The Vejer de la Frontera Armored Giants

Vejer de la Frontera sits on a low hill above the river Barbate, in the Andalusian province of Cádiz. It is cattle country, where fighting bulls are bred in the fields. Tuesday, 20 July 1982. About three in the afternoon. Broad daylight.

A local cattleman was riding his motorcycle along "a seldom traveled road" outside town. Then the motorcycle "came to a stop and would not start." It had cut out by itself. Ahead of him, about 100 metres down the road, stood what he took to be a tanker truck. He set off toward it on foot.

At about 30 metres, the picture changed. He saw "two huge human-like figures standing in the middle of the road." They wore "shiny metallic armored suits and fishbowl-like clear helmets." One stood near a wire fence, looking at the cattle in the nearby field.

Then the two figures went back. They walked to the object "as if in slow motion." The witness compared them to the astronauts on the Moon. They "entered the object through an open hatch." And the object "took off silently towards the north."

Ground traces were reportedly found at the site. Nobody described them, measured them or photographed them. There are no photographs of the object, no drawings and no radar. No duration was recorded. The only effect on the witness was the stalled engine, a classic "vehicle interference" detail of close encounter reports, and no injury was recorded.

The story first appeared in the Diario de Cádiz on 5 August 1982, about two weeks after the event. That article has never been located online. In 1987 the case reached Ballester-Olmos and Fernández Peris's Enciclopedia de los Encuentros Cercanos con OVNIs, on pages 210 and 211. The authors added a warning of their own: a "non-journalistic" field re-investigation on site was essential. It never seems to have happened, and no investigator, civilian or official, is known to have visited the road.

Albert Rosales entered the case in his Humanoid Contact Database, and NICAP carried his text in its 1982 chronology. Patrick Gross catalogued it in URECAT as a low-certainty report, listing extraterrestrial visitors, a hoax or a confusion as possible readings. He flagged two problems: only one source, and the original Diario de Cádiz article, still missing. All of these entries rest on the same chain, so they are not independent confirmations.

No specific hoax accusation has ever been made, and no ordinary explanation has been proposed. A sceptic might simply point to the witness's own first impression. From 100 metres, he thought it was a tanker truck.

Five days later and not far away, at Punta Umbría in Huelva, a bullfighter described "a square-shaped craft and a 3-meter (10 foot) tall robot." It is a separate story. But it gives the armored giants of Vejer de la Frontera company. The case remains what it was in 1982. One man, one empty road, and two figures walking slowly back to their craft.