# The Giants of Gáldar [View on uap.fun]() CASE FILE 045 · 1976 Published: September 30, 2026 One June night in 1976, a light rose over the Atlantic and swelled into a vast transparent sphere watched from one end of the Canaries to the other. Above Gáldar, a country doctor saw it near the ground with two red-suited giants inside. The Air Force filed the light as unidentified and set the giants aside. A missile test was later matched to the light; the clock still does not quite fit. ![Photograph at sunset of surf breaking on a dark volcanic shore with tide pools in the foreground, a low headland with white houses on the left, and a faint mountain peak on the far horizon under a golden, cloud-streaked sky.]() Dusk at El Agujero on the northwest coast of Gran Canaria, in the municipality of Gáldar, January 2022. The faint peak on the horizon is probably Teide on Tenerife, the direction in which the 1976 sphere was seen to vanish. Photo: Gerda Arendt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. ## AT A GLANCE - **DATE:** June 22, 1976 - **LOCATION:** Seen over the Atlantic from a Spanish Navy corvette off Fuerteventura, from four of the islands and, at closest quarters, from a taxi climbing to the hamlet of Las Rosas above Gáldar, Gran Canaria - **REPORT TYPE:** Mass sighting - **ENCOUNTER KIND:** [Third kind (CE3)]() — Based on the sworn statements of a doctor and a taxi driver who described a transparent sphere near the ground with two tall figures inside; a woman at the patient’s house was less sure she saw figures. The investigating judge set their account aside, and dozens of witnesses elsewhere saw only a distant glowing sphere. The classification records what was reported, not what caused it. - **RESOLUTION:** [Disputed explanation]() - **RECORD STATUS:** Filed as unidentified; a missile test is the leading explanation, timing disputed ## The story ### A clear night in June Tuesday, June 22, 1976, was a good night to be outside in the Canary Islands. The sky was clear and moonless, the stars were out, and in the farmhouses of northern Gran Canaria people were watching the Tuesday film on television. Seven months after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, the archipelago off the coast of Morocco was still governed from Madrid as two Spanish provinces, with an Air Force command in Las Palmas, a naval command under the Admiral of the Canaries and tourists filling the hotels on the southern beaches. At about 10:15 p.m. local time, an hour ahead of Greenwich, something began to climb into the western sky. Over the next half hour it was seen from a warship off Fuerteventura in the east to La Palma in the west, from ships at sea, from a mountaintop radar station and from the balconies of fishing towns. Newspaper switchboards lit up. Before the week was out, one of the witnesses, a respected doctor from the town of Guía, had described seeing it from barely fifteen meters away, with its crew inside. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() ### The corvette off Punta Lantailla The first official witnesses were at sea. The Spanish Navy corvette Atrevida was steaming south-southwest along the southeastern coast of Fuerteventura, three nautical miles off a point her captain called Punta Lantailla, when at 21:27 GMT, 10:27 p.m. ashore, he saw from the bridge a light rise from inside the island. Its color was an intense bluish yellow. “At first we thought it was an aircraft with its landing light on,” the captain, a lieutenant commander from Cartagena with twenty-nine years in the service, wrote in his statement. According to the judge’s summary, it seemed to be heading for the island’s airport, flying oddly low, and the captain feared a plane in trouble. He ordered his first officer, a reserve sub-lieutenant with fourteen years in the merchant marine, to follow it through binoculars. At fifteen to eighteen degrees above the horizon the light stopped, its beam turning. A great halo formed around it, “a perfectly circular halo of electric blue.” The light split in two: a smaller part stayed at the center of the circle, where a bluish cloud formed, while the upper part climbed away “in a fast, irregular spiral” and vanished. The halo did not move. It hung there for forty minutes, the captain wrote, “lighting up part of the land and the sea, which suggests it was not a distant phenomenon but a close one.” The first officer watched it until 22:10 GMT, when the sky was clean again. The ship’s surface radar showed nothing. The captain entered it in the log and reported to the Admiral of the Canaries. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() ![Faded pinkish color photograph of a long, low gray warship with a lattice mast and several gun mounts, steaming to the right across a choppy sea under scattered cumulus clouds, with the hull number PA 61 painted on its side.]