Iván López
In the early morning of 24 to 25 June 1989, the Ucanca Valley hosted for the first and last time its largest ever concentration of people for a UFO call or alert. Around 40,000 souls gathered in the surrounding area from midnight in the hope of establishing an extraterrestrial contact. An experience that RNE broadcast worldwide. Its organisers called it the year of contact.
(Image of the original 1989 brochure, taken from the newspaper archive by Iván López)
Thirty-five years have passed since the event that paralysed the island of Tenerife for a whole night at the end of June 1989. The truth is that it turned out to be something historic that was never repeated, at least in the conditions in which it was forged. It was in the early hours of 24 to 25 June when forty thousand people gathered on the slopes of the Teide, at an altitude of 2200 metres in front of the plain of Ucanca, encouraged by the call made weeks earlier by Radio Nacional de España on the programme, Espacio en Blanco, directed and presented by Miguel Blanco, which suggestively entitled the event: "Something incredible is about to happen".
Posters, brochures and press advertisements were presented with this slogan and a photograph showing the main road in front of the Parador de Las Cañadas in the foreground, and the Teide surrounded by a large light source in the background. That image looked very similar to the official poster for Steven Spielberg's film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The promotion encouraged people to live for the first time in history a meeting beyond imagination, with thousands of people concentrated for an experience of communication without limits, and that is precisely what happened.
Official sources certified the presence of ten thousand people, but Miguel Blanco claims that this number was higher, as the access roads to the summit were crowded with people, and that this amount could have been as high as forty thousand.
1989, the year of the end of history
1989 was undoubtedly a turbulent year. The famous political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a controversial article entitled The End of History?, in which he considered liberal democracy and capitalism to be the last link in the evolutionary history of ideas, and that there was therefore no other system against which to compete, thus bringing about the evolutionary end of ideologies in history. The truth is that the world was facing a key year for the future of the West in the 20th century.
In early June of the same year, the Tiananmen student revolt broke out in China. Newspapers and news reports told of the indiscriminate massacre of young students by the army of Den Xiaoping's communist regime in the famous square in the chinese capital. Television viewers around the world witnessed an image that would become iconic for universal posterity of the unknown man, bag in hand, facing a line of tanks poised to invade the square. Months later, in November, the Berlin Wall would fall.
Month and a half before the concentration, in the early hours of 9 May, Tenerife suffered the strongest earthquake in its history, measuring 5.3 on the Richter scale. The seism kept the population awake all night and the following days. And with this panorama that iconic year was faced for our lives.
I could see in a truck several people in wheelchairs and I asked them why they had come and they answered me:
Miguel Blanco, RNE journalist
–To be cured by aliens.
Then I began to pray everything I knew.
A night on the air
I was still a kid and I remember that night perfectly. The programme was broadcast for most of the early hours of the morning. My mother was a regular listener. Around midnight she tuned in to the radio as she used to do every Saturday. I was already in bed and from my room I could hear the transmission through the main voice of Miguel Blanco and the rest of his collaborators. That radio sound, the darkness of my room and the window to the outside, were the cursed ingredients so that from that moment I could not sleep a wink.
That night I became so obsessed with the imminent arrival of the extraterrestrials, that I trembled with nerves and did not dare look out of my bedroom window for fear that a spaceship might appear at some point on its way to the encounter in Las Cañadas del Teide. I lived and suffered through it in complete silence, curled up, with my head hidden, covered with the sheet and without telling my mother of the atrocious fear I was feeling during the broadcast of the programme.
On the day of the event was Blanco himself who literally commented to the media as follows:
First and foremost, what is intended is to live an incredible experience of communication between the people who attend and between the listeners of the programme. Various relaxation exercises will take place, such as Operación Unidad Planetaria (something like Planetary Unit Operation), which will unite millions of beings all over the planet. At around three o'clock in the morning, "The Call" will take place. It is not about seeing extraterrestrials, as it is not known whether they will come or not, but if they do, they are welcome; in any case ufology experts are convinced that something is going to happen tonight.
