UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Located in the Atlantic Ocean in the region called Macaronesia and just about 62 miles from the northwestern coast of Africa off Morocco is a Spanish held archipelago called the Canary Islands. Known for its amazing beaches, pleasant climate, biodiversity, and numerous natural features it is a major tourist destination in the region, yet what many of those fun seekers may not know is that these scenic islands were once the location of one of the most bizarre mass UFO sightings in history, which would be seen by thousands of witnesses from all walks of life and remains an unsolved conundrum.

Photograph of the phenomenon over the Canary Islands on June 22, 1976.

(Credit: Spanish Air Force/Antonio Huneeus)

It began on June 22, 1976, when people living on the islands of Tenerife, La Palma, and La Gomera began calling in to report numerous strange lights performing odd maneuvers in the sky, amongst them one that seemed to be larger than the others, described as a giant, luminous sphere. Among these reports some were more spectacular than others, and one of the first reported incidents was made by the Navy escort ship, the Atrevida, which at the time was positioned off the coast of Fuerteventura Island. On this evening at approximately 9:27 PM the crew observed an extremely bright light moving in the general direction of the ship. It was first thought to be a normal aircraft, but this turned out to not be the case, as it began rotating, pulsating, and generating a blindingly bright halo of yellow and blue, as well as various flashing strobe effects.

The Canary Islands (Credit: Oona Räisänen/Wikimedia Commons)

The Canary Islands

(Credit: Oona Räisänen/Wikimedia Commons)

The Spanish navy vessel Atrevida.

(Credit: José Juan Medina Cobacho/Wikimedia Commons)

The captain explained that, minutes after this “halo” of light appeared, he observed the following:

[T]he light split into two parts, the smaller part being beneath, in the center of the luminous halo, where a blue cloud appeared and the part from which the bluish nucleus had come, vanished. The upper part began to climb in a spiral, rapid and irregular, and finally vanished. None of these movements affected the initial circular halo in any way, which remained just the same the whole time, its glow lighting up parts of the land and the ocean, from which we could deduce that the phenomenon was not very far away from us, but was close.

The ship’s first officer echoed the captain’s statements. And the officers also confirmed that the ship’s surface radar detected nothing at the time of the sighting.

The depositions of the naval officers were considered to be some of the most-credible testimony regarding the UFO sighting. The deposition of a physician, however, was among the more strange accounts collected during the investigation. Dr. Francisco Padrón León was in a taxi on his way to see a patient in the town of Las Rosas on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. He explained that, when he had almost arrived at his destination, the taxi’s lights hit a luminous sphere hovering motionless just off the ground. He described that the sphere was electric blue in color and constructed of a “transparent and crystalline-like material.” He estimated that the UFO had a radius of approximately one hundred feet. Inside the sphere, Dr. Padrón saw a platform that looked like it was made of metal, and what appeared to be three control consoles. He also claimed to have seen two tall humanoid figures inside the sphere, whom he estimated were between eight and a half feet and ten feet tall. They wore brilliant red outfits and some type of head gear.

When the taxi arrived at the patient’s home, Dr. Padrón continued watching the sphere. He described it as follows:

I [then] observed that some kind of bluish smoke was coming out from a semi-transparent central tube in the sphere, covering the periphery of the sphere’s interior without leaking outside at any moment. Then the sphere began to grow and grow until it became huge like a 20-story house, but the platform and the crew remained the same size; it rose slowly and majestically and it seems I heard a very tenuous whistling.

The doctor raced into the patient’s house to inform the residents about the mysterious sphere. Everyone came outside to see the object that had ascended high in the sky. The UFO quickly accelerated, shooting away at an incredible speed. The doctor described that it “dissolved into a bluish spindle-shape with red underneath.” Similar to the description provided by the navy officers, Dr. Padrón said “a brilliant white halo was formed close to the object, which bit by bit was forming another very brilliant blue halo.”

The baffled crew watched this mysterious object for a full 40 minutes, and the official report from the ship would read in part:

The original light went out and a luminous beam from it began to rotate. It remained like this for approximately two minutes. Then an intense great halo of yellowish and bluish light developed, and remained in the same position for 40 minutes, even though the original phenomenon was no longer visible. Two minutes after the great halo, the light split into two parts, the smaller part being beneath, in the center of the luminous halo, where a blue cloud appeared and the part from which the bluish nucleus had come, vanished. The upper part began to climb in a spiral, rapid and irregular, and finally vanished. None of these movements affected the initial circular halo in any way, which remained just the same the whole time, its glow lighting up parts of the land and the ocean, from which we could deduce that the phenomenon was not very far away from us, but was close.