() The corvette Atrevida (F-61), photographed in her later years as the patrol ship PA-61. On the night of June 22, 1976, her captain and first officer watched the light rise over Fuerteventura and its halo hang in the sky until 22:10 GMT. Photo: José Juan Medina Cobacho, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. [Image source]() [CC BY-SA 3.0 · José Juan Medina Cobacho]() ### An archipelago looking west Across the water, Gran Canaria saw it too. A married couple at Boca-Barranco, on the bay of Punta de Gáldar, watched a light “like a car headlight” come toward them, growing to three times the size of the Moon, then fade and leave behind “a bluish arc the size of a rainbow.” They were frightened enough to get in the car and drive more than ten kilometers. A schoolteacher on his balcony in Agaete, with all of Tenerife in view across the channel, trained binoculars on “a great white circle, completely transparent, since you could see the stars,” standing upright over the sea with two rays of equal thickness crossing it from top to bottom. A municipal policeman in Gáldar saw a reddish object like an arrowhead cross the sky between the buildings and stop where, on clear days, he could see the town of Güímar on Tenerife; there a small circle of “a very beautiful blue” grew until it dissolved. Another taxi driver, turning his car at a quarry on the Montaña de Gáldar, mistook it for the Moon, then saw “light and fire” at its base; his passenger said it was an advertising balloon. At Pozo de las Nieves, 1,940 meters up near the island’s summit, a flight sergeant on guard at the Air Force radar station saw a circle three full Moons wide rise from behind Tenerife to forty-five degrees and vanish. The Tenerife papers took calls from Granadilla and Tacoronte; on La Palma, a young woman at the Los Llanos de Aridane town hall noted it at 10:14 p.m., and people in the Aridane valley described something like a rocket rising out of the sea. The ferry Villa de Agaete saw a great glow off Santa Cruz at 10:20. Four hundred kilometers south of La Gomera, the freighter Osaka Bay, bound from South Africa for Southampton, logged a pale orange glow and then a white disk, stars shining through it, that swelled to twenty-four degrees above the northwestern horizon and lasted about twenty-five minutes. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() ![Scanned page of line drawings in two panels. The upper panel, labeled Gran Canaria, Paraje de Las Rosas, shows concentric circles on the left with a small figure at the center and a dashed arrow pointing toward an elongated cloud above the outline of Tenerife. The lower panel shows a large circle with two rays inside, rising behind a mountain outline labeled Teide. An Air Force library stamp dated July 22, 1994 is in the middle.]() Annex III of the Air Force file: the phenomenon as seen from Gran Canaria’s west coast, first from Las Rosas (sequence A), then as a transparent circle crossed by two rays over Tenerife, left of Teide (sequence B). Source: Biblioteca Central del Ejército del Aire y del Espacio / Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa, CC BY 4.0. [Image source]() [CC BY 4.0 · Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa]() ### The doctor’s taxi Of all the night’s witnesses, only a doctor, his taxi driver and a frightened woman at a window said they had seen it up close. Francisco Julio Padrón León, a doctor, was at home in Guía at about ten or ten past ten when a man arrived with a taxi driver: his elderly mother, a patient of the doctor’s, needed him urgently at Las Rosas, a scatter of farmhouses in the hills above Gáldar. Padrón took his bag. They drove six kilometers along the main road toward Agaete and turned up a steep, badly rutted lane, the doctor and the driver, hunting companions, talking about hunting. “As we topped the last steep rise, the car’s headlights picked out a faintly luminous sphere that was stationary, I believe very close to the ground but I can’t say whether it touched it,” he wrote in his sworn statement. “It was made of a completely transparent material, like crystal, since you could see the stars through it; electric blue in color, but soft, not dazzling.” In its lower third he saw an aluminum-colored platform, apparently metal, with three large consoles. On either side of the central console stood a figure, “enormous, about 2.50 to 3 meters, but certainly no taller than 3 meters, dressed entirely in red,” facing each other, so that he saw them only in profile: “they never turned toward us.” Their torsos were long and their legs short, so that they seemed to be sitting even when standing; the back of the head was slightly elongated. They wore some kind of diving helmet that hid their faces, and their hands seemed to end in arrowheads, as if gloved. Their uniforms were rigid, without a wrinkle, bright red. The driver had been watching a great ball for some time, taking it for one of the satellites they talked about on television. Now he cried out: “My God! What is that, Don —? Shall we stop and go closer?” “No,” the doctor answered. “Keep going, keep going to the house.” Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() ![Scanned page with a line drawing of a large circle containing two thin humanoid figures in profile, facing each other and standing on a long platform between three box-shaped consoles, with a tall vertical tube behind the left figure and a rounded vertical window shape at left. An Air Force library stamp overlaps the lower right of the circle.]