Canary Islands "Missile-Launch" UFO, 1979

The Canary Islands had seen this before. Mass sightings lit the skies on 22 November 1974, 22 June 1976, 19 November 1976 and 24 March 1977. Then came Monday, 5 March 1979. Ricardo Campo would later call it the authentic Canary UFO.

Sunset came at 19:10. Roughly 200 km west of the islands, something began. According to J. J. Benítez, the first phase lasted about 24.5 minutes in the twilight. Witnesses saw iridescent, brightly coloured rings crossed by yellow zigzag lines. Then the object. It seemed flat. It flew horizontally for a few seconds toward the south east, then climbed far faster than anything normal. Some saw an oval that seemed to stretch with its speed. Others saw a metallic silhouette edged with neon-like light, or a huge flattened cauldron throwing orange light.

At about 20:08 a second phase arrived. A brilliant dome of orange-yellow light, evenly bright, which Benítez put at 69 to 100 km wide. He described the flight as completely silent. The whole event lasted around an hour.

They numbered in the thousands. On Tenerife they watched from Los Cristianos, Playa de las Américas, El Médano and Mount Teide. An infantry captain stood with 145 paratroopers. Six recruits at the CIR Olla Fría training centre looked up at about 20:00. Crews of ten airliners reported it. Aboard a Naysa air taxi, pilots Eufronio G. Monforte and Miguel Molledo saw a dark grey, elongated object spin on itself and climb from their level, leaving a trail like sparks. They estimated its speed at 25,000 to 30,000 km/h.

Odd details followed. Birds on Los Cristianos beach fell silent for more than an hour. People on the mountain heard a penetrating hum. More than 50 photographs were taken, by Guillermo Lijtmaer, Antonio González Llopis and others.

The Canary Islands Air Zone, under Division General Emilio García Conde, took the case. The radars had not picked up the objects. The Spanish asked US intelligence whether the Americans were responsible. The answer was no. If it was not the Americans, García Conde reasoned, it was the Russians. A logical deduction, he admitted, with no other basis. In 1987 El País reported an Air Force committee's conclusion: missiles from a Soviet nuclear submarine. Admiral Konstantin V. Makarov denied that any Soviet submarine was in the area.

In 2001 Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Ricardo Campo Pérez published their analysis in the Spanish Air Force's journal. The Canary sightings were US Navy Poseidon C-3 missiles fired from submerged submarines. James Oberg had found a definite correlation with Poseidon launches. Jonathan McDowell's launch database lists four Poseidon launches from SSBN-642, the USS Kamehameha, that day: 18:47, 18:48, 20:07 and 22:25 UTC. The 20:07 launch sits a minute from the dome Benítez described.

Benítez rejects every missile explanation. He points to the silence, the apparent pauses, the absent radar returns and the size of the dome. He argues for an intelligent, unknown technology.

The night still divides people. Luis Alfonso Gámez revisited it for Skeptical Inquirer. On Metabunk, users traced the launch times. Even the missile count is disputed: two, three or four. For many in the islands, 5 March 1979 remains the night something rose from the sea.