It is at this point that, consulting the newspaper archives, I realise that the information provided by the chroniclers of the time was scarce, and that even today, this event has gone almost unnoticed by a large part of the population of Tenerife and the Canary Islands in general. I got in touch with Miguel Blanco by email, –and after four months–, he agreed to tell the story in detail for the first time from the beginning. Here is his testimony as he told it in the half-hour telephone conversation we shared about this experience, which he assures, marked his life.
Blanco's testimony
The story begins several months earlier, specifically in April. In Miguel's own words:
The production people told me that several messages had arrived that coincided with each other and that they were very strange. The messages came from three different groups in Spain. Two from the peninsula and one from the Canary Islands. Three groups that had no connection with one another and that were contacting extraterrestrials through Ouija or automatic writing. The curious thing is that those messages all said the same thing: "23rd April, 22 hours, Punta del Hidalgo". At that time I had to give a conference in Tenerife with Enrique de Vicente, one of the leading experts in the world of mystery, and I asked him to go with me to Punta del Hidalgo, right on the beach in front of the San Juanito hermitage. So we got there in a car at about eight o'clock in the evening and suddenly a lot of people started arriving. I kept quiet because I didn't want them to recognise me by my voice in the dark, but we asked some people what they were doing there and they told me "they had sensed that something was going to happen and that's why they had come".
There are about sixty or eighty of us gathered there. If you know the mountains or peaks that exist in the Punta del Hidalgo mountain range... suddenly flashes of light start coming out of there. People were shouting: "They're here, they're here!"; and at first I told them that it was a storm behind the mountain and that they shouldn't start inventing things.
I met a policeman with whom I have now been soul brothers for thirty years and with whom I share adventures. The policeman took a very powerful torch and began to make three and two signals, and suddenly the supposed flashes of the mountain repeated the same signal and answered with those three and two. Then we realised that it wasn't a storm. It was curious, because the night was overcast and at approximately five minutes to ten, the sky opened up and by ten o'clock it was completely clear.
Seconds later, behind that mountain, an incredible big bug that was like the sun at dawn came out, stood in front of us at the same height as the sea line, and it was swaying for a long time. Imagine the people screaming like crazy. Enrique de Vicente was hugging me and saying: "Miguel, it's true, they're here, they're here! I had a camera with a 300 mm telephoto lens and I looked at that sphere and saw how other lights were moving inside it. It was there for about six minutes. I had time to shoot two reels of 36 photographs from that time. But suddenly, that sphere went into the water. As it sank, I saw that it was something physical, because it raised a wave that had not reached us before, breaking through the rocks that separated us like a small tidal wave. Meanwhile, people were still shouting exhilarated.
I had to leave, because I had to do the programme that night, so I went to the radio station in Santa Cruz, while Enrique de Vicente and the policeman stayed there. When I finished the programme I spoke to Enrique and he told me that the sphere had come out of the water, hovered on the horizon for a second and then stampeded off into the sky at breakneck speed. The next morning we returned to the site and found a lot of navy ships and helicopters inspecting the area. Amongst us we commented that they had heard that something very big had happened there. Later, when I went to develop the pictures I had taken, the only thing that came out of those photos was a huge blob of light. Everything was veiled. The same night of the event I had a super lucid dream, one of the clearest and most shocking dreams I've ever had in my life, in which I saw that we had to hold a reunion with a lot of people in Las Cañadas del Teide, with a stage, lights and sound, and call people together; something very similar to what happened in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
So I arrived at the radio station in the afternoon and told my colleagues about it, among them was the journalist José Carlos Marrero. When he heard my idea he liked it very much, but at first he commented that it was impossible because in Las Cañadas they had already tried to ask permission to hold a fashion event with Carolina de Mónaco and it had been denied. Curiously a few hours later I had a meeting with the civil governor of Tenerife and without hesitation I presented the idea to him. He loved it and it was as if the doors of everything had opened.
