This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 1, Issue 4, from 1987.
According to information published by the Spanish newspaper El Pais on 14 June 1987, a committee of Spanish Air Force investigators has come to the conclusion that the two UFOs seen by thousands of people on the Canarian archipelago on the evening of 5 March 1979 were really two intercontinental missiles fired by a Soviet nuclear submarine from the Canary Islands to the Siberian desert.
The firing took place 200 miles off the southwest of the archipelago, and from the first the Spanish Air Force suspected that the UFOs were missiles. The United States authorities, when asked about the incident, answered that no US combat unit had fired the two missiles.
The Spanish Air Force investigators found out that the UFOs were directed to Siberia, and study of many photographs of the event confirms that the UFOs were missiles. This was a controversial incident, because some Spanish UFOlogists thought that the UFOs were extraterrestrial ships, while others agreed that the photographs proved that the sighting was the firing of missiles from a submarine either from the US or the Soviet Union.
One of the most important defenders of the extraterrestrial explanation was Juan Jose Benitez, “the unique professional Spanish UFO investigator”. He said in one of his books that the “UFO of the Canary Islands was not a meteorological phenomenon, nor the aurora borealis, nor a meteorite, nor a sounding balloon, and much less a missile.” He affirmed that an “extraterrestrial ship” was seen over the Canarian archipelago on the evening of 5 March 1979.
Photographic analyses made by the Ground Saucer Watch in 1979 came to the conclusion that the UFO was a US Navy Polaris missile. But, on 14 October 1984, the newspaper Diario published an article about a Soviet submarine that had fired two nuclear missiles near the Canary Islands. However, Benitez has never considered the missile explanation, and has written many times ridiculing it.
Of course, this is not the first time that this UFOlogist has made mistakes, because he is the sensationalist UFOlogist par excellence. For example, he has taken toad songs for UFO sounds in a case in Bilbao, the Meier photographs for evidence of a lost civilization, Charles Berlitz for a serious investigator, and so on. But this time Soviet intercontinental missiles exploded over his head and revealed that Benitez has his head full only of exterrestrial ships.