() Annex IV of the Air Force file: the sphere as Dr. Padrón described it, with its platform, three consoles, central tube and two crew members. Source: Biblioteca Central del Ejército del Aire y del Espacio / Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa, CC BY 4.0. [Image source]() [CC BY 4.0 · Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa]() ### The house at Las Rosas Inside the patient’s house, a relative was watching the Tuesday film when the television screen went black. The dogs began to bark. She went to the window to see the doctor arrive and saw his car and, just above it, “the great blue ball.” It was perfectly round, very large, transparent, the stars visible through it. She saw two figures inside, “like men,” though she could not be sure, because in a panic she shut the windows and doors and began to pray. The ball, she said, grew and grew until it was the size of the church in Gáldar. The doctor, by his own account, watched from the house as a semi-transparent tube at the center of the sphere released a bluish smoke that spread around the inside of the globe without escaping it. Then the sphere began to swell, “enormous, like a twenty-story building,” while the platform and crew stayed the same size, and rose “slowly, majestically,” with what he thought was a faint whistle. He examined the old woman in a state of tremendous excitement, told the country people in the house what he had seen, and went out with them to watch the sphere, high now, drift toward Tenerife, until “suddenly it reached a dizzying speed such as I have never seen in any airplane,” stretching into a spindle, blue in front and red behind, and disappeared. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() ### Three men in a taxi The taxi driver, asked for his own account, wrote of a craft twenty-five meters wide and twenty or more high, with two people inside in bright red, “the whole machine as if it were made of transparent glass,” which left “a column of smoke” as it went toward Tenerife. To the interviewer’s questionnaire he added that the two figures were thin and very tall, “like divers,” and looked like “Swedish tourists.” The third man in the taxi, the patient’s son, sat in the back seat; the roof hid the object, and he saw only a light like the full Moon and the agitation of the two men in front, before he hid his head in fright. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() ### Sixty witnesses and an onion field The Canary press ran with the story for a week. On June 23, La Provincia described two red objects moving in a zigzag, forming a spiral above three red bands, with two powerful blue lights over them; El Día headlined a UFO near La Palma. Diario de Avisos weighed a submarine volcano, a meteorite and a UFO, and on the 24th narrowed the field to a notion that would come back decades later, a “Polaris”-type intercontinental rocket fired from an American submarine, or else a French missile or a UFO. On the 25th, La Provincia reported that “the UFO landed between Gáldar and Agaete,” on the word of some sixty people, “among them a doctor.” The Europa Press news agency carried the doctor’s story to Madrid, where ABC printed it on the 26th: a transparent, rounded thing two stories high, with two figures “much taller than a human” inside, apparently staring at a control panel, and residents of El Hornillo confirming it had rested on the ground for twenty minutes. The same page quoted an observer at the Izaña observatory on Tenerife: “I have worked here for more than sixteen years and I have never seen anything like it… It could have been a great meteorite falling into the sea, or a gigantic UFO.” Then came the landing trace. Two days after the sighting, a farmer at Piso Firme, José Gil González, found a flattened, scorched-looking circle in his onion field. “I watered the onions only yesterday,” he told La Provincia, “and today I find this badly damaged circle.” El Eco de Canarias reported that more than a hundred people had watched a UFO approach the ground. Sources: [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [En las islas Canarias: fue visto por centenares de personas]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() ### The judge from the Air Zone On June 25 the general commanding the Canary Islands Air Zone appointed a juez informador, an investigating judge, under the Air Staff’s 1968 rules for UFO reports: an Air Force major, Antonio Munáiz Ferro-Sastre, who handled four Canary cases between 1974 and 1977. On July 1 a secret cipher cable arrived from Madrid, prompted, it said, by “news appearing in the press” about an unidentified flying object visible from different points of the islands, and asked for a detailed report. Munáiz took thirteen statements on the Air Force’s standard form, which graded witnesses by profession and reliability. He established that the Gando radar squadron had tracked nothing abnormal, that the only Tenerife–Las Palmas flight that evening had landed at 20:29, with no other traffic at that hour, and that the one company licensed for night helicopter flights had not flown. On a map he drew a straight line from Fuerteventura at 21:27 GMT to the phenomenon’s disappearance near Tenerife at 21:40, and from the times reported by the Atrevida and the Gáldar witnesses calculated that it had crossed eighty-five nautical miles in three minutes: 1,700 knots, 3,060 kilometers an hour. He weighed an aircraft’s landing light, an aurora, a meteorite, a weather balloon and a missile, and rejected them all. “No rocket or missile behaves like this at launch, or can leave a luminous halo for twenty minutes,” he wrote; no submarine had been detected, and he knew of no launch base on Fuerteventura. