This Wednesday, the PNV deputy Aitor Esteban Bretos surprised in his speech, during the motion of no confidence against the government of Pedro Sánchez, by recalling a strange UFO sighting that occurred in the Balearic Islands on February 6, 1979:
«A Cepsa company butane ship set sail from the port of Alcudia bound for Cartagena. The weather forecasts were good, announcing a clear sky. The clock said 23.17 [en realidad fue a las 21.17] and it was sailing with its explosive cargo on a rough sea, fifteen miles east of Formentera, under a light west wind. Nothing boded a risky journey, but suddenly, the captain observed some lights on the starboard side. Those lights disconcerted him, they were not the position lights of other ships, since their colors were red and yellow and they moved quickly. In the end, the captain was able to make out what they were. As he declared to the military authorities, they were UFOs. Fifty UFOs. The name of that ship was ‘Tamames’”.
Many deputies looked surprised at the PNV deputy, when he recalled that episode to criticize the motion of no confidence that the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, announced months ago and that started this Tuesday, March 21 with the ex-communist Ramón Tamames as candidate: «Now the Mr. Tamames has spotted, in total, 52 UFOs, which with their signatures have allowed him to step on this camera today. Fifty-two obvious UFOs, advantageous and notoriously self-interested. The events that occurred in Formentera still do not have a reasonable explanation today, nor does this motion of censure.
Beyond the parliamentary anecdote, which featured part of the session, what really happened in that supposed encounter between the Tamames ship and the fifty UFOs whose file number 790206 was declassified by the Government in 1995? Even he has come to ABC to tell what the Ministry of Defense collected during the investigation carried out at that time when the presence of unidentified flying objects was common in the press. That same month, in fact, this newspaper reported another similar episode with these headlines: ‘UFO phenomenon in the Canary Islands’, ‘Photographs of the Canary Islands UFO published’, ‘Scientists do not believe in the extraterrestrial origin of the Canary Islands UFO’.
‘UFO file’
As Ignacio Cabria pointed out in ‘Among ufologists, believers and contactees: a social history of UFOs in Spain’ (Cuadernos de Ufología, 1997), at the end of the year 1950 «flying saucers were already in Spain a phenomenon firmly established in the imaginary collective”. This anthropologist reviewed the first decade of existence of ‘Ten Minutes’, which published its first issue in 1951, and collected more than forty articles on sightings of flying saucers in this magazine alone. ‘I was inside a saucer’, claimed a headline from 1952. The Spanish press followed the same trend in the 1960s and 1970s.
The document brought to light by the Ministry of Defense in reference to the sighting of the Tamames, called the ‘UFO File’, located the event near the town of Pilar de la Mola, in Formentera, as indicated by Bretos. It was recorded in the Cepsa ship’s logbook and subsequently forwarded to the chief general of the Air Sector by the chief admiral of the Balearic Islands Naval Sector. In the text, it did indeed include the yellow and red lights in the sea and the echoes on the ship’s radar screen.
The file said exactly: «At 21:17 on February 6, some lights with a yellowish-reddish reflection upwards were observed on the port side and open 45 degrees with the bow of the ship. Due to the similarity with possible light signals of danger, [la embarcación] He put forward to the lights to provide the necessary assistance. Until then, the radar had not detected any echo and, after 15 or 20 minutes, all the lights went out, and ‘beams that incessantly whiten the screen like a racon would’ (a beacon to help the navigation system that emits a visible signal on the radar screen). Calls were not heard ‘neither on VHF nor on Phone’”.
Image of the Tamames ship from which the sighting occurred in 1979
“Lights Like Sparklers”
The newspaper ‘El País’ broke the news three days later with the following headline: ‘The crew of a ship claims to have seen UFOs near Formentera’. The article included the explanation of the ship’s captain, José Luis González, whose crew was about twenty men: «About nine o’clock last Tuesday night, when we were fifteen miles from Formentera, some lights appeared before us. like flares that did not remain static. Some yellowish lights less than eight miles from us.”
#EnDirecto | The PNV refers to a supposed UFO encounter of the Tamames ship in the Canary Islands in 1979: “Now, Mr. Tamames has spotted 52 UFOs”, the Vox deputies, “obvious notoriously interested advantagers” pic.twitter.com/2hzOGG2dpP
— Europa Press (@europapress) March 21, 2023
The captain also assured that the fifty UFOs that they sighted surrounded them for approximately six hours, that is, a large part of the section of the journey that he was making from Alcudia to the Balearic island. The first to observe the phenomenon was a sailor on watch, who startled the rest of the crew. The Tamames radar indicated that one of the flying objects was close to the ship. In fact, according to the captain, the most striking thing occurred at 0.45, when the lights began to approach the ship and came to be only two miles from it.
“Slowly the echoes recede, and by 3:00 a.m., none appeared on the screen except from ships that frequented the area. No abnormality was detected in the machinery or instruments,” the file concluded. At the end, he added: «There are no aspects that make it advisable to maintain the condition of ‘classified matter’». More than a quarter of a century had passed and the Ministry of Defense found no reason to keep that episode a secret, so this and 79 other reports containing up to 1,900 pages on sightings that occurred between 1962 and 1995 were declassified.
Among them were two other cases that concerned the Balearic Islands and that occurred at the same time. One, on October 24, 1978 in Menorca, and another, just a week after the Tamames ship in the municipality of Andratx. In these two cases, however, it was determined that the sightings that had occurred from the air on commercial flights coincided with the passage of a meteorite and the presence of Air Force fighters.
The fifty Tamames UFOs, on the other hand, still do not currently have a reasonable explanation.