The Manises UFO Incident of November 1979

Off Ibiza, on the night of 11 November 1979, two steady red lights appeared in the dark - no strobes, no beacons, no answer on the radio. Aboard a Spanish airliner with 109 passengers, commander Lerdo de Tejada watched them hold formation and close. When he climbed to shake them, they climbed faster. Fearing a collision, he abandoned his flight plan and dived for Valencia.Barcelona control could find nothing on its scopes. A Mirage F-1 fighter was scrambled into the night - and at 0.95 Mach, more than a thousand kilometres an hour, its pilot could not gain a metre on lights that stayed maddeningly out ahead.This is the minute-by-minute reconstruction of Spain's most famous and most documented aviation UFO case: the diverted airliner and its frightened crew, the airport engineer who tracked the lights from the tarmac, the radar returns that one military station saw and another did not, and the chase that could not close.Working from the Spanish Air Force file declassified in 1994, the original air-traffic-control transcripts, and the 1980 parliamentary record, the book sets the encounter against the Spain of its moment: a young democracy four years after Franco, holiday air corridors stacked with charter jets, coastal refinery flares, a temperature inversion lying over a warm sea, and a US Sixth Fleet running its electronics hot through the first days of the Iranian hostage crisis.Every explanation is weighed in turn - stars and atmospheric refraction, submarine missile plumes, electronic-warfare interference, a captain's nerves - and so are the stubborn details that none of them fully explains.What really chased flight JK-297?Read the documents. Weigh the witnesses. Decide for yourself.

Pagina's: 242, Paperback, Independently published