The sky becamea glowing dome.

At 21:27 Z, the Spanish Navy corvette Atrevida was about three nautical miles south of Punta Lantailla off Fuerteventura when its crew observed an intense yellow-blue light moving outward from the island side.

The captain reported that the light climbed to an elevation of roughly fifteen to eighteen degrees, remained almost stationary for about two minutes, then expanded into a huge halo of yellowish and bluish light. The glow persisted for tens of minutes.

The ship’s surface radar recorded no echo. There was no engine noise. The brightness was strong enough that the crew judged the phenomenon to be comparatively nearby.

Within minutes, observers across Gran Canaria and elsewhere in the archipelago were reporting a luminous sphere or globe. The witness pool later taken into the Air Force file included military personnel and civilians from multiple occupations and locations.

Dr Francisco Padrón León was travelling by taxi toward Las Rosas to visit a patient. According to his deposition, the car headlights picked out a faintly luminous spherical object near the roadside.

He described it as transparent or crystalline-looking, with the stars visible through it. In the lower part was what looked like a metallic platform with three consoles and a central tube venting bluish material.

Inside stood two very large humanoid figures, around 2.5 to 3 metres tall in his estimate, dressed in red and facing one another.

The taxi-driver evidence is disputed in the later literature. Traditional UFO-source summaries say the driver also confirmed a transparent sphere with two red-clad figures. Critical source reconstructions argue that the driver saw only the large luminous phenomenon and that the detailed occupants belong to Padrón alone. Until the primary A-02 deposition is checked line by line against A-01, the page must preserve that contradiction rather than choose the more dramatic reading.

Padrón said the globe expanded dramatically, took on a bluish spindle-like form and departed toward Tenerife.

Padrón's deposition is unusually specific. Later summaries describe a transparent sphere of enormous apparent scale, sometimes reconstructed at roughly thirty metres in radius, with the stars still visible through its shell.

In the lower portion he described an aluminium- or metallic-looking platform supporting three console-like structures. A central semi-transparent tube appeared to vent bluish material or smoke that remained inside the globe.

The two giant figures were reportedly seen largely in profile, facing one another, dressed in red and wearing headgear. When the luminous globe expanded, Padrón said the outer sphere grew dramatically while the occupants and internal platform did not appear to enlarge with it.

Some retellings also preserve a faint whistling during ascent.

The Mando Operativo Aéreo opened a formal investigation within days. The surviving file runs to 107 pages and contains questionnaires, depositions, evaluations, drawings, plans and photographic material.

The file includes fourteen witness depositions and grades witness credibility and observation quality. Its investigating officer accepted that a very strange aerial phenomenon had genuinely occurred, while remaining much more sceptical about the close-encounter interpretation.

On the Padrón account, the investigator explicitly considered the possibility that witnesses facing an unusual sky phenomenon had interpreted it through mutual influence and imagination. That is an official hypothesis, not a demonstrated psychological reconstruction.

The file was formally declassified in 1994 and is now available through Spain’s Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa under a CC BY 4.0 digital-copy licence.

Critical Spanish reconstructions argue that Padrón may have been looking at the same giant high-altitude missile plume as everyone else but interpreting structure within it at close apparent range.

In that model, reddish luminous elements within the expanding plume become the “figures,” the bright envelope becomes the transparent globe, and internal contrast becomes platforms, tubes and consoles.

This is stronger than merely saying “pareidolia” because it names the real visual stimulus and attempts to connect specific features to specific parts of the plume.

But the model still has to earn the details. It must account for Padrón's reported profiles, headgear, three consoles, central tube, scaling mismatch and roadside apparent proximity. A vague resemblance is not enough.

This is where the case becomes genuinely interesting. The Poseidon reconstruction is a physical identification of the broad display. It names the launch system and aligns with the date, appearance and geometry.

The conventional explanation for the occupied sphere is different. It argues that Padrón and others structured an unfamiliar luminous phenomenon into a nearby transparent craft with figures — essentially a perception and interpretation problem.

That is plausible in principle. Humans do impose structure on ambiguous light. But a good explanation must account for why multiple witnesses described similar close features and must establish how independent those descriptions really were.