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The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Montagne, France, le 14 novembre 1979.
Valencia (Spain). -- The majority of the passengers of the Caravelle plane which, according to the crew, would have been pursued, Monday, by Unidentified Flying Objects (U.F.O.), above Valence, claimed to have seen nothing. They accuse the pilot of having masked behind "fanciful stories" a technical failure which forced him to land, according to testimonies collected yesterday by the Spanish press.
Fifty-eight of the one hundred and nine German and Austrian passengers signed a document to this effect and protested to their embassies for what they consider to be a "mockery" on the part of the company owning the plane, the TAE.
According to the version of the pilot and the co-pilot, confirmed by the deputy director of the TAE, the plane had been followed by U.F.Os. while flying from Palma de Mallorca to Tenerife. The U.F.Os. gave off a strong luminosity which "filled the cockpit with a strange reddish glow." According to this version, the strange craft went up and down and the pilot made the decision to change course to avoid the collision.
Still according to the same sources, the U.F.Os. were detected by radar at Valencia airport and military radar. A fighter plane would have taken off from the military base of Los Llamos (province of Albacete) and the U.F.Os. reportedly then disappeared.
The deputy director of the TAE claimed that the authorities at Valencia airport had not detected any technical failure after an inspection of the Caravelle and that the pilot had taken "the very good decision" to land only to preserve passenger safety.
The Spanish government's undersecretariat for civil aviation declined to comment, while the defense ministry said it was a "reserved" matter. Some civil aviation circles have indicated, however, that the mysterious U.F.Os. could be aircraft of the US 6th Fleet.
