On a cold November night in 1979, Josep Climent was leaving the local cinema in Soller when he and others noticed strange lights circling the Ofre, a peak of more than 3000 ft in the Tramuntana mountain range.
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| Did Majorcan, Josep Climent, really see a UFO? |
Grabbing his old Minolta camera, Climent took a black and white image of what he saw. Within days it had been circulated around the world as proof of UFO activity in Majorca.
Did Josep Climent and other local Soller residents really see a UFO or OVNI, the Spanish equivalent, that night or were they just witnessing a natural astronomical phenomenon of some kind? As it happened, at the same time as Climent claimed to have seen abnormal activity in the sky, a commercial plane leaving Palma for Tenerife was forced to make an emergency landing in Valencia apparently because airborne unidentified objects were interfering with its route. Spooky stuff and yet some would say the whole story was exaggerated and perhaps even manipulated by Climent.
Only the other night, IB3, one of Majorca’s main television channels again broadcast the testimony of Josep Climent relating to his supposed sighting of UFOs. Many eye witnesses in Soller corroborated his story. Since the airing of the programme I have spoken with various locals in the town of Soller. To my surprise most have backed the concept of UFOs, some explaining that strange vibrations have even been recorded on the sea bed about 1000 metres off the coast of Port Soller giving possible proof to Climent’s long held theory that there is a hidden UFO base there. Several people claimed to have filmed or photographed strange objects on the horizon but had chosen not to release them to the media for fear of ridicule.
One elderly woman told me that in her youth she and her father had seen a piercing light emanating from a remote area of the Tramuntana mountains. They had been on foot accompanied by a donkey which, she said, grew agitated and refused to budge when it neared the site.
As for Josep Climent, he is still disgruntled that the negatives from his Minolta camera, requisitioned by the Spanish army at the time, have never been returned despite repeated requests. Just as the British Army has relaxed the rules on the release of such historical data so too has the Spanish Army and yet curiously there seems to be no trace of the negatives.
Perhaps when Josep Climent witnesses his next UFO, he will be canny enough to squirrel away the negatives, not in the hope of material gain or personal notoriety of course but purely for the sake of posterity.
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