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [UFOLEAKs (6): los jueces instructores de los expedientes ovni, identificados por primera vez]() ### A scooter from elsewhere On the doctor’s craft the judge allowed himself a theory of his own. It was not an interstellar ship, he suggested, but an exploration “scooter,” a platform with three control consoles, driven by an electromagnetic force strong enough to cancel gravity and “ionizing the atmosphere around it,” which would explain why it swelled on takeoff and deformed at speed, and why it left no radar echo. His conclusion, signed in Las Palmas on July 16, was that the phenomenon had really existed, that its nature was completely unknown, and that it was a fenómeno aéreo no identificado, an unidentified aerial phenomenon. On July 21 the Air Zone’s general agreed: it had been seen on three islands by “a considerable number of reliable people, consistent on the essential points,” and neither its origin nor its nature could be determined. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [UFOLEAKs (6): los jueces instructores de los expedientes ovni, identificados por primera vez]() · [¡Identificados! Los OVNIS de Canarias fueron misiles Poseidón]() ![Scanned hand-annotated map of Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura laid sideways on the page, with coastal place names, a long straight line running from the south of Fuerteventura past Gran Canaria toward Tenerife, a ship name, Atrevida, off Fuerteventura, a circled number 2 near Gran Canaria’s north coast, a boxed note reading 85 N.M. en 3 min, velocidad calculada 1700 Kts = 3060 Km/h, and a legend box at top right.]() Annex I of the Air Force file: the judge’s “straight and verified trajectory” from Fuerteventura (21:27) to Tenerife (21:40), with the Atrevida’s position off Fuerteventura, the circled “sole and doubtful landing” near Gáldar and his calculated speed of 3,060 km/h. Source: Biblioteca Central del Ejército del Aire y del Espacio / Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa, CC BY 4.0. [Image source]() [CC BY 4.0 · Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa]() ### The tape and the iris The giants did not make it into the verdict. Munáiz graded the doctor’s statement 4-D, the lowest mark on his scale, below the illiterate farmworkers, and explained why in a sixth annex. It records his interview with a Hungarian-born physician in Las Palmas, the president of the local parapsychology society, named in a 1977 press clipping in the same file, and by later researchers, as Alejandro Carlos de Gyorko-Gyorkos. Gyorko had recorded Padrón’s story on tape, and when the judge played it, it matched the statement “down to the smallest detail.” Had the doctor staged a hoax? “Absolutely not,” Gyorko answered: Padrón was sincere, and had lived through an experience that shook him. When questioned, the doctor’s palms had run with sweat and his eyes had reddened and watered. Gyorko then offered a diagnosis based largely on an examination of the iris of the doctor’s eyes: a degree of neurosis with night terrors, and an old car accident in which he had lost consciousness. He claimed to find “astonishingly the same symptoms” in the taxi driver, and suspected the doctor might in some way have passed his dream to him. He did not rule the vision out: “Even with some degree of neurosis, the patients may really have seen what they described.” Munáiz concluded that it was “VERY PROBABLE” that the two men, faced with something extraordinary in the sky, had told him what their minds made them see, each influencing the other. “Of their seriousness and sincerity this judge has not the slightest shadow of a doubt. They told what they undeniably ‘believed’ they saw.” Their statements were to be rejected “for the moment.” Both men declined hypnosis sessions with a Barcelona neurologist. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() ### Under military penalty On July 20 the doctor answered a letter from Irmi Heimann, a Tenerife correspondent of a Barcelona UFO society, on his own letterhead. He wished he could describe what he had watched “for a period of fifteen minutes and at very close range,” he wrote. “I am sorry I cannot speak, because the Air Ministry sent an investigating judge to my home, who told us that I may not tell anyone what I saw, under military penalty. I hope that one day they will give me permission to speak.” The letter ended up in the file. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() ### Benítez and the twelve files The fullest version of the story reached the rest of Spain through Juan José Benítez, a young reporter for the Bilbao paper La Gaceta del Norte who would become the country’s best-selling UFO author. About two months after the sighting he interviewed Padrón, who told him the sight had filled him with joy. “I liked seeing it! It pleased me,” he said. The feeling, he explained, was like the one you have at a Corpus Christi procession when the Host passes under its canopy: “That grandeur, that majesty, was what that object radiated.” And: “Anyone who sees beings like these has to acknowledge that God exists.” On October 20, 1976, the chief of the Air Staff, Lieutenant General Felipe Galarza, received Benítez in his office and let him leave with twelve official UFO files, among them the Canary report, after the reporter signed a pledge not to use the names of those involved or the documentation itself. A seven-part series ran in December, and in 1977 came the book OVNIS: Documentos oficiales del Gobierno español. A month later Galarza