Pursuers and Persecuted

November 4, 1970. Zaragoza air base. It is 11:00 a.m.: the appointed time for Operation Red Eye, a series of military maneuvers carried out jointly by the Spanish Air Force and the United States Army.

The exercise consisted of locating on airspace coordinates the location of a fictitious enemy towards which the fighters were to head. The objective of the simulation was to know the response capacity to a hypothetical warlike confrontation in the air. The operation was directed from the Calatayud (Zaragoza) radar, also known as Siesta. The mystery came when one of the fighters approached the invisible enemy…

Two F-86 fighters took off from the Zaragoza air base. They were piloted by captains Juan Alfonso Sáez-Benito and Luis Carvayo. A few minutes later, from Calatayud, the pilots were told to head towards the Cantabrian Sea. The place indicated from Siesta was located about eighty kilometers north of Gijón. That is where they headed.

However, at that moment the plans changed. A real unidentified echo appeared on the screens of the Air Surveillance Squadron (EVA). It was nothing fictitious. At that moment, the controllers decided to send the F-86s to that point. At the time, the pilots still thought it was all part of the simulation exercise, but this was no longer the case: the threat had become real…

A few minutes later, the pilots reached the designated point. The unidentified echo was at 8,000 meters altitude and approximately 1,000 meters above where the fighters were. The pilots did not observe anything at first, but the operators insisted, while repeating over and over again that this was no longer a fictitious exercise. Both Sáez-Benito and Carvayo found it hard to believe. Besides, they could not see the intruder anywhere.

After several twists and turns, the fighters’ fuel began to run low and the process of returning to Zaragoza began. What happened next explains why the case file is still secret almost forty years later…

The F-86s started the return maneuver, but in Siesta the concern was increasing, since the unidentified was not only still there, but according to what the screens showed, the echo was located about three thousand meters behind the fighters. It seemed to follow the Spanish fighter planes. However, it came into view of the military, but it would be for a short time, since it would appear just when they were barely a hundred kilometers away from the air base’s runway.

The first to see something strange was Juan Alfonso Sáez-Benito, who, paradoxically, years later became head of the Zaragoza base. It was, in principle, a reflection to the left of the plane.

Both pilots decided to find out what it was

They varied their route and headed towards that flash that also appeared on the radar. They were astonished. When they approached the object they could see the shape perfectly. It was an ovoid, metallic-looking artifact. On top of it was a sort of rectangular platform or canopy. They had never seen anything like it before. It was undoubtedly a solid, manufactured object. A real ship. However, its shape did not correspond to any aeronautical principle…

The pilots tried to position themselves in front of the artifact, but it was impossible. Each time they tried, the unidentified object avoided the nose of the fighters: it climbed, slowed down and positioned itself behind the F-86s. In aeronautical terms, the maneuver he performed is known as a “perch,” a combat tactic that only aviation aces know how to perform with precision. The problem – and what a problem it was – is that some kind of intelligence had to handle that object, which, to top it off, was not the right shape for such operations.

The scene was repeated several times. According to the pilots’ statements, the unidentified aircraft performed those maneuvers with total cleanliness and at an inconceivable speed.

Very close to the runway, the UFO was again behind the planes. This last part of the observation lasted only a few moments: it all ended when the object catapulted to the vertical at an inconceivable speed.

After that, it also disappeared from the radar screens. When they landed, the pilots, who remained livid for hours, were asked to remain silent, although it never disappeared from their memories.

More and more of these secret projects are coming to light, especially those related to the UFO phenomenon. Much has been said about Area 51 and now, new and surprising operations have appeared, the same ones that many researchers of extraterrestrial life have long intuited.