San Clemente Landing Traces

1974 was a year of sightings in Spain. Aznalcóllar and Gerena, in Seville, came in March, and Arrúbal, in La Rioja, in November. San Clemente is a town in Cuenca province, in Castilla-La Mancha. Its hunting estates include one registered as CU-10.193. Its sworn gamekeeper, its guarda jurado, was Demetrio Carrascosa Martínez, then 53.

Friday, 24 May 1974, at 11:30 in the morning. Carrascosa saw an unidentified object set down in a field sown with vetch. The Guardia Civil summary says it took up 3 or 4 square metres, in the shape of a tripod. It had many windows, yellow or khaki in colour. The research catalogues put it another way: a four metre long ovoid object, standing on four legs, with six windows.

He tried to get closer. It took off, carrying great illumination with it. Rocks scattered on takeoff. The whole sighting lasted 15-20 seconds. He was alone, and no beings were reported.

A 2009 school magazine retelling has him on a bicycle, facing a lemon-shaped object hovering about two metres above the ground. It cites no sources.

Lieutenant Salvador Fernández, the local Guardia Civil commander, took the statement and went with Carrascosa to the field. Years later he told journalist Paco Contreras what they found. A drier patch in the legume crop, "como si estuviera solanao", as if scorched by the sun. "Estaba todo el campo verde menos esa zona, que incluso tenía las plantas caídas": the whole field was green except that area, where the plants had even fallen over. The ground around it and the indentations had completely fallen in.

Fernández sent a report to his superiors. On 1 June 1974, ABC in Madrid ran "Tras las huellas de un OVNI".

Almost a decade passed. On 14 October 1983, General Andrés Cassinello, Director General of the Guardia Civil, sent Andreas Faber-Kaiser, editor of Mundo Desconocido, a table of 25 incidents dated 1 July 1953 to 20 July 1983. Each had involved an official investigation. San Clemente was one of them.

The file itself has never been released. Manuel Carballal writes that the case files remain in Guardia Civil archives: "we know they exist, but we have not seen them." The Spanish Air Force files, declassified between 1991 and 1997, hold nothing on San Clemente. The case seems never to have left the Guardia Civil. No conclusion has ever been published.

No hoax claim has surfaced. No explanation is on record. Another Cuenca case on the same list did get one. At Casas de Aro in 1979, the object turned out to be a Guardia Civil helicopter on its way to a fire in Valencia province. Nothing like that has been published for San Clemente.

The case entered the literature quickly. E. Villagrasa wrote it up in Stendek in September 1974. It became case 191 in V.-J. Ballester Olmos's catalogue of Type-I events in Spain and Portugal, case 806 in Ted R. Phillips's Physical Traces Associated with UFO Sightings, published by the Center for UFO Studies, and case 570 in UNICAT. Half a century on, a gamekeeper's few seconds in a vetch field still wait on a file nobody outside the Guardia Civil has read.