also passed him a photograph of a glowing orb with rays like arms above a scatter of night lights. It was published as the picture of the Canary UFO, though the file itself is contradictory about which night it shows. Sources: [UFOLEAKs: J. J. Benítez, la historia no contada]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() ### What the doctor carried Padrón did not stay silent for long. In May 1977 he told the Diario de Las Palmas that he had seen the craft again, twice. “The ship is immaterial,” he said. “It has a property I was able to observe, which is that it grows at will. It makes no noise.” The encounter had left him with a cold that lasted three days, not shivering but a sense of inner vibration: “It is a cellular cold.” Afterward, he said, he found a great clarity in diagnosis and a new confidence in himself. Later that month the investigating judge told the same paper that the existence of UFOs was “more than proven,” provided one kept to the literal meaning of the letters, and that the Canary lights might be manifestations of “some kind of energy little known until now.” Sources: [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() ### Free to speak When the Air Force declassified the file in 1994, the officer who reviewed it noted that, if the doctor had kept anything back under that supposed obligation, he was now free to tell it. That August, Padrón told the Diario de Las Palmas that an Army major had threatened to have him declared insane; he said the beings could wipe your mind and replace “an energy” in your brain, and that about eight people who had wronged him publicly had died of cancer within months. Munáiz, interviewed in 1998, remembered a very nervous man “saying very strange things,” denied any threat, and said he had handed Padrón two blank sheets, sealed with wax, on which to write his own account. As for the onion field, the farmer had told him: “the only thing that landed here is the journalists who wrecked my onions.” For years afterward, one of the patient’s sons told Ricardo Campo, the doctor could be seen driving the lanes around Las Rosas hoping to see the craft again, and once his car slid into a ravine and he had to be helped out. He died in 2014. His son later put it another way: “My father thought he had seen some kind of entity, probably not of this Earth… but I think my father witnessed an intrusion.” Sources: [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [UFOLEAKs (6): los jueces instructores de los expedientes ovni, identificados por primera vez]() · [Ha muerto el Dr. Padrón, testigo clave del caso Gáldar]() · [Ni ovni, ni humanoides, el caso Gáldar pudo ser una “intrusión”]() ### Poseidon The skeptics’ answer was built from the edges of the case inward. In a monograph written in 1990, the Barcelona researcher Manuel Borraz Aymerich laid the island reports side by side and found that everyone had been looking west, toward the open Atlantic, in the late dusk of a summer evening with the sun some fourteen degrees below the horizon. By his geometry the phenomenon began at least 762 kilometers west of the islands and dozens of kilometers up, a vast cloud high enough to catch sunlight long after dark on the ground, and the Osaka Bay’s sighting, four hundred kilometers to the south, fit the same distant source. In April 1998 the American space writer James Oberg sent Ballester Olmos a table that the German space historian Gunter Krebs had drawn from the launch catalog kept by the astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell: on June 22, 1976, the submarine USS Von Steuben had fired two Poseidon C-3 ballistic missiles on the Eastern Test Range, the ocean corridor running southeast from Cape Canaveral into the South Atlantic. The Navy’s own missile chronology confirms two Poseidons from the Von Steuben that day. The same catalog put Poseidon launches on the dates of four more Canary sightings, in November 1974, November 1976, March 1977 and March 1979. In 2001 Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Ricardo Campo published the match in the Spanish Air Force’s own journal under the headline “Identified!” A missile’s exhaust, fired into the upper atmosphere and lit by a sun already set for those below, can swell into a glowing, transparent sphere hundreds of kilometers across, with a bright spiraling core where the stages burn. The American researcher Martin Kottmeyer later compared Padrón’s giants to the cover of the August 1952 issue of the science fiction magazine Other Worlds, which showed two men in red suits inside a transparent sphere full of controls. Sources: [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() · [¡Identificados! Los OVNIS de Canarias fueron misiles Poseidón]() · [General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects: launch list]() · [Poseidon (C3) Missile Chronology]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [Incidente del misil Poseidón de Canarias]() ![Color photograph of a striped white and brown missile rising at a slight angle from a deep blue sea on a column of white spray and exhaust, under a clear pale blue sky.]