On the night of 11 November 1979, a Spanish airliner did something no airliner had ever done before: it made an emergency landing to escape a UFO. Flight JK-297 was over the Mediterranean near Ibiza, bound for the Canary Islands with 109 people aboard, when a cluster of red lights came racing at the cockpit on what looked like a collision course. What followed — a diverted airliner, a scrambled fighter jet, and a chase that trailed off over the sea toward Africa — remains the most famous UFO sighting in Spain.
The aircraft was a Sud Aviation Supercaravelle operated by Transportes Aéreos Españoles, flying from Salzburg with a refuelling stop on Mallorca before setting course for Las Palmas. Around eleven at night, the captain, Francisco Javier Lerdo de Tejada, and his crew noticed a set of red lights closing fast, seemingly on a collision heading. He asked for an explanation, but neither the military radar at Torrejón de Ardoz near Madrid nor the control centre in Barcelona could account for them. When the captain changed altitude to avoid a crash, the lights simply mirrored his move and held station about half a kilometre away. With an evasive manoeuvre judged impossible, he broke off course and put the airliner down at Manises airport in Valencia — the first time in history a commercial flight was forced to land because of a UFO.
The lights broke off their pursuit just before the wheels touched down, but the night was not over. Radar then picked up three new signals, each estimated at some 200 metres across, and several witnesses on the ground reported seeing them. One passed alarmingly close to the runway. The airport's ground crew, unsure whether they might be dealing with an unregistered aircraft in trouble, lit the emergency lights, just in case whatever it was intended to come down. Nothing landed. But the sense that something real and unexplained was moving over the airfield pushed the incident from a single pilot's report into a matter for the Spanish Air Force.
With no answer to any radio call, a Dassault Mirage F1 launched from the Los Llanos base at Albacete, flown by Air Force captain Fernando Cámara. He had to push to Mach 1.4 just to get eyes on the object, which he described as a truncated cone glowing with a shifting, bright colour — and which promptly vanished from sight. Told of a fresh radar echo near Sagunto, he closed again, and again the object accelerated away. This time it seemed to answer back. The fighter's avionics scrambled: its electronic systems jammed, and the onboard warning gear alerted Cámara as though he were being locked up by a missile's continuous-wave radar. After a third failed approach, the object disappeared toward Africa. An hour and a half in, low on fuel, Cámara turned for home with nothing to show.
The affair made too much noise to ignore. By September 1980 it had reached the Cortes Generales, the Spanish parliament, where the deputy Enrique Múgica Herzog demanded an official explanation. Authorities dismissed a genuine UFO and chalked the whole thing up to freak optical illusions. When the Air Force finally declassified its full report in August 1994, it suggested the airline captain, the ground crew and Cámara had all been fooled by flashes from a distant chemical industry complex roughly a hundred miles away, together with some stars and planets. It remains the only non-UFO explanation on record — and it has been debated and firmly rejected by nearly everyone who was actually there that night.
The official report left out the most unsettling detail: the jamming of the Mirage itself. One theory points away from the paranormal entirely. The United States Sixth Fleet was operating in the region at the time, running powerful electronic-warfare equipment as the world waited on the outcome of the Iran hostage crisis, and its transmissions could conceivably have scrambled the fighter's systems. Cámara did not buy it. The fleet, he argued, was too far off — and in any case, his systems failed at the precise moment he tried to lock the object with an infrared missile. More than four decades on, the Manises incident keeps its grip on Spain: too well-documented to dismiss, too strange to fully explain.
The airliner diverted into Manises — Valencia Airport, ICAO LEVC — at about 39.483°N, 0.450°W, on the western side of the city; the runway the crew reported a UFO passing near is the same one in daily use today. The drama ranged out over the Mediterranean toward Ibiza and back across the coast near Sagunto, northeast of Valencia. The intercepting Mirage F1 flew from the Los Llanos air base at Albacete (ICAO LEAB), about 145 km inland to the west-southwest. Alicante–Elche (ICAO LEAL) lies roughly 135 km south. The events unfolded at night at cruising altitude; by day the coastal plain around Valencia offers clear visibility, with the airport an obvious landmark about 8 km west of the old city.