That was at the end of April. Throughout the month of May, together with our colleagues from Radio Nacional de España, we were preparing the plan to organise it. We did it as if we were planning an invasion of Iraq. From managing bus services to take people up the Teide, to the preparation of all the technical and logistical aspects involved. We decided that we were going to broadcast it on Radio 1, Radio 3, Radio 5 and Radio Exterior and we began to launch the idea. The repercussion it had before it was even made was impressive. We presented it as an incredible communication experience; we never said it was an alien contact.
The encounter in Ucanca
Miguel Blanco continues:
The day of the event I was preparing to leave and the Guardia Civil called me to ask me where I was, because the road up to Teide was clogged with vehicles, and that they were going to send a helicopter so that they could take me up. When I heard that, I panicked. In the end I was able to get there by my own means around nine o'clock in the evening. The commander told me that they had planned for five thousand people to enter the event, but in the end they counted thirteen thousand cars, with forty thousand people. At that statement I could only say: "The mother who bore me". I could even see in a truck several people in wheelchairs and I asked them why they had come and they answered me: "To be cured by aliens". Then I began to pray everything I knew; I prayed fourteen rosaries, I prayed to Allah, I prayed to Buddha, repeating to myself, "don't let what we saw at Punta del Hidalgo come out, because something very big is going to happen".
©2012 José Luis Valdivia
According to José M. Villate in his later chronicle in the Diario de Avisos, thousands of cars had crowded the roadsides on the way up to the Teide. The stage was set up on the Ucanca viewpoint, for which there was a generator, 20000 watts of light and 10000 watts of sound.
But going back to Miguel's account, he describes to me what happened that night:
From the stage we had set up I could see all that mass of people and it was astonishing. It extended from the Parador Nacional, which was in front of us. It was as if we were at a Rolling Stones concert. Then, the transmission began with Paco Padrón and other colleagues like José Carlos Marrero or Pilar Socorro, and at a certain moment, some lights turn above on Teide. If you could see how the people were shouting... Just little flashes for a very short time, and I said to myself inside: "God, let them not appear now". But then nothing else happened.
We had agreed to do a guided meditation during that night to try to make contact and it was very beautiful. The crowd that was there took to it as if it was catechism; an incredible experience that left people very calm. The Atlán group, who were with us, commented that during that night they had seen some very strange people hanging around: "Some very tall guys who had been there to witness the echo of that call". I didn't believe it, but the experience remained there.
The people were very happy and gave an amazing lesson in tidiness, coexistence and poise. It was so incredible, that the following days I had to shave my beard so that I wouldn't be recognised in the street, because everyone stopped me. In fact, they told me afterwards that they wanted to add that rally to the Guinness Worlds Records as the largest concentration of people in the history of radio. It was even studied as a phenomenon of behaviour and concentration of people in some sociology faculties.
The historical reminiscence
For this writer, listening to the programme again thirty-five years later was a catharsis. During its three and a half hour duration, there was participation and interviews of people who had experienced UFO encounters on the island, and with several guest groups, some of them from the peninsula. Near the end of the programme, Tenerife journalist José Carlos Marrero told an anecdote that had caught his attention that night. He spoke with two young teenagers who had run away from home because they had to be there, as they felt it was a "calling".
Some time later, in an interview on his own programme in November 2009, Miguel spoke with José Carlos Marrero, commemorating the twenty years of the anniversary. José Carlos said that he knew of many people who had felt something that night, and that the event was a turning point in their lives. He assured that many couples had formed that day and that it was an example of organisation, as there was not a single altercation during the whole night and people left the area completely clean.
