What happened
Flight JK-297, a TAE Super Caravelle carrying 109 holidaymakers from Salzburg to the Canary Islands, had refuelled in Palma and was over the sea near Ibiza at about 11 p.m. when the crew saw a cluster of red lights closing on them fast. Captain Francisco Javier Lerdo de Tejada asked Barcelona control and the military radar at Torrejón what it was; nobody knew. He climbed to dodge it, and the lights seemed to match his moves, holding about half a kilometre off. Judging the situation unsafe, he diverted and made an unscheduled landing at Manises, Valencia, the first time a Spanish airliner had diverted because of an unidentified object. Lights were reported near the airport too. A Spanish Air Force Mirage F1 scrambled from Los Llanos, and its pilot, Captain Fernando Cámara, chased a light for about ninety minutes, later saying it seemed to respond to him and that his threat-warning systems went off. The Air Force file was declassified in 1996.
The official explanation
When the case reached the Spanish Senate in 1980, the government attributed it to a series of optical illusions. After declassification, researcher Juan Antonio Fernández Peris argued in a detailed report that the airliner crew, Manises controllers and the Mirage pilot were misled by flare stacks at a distant chemical complex roughly 160 km away, plus bright stars and planets; this is the main non-anomalous explanation. The Mirage's electronic warnings have been attributed by some to electronic warfare equipment of the US Sixth Fleet, then in the Mediterranean during the Iran hostage crisis.
The anomalous case
Every key witness was an aviation professional: an airline captain responsible for 109 passengers who judged the threat serious enough to divert, ground controllers who received no identification from either civil or military radar, and an Air Force fighter pilot. Captain Cámara, who later rose to colonel, has consistently rejected the flare-stack and Sixth Fleet explanations; he said his radar did not paint the object but when he caught up with the light it went from stationary to flying ahead of him at his own speed, that his threat warnings indicated he was being tracked, and that the fleet was too far away. Lerdo de Tejada likewise held to his account, and radio recordings of the airliner's exchange with control capture the crew's mounting alarm as the light seemed to close in. Spanish journalist Javier Cavanilles has called it the most famous UFO case in Spain.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- Manises UFO incident Wikipedia
- La noche en la que un ovni sobrevoló Ibiza y forzó un aterrizaje de emergencia Noudiari (Ibiza)
Witness reports elsewhere
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