The Gáldar Giants: the Canary Islands Sphere of 1976

It was 21:27 local time. The Spanish Navy corvette Atrevida was sailing off Fuerteventura. Her officers saw a light rise. "At first we thought it was an aircraft with its landing lights on," they reported. Then it stopped.

The original light went out and a luminous beam began to rotate. Two minutes later a great halo of yellowish and bluish light formed. It held its position for about 40 minutes. The light split in two. The upper part climbed in a rapid, irregular spiral and vanished.

Several hundred people watched from Gran Canaria, Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and from ships at sea. About 400 km south of La Gomera, the cargo ship Osaka Bay reported a white disc with stars visible through it. A sergeant on duty at Pozo de las Nieves saw it too.

Near ten o'clock at night, Dr. Francisco Julio Padrón León was on an emergency house call. Francisco Estévez was driving the taxi, and a relative of the patient sat in the back. Near Las Rosas, in Gáldar, above an onion field, they saw a sphere close to the ground. The doctor described a "totally transparent and crystalline-like material," electric blue, with a "platform of aluminum-like color" and three consoles. Inside stood "two huge figures of 2.50 to 3 m tall, dressed entirely in red."

Then it moved: "The sphere began to grow and grow until it became huge like a 20-story house... it rose slowly and majestically." It drifted toward Tenerife. It reached enormous speed and dissolved into a bluish spindle. Estévez also described a transparent craft with two persons dressed in brilliant red. Accounts of what the back-seat passenger saw do not agree.

On 25 June 1976 the Commanding General of the Canaries Air Zone ordered an inquiry. The file came to hold 14 witness depositions. The investigating judge, Commander Antonio Munaiz Ferro-Sastre, held that Padrón's testimony could not be given "unquestionable credibility." Radar recorded nothing.

The Adjutant's Report of 16 July 1976 considered and rejected aircraft, a missile test, aurora, a meteor, balloons and weather. It concluded "Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon." In 1977 the journalist J. J. Benítez obtained the report and published most of it. The Air Force declassified the file in June 1994.

In March 2001, Ricardo Campo Pérez and Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos published their answer in the Air Force's own journal. Using Jonathan McDowell's launch database, they matched the event to two Poseidon C-3 missiles launched by the submarine USS Von Steuben at 20:16 and 20:17 GMT. In their account, sunlight from below the horizon lit the high exhaust plume, which grew into the glowing hemisphere. Four of the five big Canary events match documented launches.

The giants are harder to explain: Campo sees a distant light reinterpreted by the mind. On Metabunk, a reconstruction of the taxi's route showed its occupants facing toward Tenerife, the same direction as other observers. One witness had first suggested the figures were prickly pears lit by the car's headlights. The family remembers it differently. Padrón's son said his father thought he had seen "some kind of entity, probably not terrestrial."

Today the Spanish defence catalogue lists file 760622 as a Poseidon C-3 launch. The Gáldar giants still appear in books, on television and on radio, from Más allá to Cuarto Milenio. Some call the case the Spanish Roswell. In 2026 it turned fifty.