Manises and the Unscheduled Landing
On the evening of 11 November 1979 a TAE Supercaravelle from Mallorca to Tenerife was over the Mediterranean when the crew saw red lights closing on them. Captain Javier Lerdo de Tejada judged the approach dangerous, altered course twice, and finally put the aircraft down at Manises airport near Valencia — with 109 passengers aboard. The Spanish Air Force scrambled a Mirage; the pilot reported seeing the lights and that his radar would not hold the target. The ground radar at Valencia did record a return. Spain declassified the file in the 1990s. The official explanation is the flare of an oil refinery combined with an optical illusion; the crew did not accept it.
Off San Diego and the Tic Tac
On 14 November 2004 the Nimitz carrier group, a hundred-odd kilometres south-west of San Diego, spent several days tracking returns that dropped from twenty-five kilometres to sea level in seconds. A pair of F/A-18s was sent to look; the squadron commander, David Fravor, reported a white object with no wings and no exhaust, shaped like a breath mint, moving over the water in sharp jumps. The second aircraft filmed it on an infrared camera. That recording, known as FLIR1, was published in 2017 and confirmed by the Pentagon in 2020 as genuine and unidentified. It is the first case on this map where the defence ministry itself vouched for the document.
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