() A Poseidon C-3 missile breaks the surface after launch from the submerged USS Ulysses S. Grant, a sister of the Von Steuben, on May 26, 1979. Photo: U.S. Department of Defense, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. [Image source]() [Public domain · U.S. military photograph]() ### The judge changes his mind The last twist came from the judge himself. In 1981 Munáiz, who had once ruled out a missile, wrote a staff college thesis on investigating aerial phenomena. Missiles, “especially those launched from submerged submarines,” he now wrote, “can perfectly explain 95% of the observations of phenomena over the sea.” Sources: [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [¡Identificados! Los OVNIS de Canarias fueron misiles Poseidón]() ### The giants in memory The missile did not retire the giants. Believers answer that a launch cannot account for a light seen rising from inside Fuerteventura, lighting land and sea, or for a halo that hung in one place for forty minutes, and they note that the launch catalog’s times do not match the sightings, a gap the skeptics themselves put down to a database error. Iker Jiménez, the host of the long-running Spanish mystery program Cuarto Milenio, called the Gáldar giants an unsolved mystery, and his traveling exhibition brought them to the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium in Las Palmas in 2015. In the 1990s the case was included in The Best Available Evidence, a UFO briefing paper funded by the philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller and sent to the White House and Congress. Ricardo Campo, who has spent three decades arguing that the Gáldar UFO was “two red giants riding a missile,” has never persuaded the believers. In the summer of 2026, on the fiftieth anniversary, the columnist Vidal Bolaños Betancort suggested treating the story neither as a joke nor as proven truth, but as patrimonio narrativo, part of the north of the island’s narrative heritage: a story that says a great deal about how a town remembers and passes on what it cannot entirely explain. Sources: [El ovni de la discordia]() · [Los Gigantes de Gáldar aterrizan en la Exposición de Cuarto Milenio en el Auditorio Alfredo Kraus]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar, un misterio sin resolver]() · [Canary Islands Mass UFO Sighting, 1976]() · [El OVNI de Piso Firme unió a los Rockefeller y la Casa Blanca con Gáldar]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [Medio siglo del OVNI de Gáldar: la noche en que el Norte miró al cielo]() ## The evidence ### What the 1976 file holds The core record is file 760622 of the Spanish Air Force’s Air Operations Command, declassified in July 1994 and published online by the Defense Ministry’s virtual library under an open license. It holds the Madrid cable of July 1, the judge’s appointment, radar, air-traffic, helicopter and weather checks, thirteen witness statements on standard forms with the names blanked out, the judge’s report and conclusions of July 16, the Air Zone general’s endorsement of July 21, annexes of maps and drawings, the parapsychologist interview, a history of the Maspalomas photograph, a 1977 newspaper interview with the judge and the doctor’s July 20 letter. A few names escaped the censor’s pen: the conclusions speak of “Dr. Padrón and the taxi driver Francisco,” a farmworker’s statement places him two hundred meters from “Dr. Padrón,” and the 1977 clipping at the back names the judge and Dr. Gyorkos. The Atrevida’s logbook and the captain’s report to the Admiral of the Canaries, which the judge mentions, have not been published. The Canary newspapers of June 1976 are known mostly through the quotations collected by Borraz and Campo. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() ### How the details moved The numbers in the Las Rosas story do not hold still. The doctor’s questionnaire gives the sphere a diameter of thirty meters; his written narrative, in the same file, a radius of thirty meters. The taxi driver made it twenty-five meters wide and twenty high; a farmworker two hundred meters away called it a perfect circle of twenty to twenty-five meters. The Europa Press wire had it two stories high and ten meters from the car, resting on the ground for twenty minutes, a detail no witness in the file supports. The woman at the house reported two figures she could not be sure of; the judge told the press in 1977 that she and the third passenger had seen only a light in the sky. Munáiz recalled in 1998 that the doctor had spoken of four crewmen, not two. On the Atrevida, the light’s elevation is fifteen to eighteen degrees in the captain’s narrative, twenty-five to thirty in the first officer’s form and the judge’s retelling, and thirty-five to forty in the judge’s missile discussion; the halo lasted “more than twenty minutes” or forty, depending on the page, while the watch as a whole ran forty-three minutes, to 22:10 GMT. The onion field was already written off in the judge’s own map annex as a landing “invented” by the local press. