A declassified military file dismantles one of the most cited references about UFOs in the Barcelona area. Document 780704 records an observation from July 4, 1978, from Barcelona, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, and Sabadell, but the response signed by the air sector of Catalonia denies that the radar at El Prat airport detected that object.
The contradiction is at the heart of the case. The file preserved for years an observation presented as a radar-assisted sighting, although the letter sent by the Air Force itself later indicated that the control tower had not registered any unidentified object that day.
File 780704 denied radar trace at El Prat airport
Spain began to declassify documentation on UFO sightings in 1991 and made it available to the public from 1992 in the Virtual Library of Defense. The archive brings together 80 files and 1,900 pages on strange aerial phenomena in Spanish airspace between 1962 and 1995.
The case linked to the metropolitan area is included in a nine-page file.
That dossier was opened after the management of the secretary of the Agrupació de Parapsicologia i Ufologia de Barcelona, who requested information from the Air Force at the beginning of August. Before that, he had received a negative response from the airport and then the request went through the Ministry of Defense, the Third Air Region in Zaragoza and the head of the air sector of Catalonia.
The official response arrived on September 1st. The air sector's commanding general of Catalonia signed a letter in which he communicated that the airport's control tower had not detected any unidentified objects on July 4th.
The military explanation pointed to balloons launched from Sicily
The response added an element that diminished the initial sighting hypothesis. During that month, the Palma de Mallorca Control Center had reported the launch of balloons from Sicily by United States personnel.
Barcelona, L'Hospitalet and Sabadell appear in the same observation of July 4.
The document also specified that those balloons were not detected by radar screens due to their low speed. The file does not include photographs or testimonies and is limited to the request submitted by the APU and the administrative processing of the military response.
Decades later, another episode seen in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat also ended with a conventional explanation. On May 15, 2014, an object was observed in broad daylight that was later confirmed as an atmospheric probe launched by the Spanish National Research Council over the university area of Barcelona.