Good evening. I'm calling from Valencia, and I need to tell you about something that happened to me back in November of 1979. I was the captain of a commercial flight that night, TAE Flight JK-297. I had fourteen years of experience as a commercial pilot at that point, over 8,000 hours in the air, and I'd seen just about everything you could see from a cockpit. This was different. This was something I still can't explain, and believe me, I've tried. We'd left Salzburg that evening, heading to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. 109 passengers on board the Super Caravelle. We'd made a refueling stop in Mallorca, nothing unusual about that, routine stuff. I was in the cockpit with my copilot Ramon and our flight engineer Francisco. Around 11 PM, we were cruising over the Mediterranean, everything normal, when Barcelona control came through on the radio. They asked us to switch to the emergency frequency. Said they'd detected an emergency signal in the area. That got my attention right away.
So I switched frequencies, and that's when Ramon pointed out the left side of the cockpit. He said there was something out there. I looked, and there they were. Two red lights, no navigation lights, no strobes, nothing like that. Just two bright red lights, and they were moving toward us fast. I got on the radio immediately. Asked Barcelona control what traffic they had in our vicinity. They came back and said their radar showed nothing. Just our plane. But I could see these lights with my own eyes, and they were getting closer. I asked about aircraft on our left, maybe four or five miles out. Control confirmed again, no traffic on that route. We were the only ones they had. The lights kept approaching. I asked what type of aircraft it could be, and the controller asked if it was heading in our direction. I said affirmative, and it was getting closer every second. Then I told them what I was seeing. Two red lights, no flashing. No standard navigation lights at all. I increased our rate of climb, went up through 28,000 feet. The lights climbed faster than we did. Stayed with us. That's when I knew this wasn't right.
Listen, I'd been flying commercially for fourteen years. I knew aircraft. I knew what planes looked like at night, how they moved, what their lights did. This was not a conventional aircraft. The way it moved, the way it matched our maneuvers, it wasn't following normal flight patterns. I changed altitude again, tried to put some distance between us and whatever this was. The lights mirrored us. Stayed about half a kilometer away, according to our instruments. Barcelona still had nothing on radar except us. The military radar at Torrejon de Ardoz in Madrid, same thing. Nothing. But we had them on our radar. Solid returns. And all three of us in the cockpit could see them. These weren't stars, they weren't Venus, they weren't reflections. They were objects, and they were violating every safety rule in aviation. You don't approach another aircraft like that. You don't mirror their movements. You don't stay that close without radio contact. I made the call. I told control we were diverting to Manises Airport in Valencia for an emergency landing. I had 109 people on that plane, and whatever these things were, they were too close, too unpredictable. First responsibility is always flight safety.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]