At no point was the craft picked up on radar, and a check of air traffic in the area showed no military or civilian aircraft scheduled to be in the vicinity. This would start a whole series of reports from throughout the Canary Islands as whatever it was headed out on its inscrutable mission, and people seemed to be reporting two different types of phenomena, one being this large sphere and the other being smaller flitting orbs, and these were seen by hundreds of people across several islands. One of the most intriguing reports came from a doctor Francisco Padron Leon, who at the time was in a taxi on his way to a house call at the town of Las Rosas. However, things got very odd when both he and the driver noticed an illuminated globe up in front of them, just seeming to hover over the ground. According to Leon’s report, it measured an estimated 100 feet across, and was seemingly made up of a semi-clear material like crystal. More bizarre still was that as they drew closer they could see that the bottom of the sphere was ringed by some sort of metallic platform, upon which two immense humanoid beings around 10 feet in height were standing next to large consoles of some kind. These two creatures had oversized heads, wore some kind of helmets, and seemed to be operating a giant tube that belched forth a bluish smoke, and the doctor would say of these entities and what happened next:

At each side of the center there were two huge figures of 2.50 to 3 m. [8.5 to 10 ft.] tall, but no taller than 3 m. [10 ft.], dressed entirely in red and facing each other in such a way that I always saw their profile. Then I observed that some kind of bluish smoke was coming out from a semi-transparent central tube in the sphere, covering the periphery of the sphere’s interior without leaking outside at any moment. Then the sphere began to grow and grow until it became huge like a 20-story house, but the platform and the crew remained the same size; it rose slowly and majestically and it seems I heard a very tenuous whistling.

This gigantic sphere would ascend and then purportedly shoot off at astounding speed along with its mysterious occupants. It would then be seen by several other witnesses directly after this, including the very patient that the doctor was on his way to see, all of who described the same translucent crystalline structure and giant beings on their catwalk. By the end of the evening there would apparently be thousands of reports from across the archipelago describing something bizarre going on in the sky, coming from a wide variety of professions and ages and making them one of the most mass witnessed UFO events ever, yet it was all mostly swept under the carpet by the Spanish Air Force.

Sketch of the UFO occupants

The following year, in 1977, some of these reports were leaked to journalist J. J. Benitez by a Spanish Air Force General, and would subsequently find their way into his book UFOs: Official Documents of the Spanish Government, but this was all still considered unverifiable and filled with spooky conspiracies. It would not be until 1994 that people would really take it seriously, when the Spanish Air Force declassified its files on the events and it was clear for all to see that something very odd had indeed been documented from that evening. The declassified report was very detailed, included over 100 pages of testimony, evaluations, drawings, a full chronology of the sightings, and it also took the step of separating witnesses by their perceived level of veracity and reliability, with the reports of the crew of the Atrevida and that of doctor Leon ranking at the top. It was also explained that an investigative adjunct had been launched by the Spanish Air Force, which had found that there had been no military or civilian aircraft at the time and they officially labelled it an “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The report would conclude:

The fact that a very strange and peculiar aerial phenomena occurred on the night of 22 June is a true and proven fact, as incredible as its behavior and conditions may seem. We should have to think seriously of the necessity of considering the possibility of accepting the hypothesis that a craft of unknown origin, propelled by an equally unknown energy, is moving freely over the skies in the Canaries.

It is a startlingly clear and refreshingly frank piece of declassified information, with the rare stance of a government honestly throwing up their hands and admitting that they don’t know what they are dealing with. No Venus, ball lightning, Jupiter, or other attempts to wedge it all into the mundane, just the acknowledgment that something very weird was going on, indeed, and leaving the field open for speculation. What happened over these secluded islands back in 1976? What did they want and who or what were those enigmatic beings? The Canary Island UFO sightings remain important in that they were reported by so many witnesses, many of which were highly reliable, as well as the fact that occupants were observed and the government admitted they have no answer for it all. Although this case still remains rather obscure, it certainly seems to be worth another look.

In the annals of UFO sightings throughout history there have been many that stand out as truly incredible, even sometimes including purported military engagements between UFOs and human beings. This may seem pretty spectacular as it is, like something out of a science fiction movie, but what if we take it a step further? What happens when these enigmatic objects actually engage each other? While it seems to be a subject well off the beaten path, there are actually a few cases of UFO on UFO dogfights going way back.

The earliest case we will look at here, and probably the most flat out spectacular and bonkers, is an odd phenomenon that purportedly played out in the skies over Nuremberg, Germany, in 1561. On April 14th of that year, normal life ground to a halt as citizens looked upwards with a mixture of awe and fear as something very strange happened up there. There whizzing about in the heavens were reportedly hundreds of mysterious objects of all shapes and sizes, including spheres, cylinders, tubes, saucer-like objects, crosses, ovals, lunar crescents, a black spear, and myriad others, which seemed to be engaged in some sort of free-for-all aerial battle, scorching the sky with their hostilities, after which one of them was said to actually crash somewhere out in the wilderness. The objects moved erratically and with great speed, and an article that appeared in the local paper at the time, said of this bizarre scene:

At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color. Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.

These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows.