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [En las islas Canarias: fue visto por centenares de personas]() · [UFOLEAKs (6): los jueces instructores de los expedientes ovni, identificados por primera vez]() ### The missile case and its loose minute hand The identification rests on date, place and appearance. The Von Steuben launch fell on the right day, on a range that ran out into the Atlantic west of the Canaries; four other Canary sighting dates also match Poseidon tests, and for November 19, 1976 and March 24, 1977 the catalog times fit the sightings to within minutes. The descriptions from across the islands, a light climbing, a spiral, then an expanding transparent dome with a bright core, match what later cameras recorded of submarine-launched missiles at twilight. The weak point is the clock. McDowell’s catalog lists the two launches at 20:16 and 20:17 GMT, about seventy minutes before the Atrevida saw the light rise at 21:27, and still does. Ballester Olmos and Campo attributed the gap to a database error, noting that the range historian Mark Cleary had told them he had found errors in launch dates and times; no corrected time has been published. The submarine’s position that night has not been released. To the corvette’s light rising from land three miles away, and the judge’s halo that no rocket could leave, the skeptics answer that nearness is the classic illusion of a vast, distant, sunlit cloud. Sources: [¡Identificados! Los OVNIS de Canarias fueron misiles Poseidón]() · [General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects: launch list]() · [Poseidon (C3) Missile Chronology]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() · [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [El misil de Gáldar]() ### The Maspalomas photograph Only one photograph has been linked to the case: a color print, reproduced in the file in black and white, of a glowing sphere crossed by spindle-shaped streaks above a scatter of lights. Its history, as the judge recorded it, is a small mystery of its own. A foreign tourist was known to have photographed the phenomenon; a print was delivered by mistake in another guest’s envelope, returned to the concierge and kept as a curiosity; the Guardia Civil, Spain’s rural police force, tracked down “the only original copy” at the Jardín Atlántico complex in Playa del Inglés, and the Heinze laboratory that developed the roll said it had not been retouched. It was published in the Canary press in 1977 and later reproduced as the picture of June 22. The file itself is contradictory. The judge’s note, written during his investigation of a later Canary light on November 19, 1976, says the photograph “apparently” belongs to the earlier report, this June case, yet the crew of an Air Force T-12 transport who saw the November light recognized in it the second phase of what they had watched, and the officer who indexed the file in 1994 wrote that it had nothing to do with the events of June 22. Campo and Borraz read the streaks as optical artifacts, lens reflections in Campo’s view. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() · [Observation in the Canary Islands in 1976]() ### Classification and evidence note This archive files the Canary Islands case as a mass sighting: the phenomenon itself was reported by the crew of a naval vessel, a sergeant at a radar station, a policeman, a teacher and dozens of civilians on at least four islands and at sea, and was classed by the Spanish Air Force as an unidentified aerial phenomenon. The close-encounter classification applies only to the Las Rosas account, which rests on the sworn statements of two men in the same car, both judged sincere and both set aside by the investigator, and on a frightened witness at a window who was not sure what she saw. No trace, photograph or instrument record supports the landing. The strongest documented explanation is a pair of Poseidon missile launches that day, though the published launch time does not match the sightings. What remains is one of the best-documented nights in Spanish UFO history, and a doctor who never retracted what he said he saw on a dirt lane above Gáldar. Sources: [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() · [¡Identificados! Los OVNIS de Canarias fueron misiles Poseidón]() · [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() ## Timeline - **22 NOV 1974:** A glowing light over the Canaries coincides with Poseidon launches, the first of five such nights. - **22 JUN 1976 · 20:16–20:17 GMT:** By the launch catalog, the submarine USS Von Steuben fires two Poseidon C-3 missiles on the Eastern Test Range. - **22 JUN 1976 · 21:27 GMT:** From the corvette Atrevida off Fuerteventura, the captain and first officer watch a light rise, stop and form a great blue halo. - **22 JUN 1976 · 21:30 GMT:** Dr. Padrón’s taxi tops the rise at Las Rosas; witnesses across northern Gran Canaria see a vast transparent circle toward Tenerife. - **22 JUN 1976 · 21:45 GMT:** A flight sergeant at the Pozo de las Nieves radar station sees a circle three Moons wide rise from behind Tenerife. - **22 JUN 1976 · 22:10 GMT:** The halo fades from the Atrevida’s view and the sky is clear again. - **23–26 JUN 1976:** Canary papers report the sighting from across the islands; La Provincia says the UFO landed; a scorched circle is found in an onion field at Piso Firme. - **25 JUN 1976:** Air Force Major Antonio Munáiz Ferro-Sastre is appointed investigating judge. - **1 JUL 1976:** A secret cable from Madrid, prompted by press reports, orders a detailed report. - **16 JUL 1976:** Munáiz signs his report: an unidentified aerial phenomenon; the doctor’s and driver’s account rejected “for the moment.” - **20 JUL 1976:** Padrón writes that an investigating judge has told him he may not speak of what he saw, under military penalty. - **20 OCT 1976:** Lieutenant General Felipe Galarza gives J. J. Benítez twelve Air Force UFO files, including the Canary report. - **1977:** Benítez publishes OVNIS: Documentos oficiales del Gobierno español; Padrón tells the press he has seen the craft twice more. - **JUL 