Expediente — Avistamiento en Canarias (22 May 1980)
Spanish Air Force cover sheet for expediente 800522 — the official case file for an unidentified phenomenon sighting over the Canary Islands on 22 May 1980.
Brief
Expediente 800522 is a formal case file held by the Biblioteca Central del Ejército del Aire cataloguing a sighting of unidentified phenomena over the Canary Islands on 22 May 1980. It belongs to the early-1980s Canarias series of Spanish Air Force UFO records, runs approximately 50 MB, and per the release description contains extensive technical annexes and witness statements across 46 pages. Only the administrative cover page carries extractable text; the remaining 45 pages are image-only or otherwise non-OCR'd, so no substantive findings can be drawn from the source text alone.
Metadata
- Agency
- Ejército del Aire / Ministerio de Defensa
- Release
- 1980-05-22
- Type
- PDF • .pdf
- Length
- 46 pages
- Tags
- UAP-unspecified, Canary Islands, 1980, Expedientes OVNI series, Spanish Air Force
Key points
- The file is formally designated 'Expediente Número: 800522' — the Air Force's own case-numbering scheme encodes the date (800522 = 1980-05-22).p.1
- The holding institution is the Biblioteca Central del Ejército del Aire (BCEA), headquartered at Cuartel General del Ejército del Aire, Romero Robledo 8, Madrid 28071.p.1
- The cover categorises the record under 'Avistamiento de Fenómenos Extraños (Expedientes OVNI)' — the Air Force's formal taxonomy for strange-phenomena / UFO case files.p.1
- Location of the reported sighting is listed simply as 'Canarias,' placing it within the well-documented 1980 Canary Islands incident series.p.1
- Only 1 of 46 pages yielded extractable text; the body of the file — including the technical annexes and witness statements described in the release listing — is not machine-readable from the provided source.p.1
Verbatim
Most interesting
- The Canary Islands UFO series of 1979–1980 is among the most extensively documented government UAP investigations in European history, involving military radar tracking, multiple independent civilian witnesses, and official Air Force inquiry boards.
- Spain's Ejército del Aire began systematically declassifying its OVNI expedientes in 1992 — one of the earliest institutional disclosure programs by any NATO air force — with the archive eventually migrated to the Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa.
- The case-number scheme (800522) directly encodes the date in YYMMDD format, suggesting a centralized registry that predates the declassification era and implies a larger, sequentially numbered corpus of similar files.
- At approximately 50 MB for a 1980-era paper case file, the bulk of this expediente likely consists of high-resolution scans of handwritten or typed reports, photographs, and radar printouts rather than born-digital documents.
- The BCEA contact details on the cover (phone, fax, email) are modern administrative additions, indicating the page was reformatted for the digital archive release rather than being a direct scan of the original 1980 document header.