The whole thing apparently lasted for a full hour, after which all of these various objects apparently flew off towards the sun. The article was accompanied by a woodblock print depicting the battle, which was also brought into modern discourse when it was published in Carl Jung’s 1958 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, and it has left people scratching their heads ever since. At the time of the article it was largely seen as some sort of celestial battle and a sign from God, but of course in that era flying spaceships would not have really been a thing since it was an age when we didn’t even understand the cosmos in the first place, let alone flying machines. It only makes sense they would try to explain it in a religious context, with something they could understand. In later centuries it has come to be seen as perhaps some sort of atmospheric phenomena such as a sundog, flying swarms of insects, clouds, birds, a sensationalized tall tale, or even an actual mass battle between UFOs. It is likely we will never know, considering how lost to time the report is, but it is definitely curious.

A very similar series of events allegedly occurred in April of 1665 in the skies over Barhöfft, which was then in Sweden, but is now in Germany. On this occasion there were supposedly seen several disc-shaped objects that were battling amongst themselves, after which they scattered and one remained hovering there, which apparently made all those who looked upon it sick. One Erasmus Francisci would write of this in a 1689 article entitled Der wunder-reiche Ueberzug unserer Nider-Welt/Oder Erd-umgebende, in which he says of the battle aftermath:

After a while out of the sky came a flat round form, like a plate, looking like the big hat of a man… Its color was that of the darkening moon, and it hovered right over the Church of St. Nicolai. There it remained stationary until the evening. The fishermen, worried to death, didn’t want to look further at the spectacle and buried their faces in their hands. On the following days, they fell sick with trembling all over and pain in head and limbs. Many scholarly people thought a lot about that.

As with the Nuremburg case, this has been speculated as being mirages, birds, or some other mundane phenomena, but the detail of the fishermen falling sick is intriguing, and makes one wonder if this could have been an effect of radiation sickness in an era when we didn’t even know what radiation was. What was going on here? There have been much more modern reports of this sort of battle between UFOs happening, such as one incident that reportedly happened in February of 1980 in Australia. On this day brothers Rob and Phil Tindale were at their home in the town of Aldgate when they spied what seemed to be a brightly lit yellow object “bobbing about” in the sky above. After several minutes another similar object then joined it, only this one was larger and emitted a red light towards the smaller object.

According to the brothers, the larger object would move up to the smaller one, stop, shoot its red light, back up and then repeat the process, which gave them the impression that it was an attack of some sort. The smaller object then took off and the two engaged in a breathtaking display of speed and aerial maneuverability, an obvious chase, before both of them sped off in opposite directions. One of the brothers would say, “Certainly there were two lights, one appeared to be chasing the other, they both dipped below the horizon. It was a very memorable thing.” Both of the brothers remain adamant that they actually witnessed two UFOs dogfighting each other, and there was even another witness, a local farmer named Daryl Browne, who reported seeing a “speedboat-shaped yellow thing” crash through some trees leaving a mess of broken branches behind. One wonders just what happened here.

Even more recently is an account covered on UFO Casebook and from Unsolved UFO Mysteries by William J. Birnes, and Harold Burt. Supposedly this report comes from the Russian UFO researcher Nikolay Subbotin, and took place in 1989 over Zaostrovka, Russia. Apparently, on September 16, 1989, several hundred witnesses observed a formation of six silvery saucer-shaped UFOs chase a larger, golden one, apparently attacking it in the process. During the confrontation, all of the craft exhibited acceleration and maneuverability far beyond anything known, and all were described as shooting strong beams of flickering intense light at each other. According to a report in the newspaper Semipalatinsk, the energy being thrown about by these UFOs was enough to cripple the power grid and send the whole town into darkness.

Making this report all the more sensational is that after some time of the silver saucers ganging up on seventh object, the golden one then seems to have succumbed to the many energy beam hits it was sustaining, losing altitude to go hurtling towards the ground off in the distance, purportedly coming down at a bog on a nearby military test range. As soon as this happened, the victorious silver objects then reportedly shot off into the distance, and although the first reaction of the witnesses was to see if the other had crashed, it was a military area off limits to civilians. According to Subbotin, the military wasted no time in moving in shortly after the crash, and cleared the area, during which time several personnel fell mysterious ill and the instruments of passing aircraft experienced interference. What happened to this alleged downed UFO, if it ever really existed at all? Why were those other UFOs attacking it? Who knows?

These are certainly some very surreal and off-kilter accounts, in that rather than human fighter jets engaging these unidentified flying objects they seem to have been engaging each other. It is all pretty wild to think about, these advanced craft testing their meddle with each other in battle, and if it is real one is left to wonder why they would do this. Are there differing factions of these beings that on occasion don’t see eye to eye? Are there enemies among the occupants of these craft, who for whatever reasons resort to battle? Or is it just that these are misidentified phenomena that give the illusion of such bizarre dogfights? Such cases surely are some pretty far-out stuff, and whether they are real or not they certainly stoke the fires of the imagination.