrived in a Peugeot 404 loaded with radio equipment and a direction-finder. They asked to handle the payload. They were refused. Only after contacts through the French Embassy was it flown to Madrid, under the supervision of a Spanish meteorological officer.

The intelligence officer of the Mando Operativo Aéreo worked through it all. The 5 September sightings lined up northeast to southwest, 190 km and 9 hours apart. One object, seen twice. Radar put it at 27,000 to 30,000 m. The Mach 1 was speed relative to the jet. The verdict: meteorological-analysis balloons launched by CNES. On 7 September, La Vanguardia carried an Air Ministry statement naming a tetrahedral probe for studying the mesosphere.

One report refused to fit. At 23:00 in Seville, a traffic officer at San Pablo counted three strange objects, two stationary with blue, red and green flashes. A balloon would have needed to be about 700 km up to catch sunlight. Seville stayed unexplained. The file was declassified on 20 January 1993.

Skeptics fold the case into the 1968 to 1969 Spanish wave, blaming a Ministry of Air press release, a prominent Venus and large balloons drifting in from France. Ufologists answer with the drift against the wind, the Mach 1 report and the Observatory's first denial. Accounts in the vein of Benítez still call it unexplained. Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos advised on the declassification that opened these files.