The Madrid UFO of 1968: Spanish Air Force File 6809VR

1968 was a restless year in Spanish skies. In September the Spanish Air Force opened a new file. Expediente 6809VR. Madrid, Toledo, Cuenca and Pamplona. 5 and 6 September 1968.

Thursday, 5 September. 11:00. Radar squadrons EVA 1 and EVA 2 detected an object over Barahona at 75,000 feet, moving from north-east to south-west. An F-104 pilot on an interception exercise at 51,000 feet saw it far above him. He could not get close. His fuel was running low. The second pilot, flying as the practice target, described a tetrahedron with three bright balls on its underside.

At 19:50, EVA 2 tracked an object for 20 minutes between 81,000 and 90,000 feet, heading south-west at an average of 15 km/h. Control Madrid at Paracuellos saw two echoes over Toledo, more than 20 nautical miles apart, heading south-west.

Around sunset, the calls began. Residents of the Avenidas district. A woman in Plaza de Cristo Rey. Drivers and pedestrians stopped to stare, and the Gran Vía jammed solid. Colleges, monasteries and scientific institutions turned telescopes and binoculars on the sky. Early reports spoke of a bright, stationary sphere whose brightness flickered. Most ground observers saw a triangle.

The Madrid Observatory was precise: "su forma es triangular." Solid on one face, translucent on others. A journalist there spoke of its blinding light. Several photographs were reportedly taken, some through telescopic lenses. ABC reported a slow drift south-east, against upper winds from the east and south-east. After about 65 minutes the object faded into cloud, toward the Casa de Campo.

On 6 September the reports kept coming. Iberia flight IB-413 saw an elongated, brilliant object over Cuenca at about 42,000 feet. Two meteorology sergeants in Cuenca described something metallic, bell-shaped, very bright and very high. At noon a Lufthansa Boeing crew reported a balloon over Pamplona at 70,000 to 80,000 feet.

Then the balloons came down. One fell at Tudelilla and the Guardia Civil recovered it at 14:45. At El Carroñal, near Murillo de Río Leza, the colonel commanding Agoncillo watched another fall from the control tower. Its white octagonal box carried a four-bladed plastic antenna and labels from France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, the CNES. At 23:00, controllers in Seville reported a bright object. An officer at San Pablo saw three, two of them stationary, flashing blue, red and green.

The Air Ministry spoke the next day. Lacking reliable data, it suggested a meteorological probe studying the lower mesosphere. Not everyone agreed. The US tracking station at Robledo said it was definitely not an American satellite. Spain's weather bureau denied it was a weather balloon. French technicians reportedly said their balloon had not drifted over Madrid. One blog even claims the Air Force settled on Venus.

The file's analysis, signed at Torrejón on 20 January 1993, was firm. Every object seen on the 5th moved north-east to south-west, on a path that could begin in the south of France. The recovered balloons, it concluded, confirmed meteorological balloons launched by the CNES. One gap remains. Those balloons were found on the 6th, in La Rioja, and nothing directly ties them to the evening sky over Madrid.

Declassified on 13 September 1993, the file now sits in Spain's Defence Virtual Library. J. J. Benítez preserved the Observatory's words. For Spanish ufologists, the Madrid UFO of 1968 is still one of the great classics.