The Manises Incident

On the night of November 11, 1979, a TAE (Transportes Aéreos Españoles) Caravelle en route from Salzburg to Tenerife via Mallorca, commanded by Captain Francisco Javier Lerdo de Tejada, diverted and landed at Manises airport in Valencia after a set of red lights appeared to approach the aircraft on a collision-like course and pace it through evasive maneuvers. It is commonly described as the only commercial flight forced down by a UFO in aviation records.

The crew reported two rapid red lights closing from the left; unable to obtain traffic information and judging the lights to be maintaining dangerous proximity through altitude changes, the captain declared an emergency and diverted. After the landing, ground observers at Manises also reported lights. The Spanish Air Force scrambled a Mirage F1 whose pilot, Captain Fernando Cámara, reported visual contact with fast lights and a shape he could not close on despite supersonic pursuit, along with reported interference; the chase spanned over an hour before fuel forced return.

Crew and fighter-pilot testimony, controller records, and the airline's operational decision itself, an emergency landing being an unusual, costly, checkable act.

Spain's Air Force investigated within its then-classified UFO files (later declassified in the 1990s), recording the events without definitive identification.

Spanish researchers, notably Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and skeptic-leaning analysts, attribute the lights to flares of the Poseidon missile-test-adjacent naval exercises and, in other reconstructions, to distant industrial flames (the Escombreras refinery burn-off) seen under exceptional propagation, with the fighter's difficulties reflecting light-chasing geometry. Proponents note the crew's proximity judgments and the interference reports. The declassified file leaves the identification open, and the case remains Spain's most cited.