1994:** The Air Force declassifies file 760622. - **15 AUG 1994:** Padrón tells the Diario de Las Palmas that an Army major threatened to have him declared insane. - **1981:** In a staff college thesis, Munáiz writes that submarine-launched missiles can explain most sightings over the sea. - **MAR 2001:** Ballester Olmos and Campo publish the Poseidon identification in the Air Force’s own journal. - **2014:** Francisco Julio Padrón León dies, never having retracted his account. - **JUN 2026:** On the fiftieth anniversary, a column in Infonorte Digital proposes treating the story as the north’s “narrative heritage.” ## Sources & interviews - [Avistamiento de fenómenos extraños en Canarias: 22 de junio de 1976]() — Mando Operativo Aéreo, Ejército del Aire · file 760622, 107 pp., with the thirteen witness statements, the investigating judge’s report of July 16, 1976 and its annexes · declassified July 1994 · Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa, CC BY 4.0 - [¡Identificados! Los OVNIS de Canarias fueron misiles Poseidón]() — Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Ricardo Campo Pérez · Revista de Aeronáutica y Astronáutica no. 701 · March 2001, pp. 200–207 · the Spanish Air Force’s own journal - [Los gigantes de Gáldar y los avistamientos canarios]() — Manuel Borraz Aymerich · Cuadernos de Ufología, Monografía 1 · Santander, 1992 (written October 1990) · with the press record, Benítez’s interviews and the 1977 judge interview as annexes · archived copy - [Dos gigantes rojos cabalgando un misil]() — Ricardo Campo · Naukas · June 22, 2016 · fortieth-anniversary essay with the 1976–1994 press quotations and his field visits to Las Rosas - [En las islas Canarias: fue visto por centenares de personas]() — ABC (Madrid) · June 26, 1976, p. 80 · Europa Press and Cifra wire reports - [UFOLEAKs (6): los jueces instructores de los expedientes ovni, identificados por primera vez]() — Manuel Carballal · El Ojo Crítico · 2020 · with his 1998 interview of the investigating judge, Antonio Munáiz Ferro-Sastre - [UFOLEAKs: J. J. Benítez, la historia no contada]() — Manuel Carballal · August 2020 · on the Air Force files handed to Benítez in October 1976 - [General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects: launch list]() — Jonathan McDowell · planet4589.org · entries 1976-S207 and S208, Poseidon C3 from SSBN-632, June 22, 1976, 20:16 and 20:17 UTC - [Poseidon (C3) Missile Chronology]() — Nuclear Companion · from the U.S. Navy fleet ballistic missile chronology · entry for June 22, 1976 - [El misil de Gáldar]() — ARP–Sociedad para el Avance del Pensamiento Crítico · escepticos.es - [Canarias, ¿tierra de ovnis?]() — Luis Alfonso Gámez · Skeptical Inquirer · March 2018 - [El ovni de Gáldar: bajo la sombra de la Guerra Fría en Canarias]() — José Antonio Felipe · Diario de Avisos · June 2023 · with Alfonso Ferrer of the podcast El Laberinto and Ricardo Campo - [El Ejército desclasifica expedientes OVNI en Canarias]() — Diario de Avisos · October 2016 - [¿Ovnis en Gran Canaria?]() — Canarias7 - [El OVNI de Piso Firme unió a los Rockefeller y la Casa Blanca con Gáldar]() — Gáldar al Día · September 2016 - [Los Gigantes de Gáldar aterrizan en la Exposición de Cuarto Milenio en el Auditorio Alfredo Kraus]() — Gáldar al Día · November 2015 - [Canary Islands Mass UFO Sighting, 1976]() — OpenMinds · on the case’s place in the Rockefeller-funded briefing The Best Available Evidence - [Ni ovni, ni humanoides, el caso Gáldar pudo ser una “intrusión”]() — Espacio Misterio · with the doctor’s son’s account - [El ovni de la discordia]() — Espacio Misterio · argues that the Atrevida captain’s account rules out a missile - [Ha muerto el Dr. Padrón, testigo clave del caso Gáldar]() — El Ojo Crítico · 2014 - [Medio siglo del OVNI de Gáldar: la noche en que el Norte miró al cielo]() — Vidal Bolaños Betancort · Infonorte Digital · June 2026 - [Observation in the Canary Islands in 1976]() — Patrick Gross · UFOs at close sight · English case page drawing on Antonio Huneeus - [Incidente del misil Poseidón de Canarias]() — Wikipedia (Spanish) · with the list of Canary sightings matched to launches - [Los gigantes de Gáldar, un misterio sin resolver]() — VM Granmisterio (Iker Jiménez) · YouTube · July 2016 · Spanish-language program (video) Spotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun. ## Connected files - [The Tehran Intercept]() — The same year’s other military UFO file, where official witnesses reported a light no aircraft could match and a government kept the paperwork. - [The Light over Deception Island]() — Another Spanish-speaking military sighting with announced photographs that never quite materialized, and a later argument over stars, satellites and timing. - [The Landing at Trans-en-Provence]() — A European landing report taken up by an official investigator, where a scorched patch of ground became the center of the case. - [The Ariel School Encounter]() — Africa’s other close encounter in the archive: witnesses who described figures near a craft, and a debate over what a mind makes of a strange sight. - [Close encounters, explained]() — Hynek’s scale of close encounters, which the doctor’s account moves into the third kind while the rest of the islands saw only a light. ## A NOTE ON EVIDENCE Unidentified describes a limit of the available information. It doesn’t identify an origin. [NEXT CASE FILE: The Night the Pumps Stopped]()