That multitudinous concentration was the first and the last that was allowed in the National Park. Almost at the end of my conversation with Miguel, he concludes:
These types of intelligences that visit us are interdimensional intelligences, –I don't say extraterrestrials–; they inhabit different dimensions and are preparing us to become accustomed to the fact that it will not take us long to realize the irrefutable proof of not being alone on this planet; that we are not the only inhabited planet, and that there are many other intelligences that are there intervening at particular times. I can only say that that encounter was one more point in this whole plan that was foreseen, to which I feel very proud to have contributed.
The journalist Pilar Socorro, living history of radio in the Canary Islands, also took part in the experience, which she remembers with great emotion:
Paco Padrón, a journalist expert in ufology, and Miguel were close friends. They, together with José Antonio Pardellas, who was the director of RNE in the Canary Islands, provided all the means to make it possible.
I remember riding up on a motorbike and wearing a Ghostbusters jersey, and that night was so special, it was incredible. Already the place was magical. There was a wonderful starry sky and the night was great for whatever had to happen, happened.
The figure of Francisco Padrón
The legendary Tenerife journalist Francisco Padrón was also present and actively participated in the programme that night. Paco was one of the pioneers of paranormal information in the media in the islands, Spain and internationally. On the 22nd of June 1978, he himself had summoned some 3000 people to the Ucanca valley for a guided meditation experience in the so-called "Planetary Unit Operation", which turned out to be a great success. During the eighties, he was the promoter of numerous articles that placed the Canary Islands as one of the epicentres of international ufological information.
Paco relates in his book Luces de Medianoche, el viajero del alma, that he knew that nothing would happen on the night of 24 June 1989, and that when the meeting ended, he got angry and swore in Aramaic because of the "dunghill" which, according to him, the area around Las Cañadas del Teide had become due to the behaviour of many people who went there to have a good time and party; reaffirming that this was the reason why, from then on, no more gatherings of this or any other kind would be allowed in Ucanca.
However, Paco claims in his book that on that night someone was able to photograph a discoidal object that gave off lights, and whose negatives came into his hands and which he himself was able to certify. When he took them to be developed, the owner of the shop commented that the photographs had mysteriously disappeared. In 2002, the researcher Ricardo Campo Pérez, in an article entitled Bromas útiles, available in the publication called El escéptico, claimed that thanks to CESID and members of the army, he was able to obtain information from the astronomer Lluís Tomás Roig, who confessed to him that during that night he and his colleagues had experimented with a trial balloon and a red and orange signal flashlight that flew over the meeting for a few minutes as a joke.
Days later, some witnesses located in other parts of the island assured that they had a UFO experience that night; one of them, the sincere testimony of a 12 year old boy, which Padrón himself was able to collect for his radio program, and who claimed to have seen a large luminous object with other friends while camping on a beach in Granadilla, in the south of the island.
Pilar Socorro ensures that this was one of the two most intense mass events she ever experienced in her life, together with the two hundred and forty thousand people who danced at the same time with Billo’s Caracas Boys and Celia Cruz at the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Carnival in March 1987.
The number of people who gathered in Ucanca experienced a collective relaxation, such as when all the people put their mind and concentrate at the same time, it is like when you pray. In this case, the prayer was towards the universe for a sign to be given. You saw people with a peace and a calmness and I don't know if the word to define it is love, but I think so. It was like a collective prayer with a positive energy and it was really wonderful.
Canary Islands as ufological referent
As the fictional agents Mulder and Scully would say, the truth of all this is still out there. It is clear that the Canary Islands were a continuous hotbed of ufological information that year, and that this historic concentration signed off such a fever for the UFO phenomenon that it would spread over the next decade.
The Ucanca Valley, located almost two thousand meters above sea level, has always been a magical and unique place despite the thousands of tourists who visit it every day. Perhaps many people climbed that summer night in 1989 looking for answers, or simply to feel that there was something more to give meaning to their lives. I have come in this present to revive the nostalgia of that time, which is the greatest treasure I possess in the face of the anxiety of an uncertain future. Miguel Blanco is the history of Spanish radio. Thank you for opening the door and living again an experience without limits.
