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.
Trindade and the Photograph from the Deck
On 16 January 1958 the vessel Almirante Saldanha lay off this Brazilian island in the South Atlantic with an International Geophysical Year expedition aboard. A photographer, Almiro Baraúna, shot an object shaped like a disc with a ring around it from the deck — four of six frames caught it. The film was developed on board there and then, with officers present; the Brazilian Navy analysed the images, accepted them as genuine, and the country's president confirmed them publicly. It later emerged that Baraúna had once made staged photographs for a magazine as a joke, and that became the sceptics' main argument. In sixty years the frames themselves have never been shown to be faked.
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