Qualla: Manises UFO incident

Manises UFO incident: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Manises UFO incident: The Lights Over Ibiza

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Manises UFO incident: Three Echoes on the Radar

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 runwa...

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Manises UFO incident: Scramble the Mirage

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 colo...

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Manises UFO incident: Stars, Planets, and a Chemical Plant

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 il...

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Manises UFO incident: What Jammed the Jet?

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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