The Gerena Cotton Field

The setting is a cotton farm at Gerena in the province of Seville in August 1973, and the witnesses were the people working it. The archive's transcription renders the place as Garina; Gerena is the documented name and the pin on the map follows it. According to the account the archive holds, a large domed craft showing red lights came over the field at low altitude and did so repeatedly, passing four or five times and low enough on each pass to graze the cotton plants. The archive's telling puts seven workers in the field; the published Spanish account of the case has nine, irrigating the crop at the time.

Days later one of them, David González, reported a separate encounter: a craft on the ground on a road.

What is on the record

Three claimants are resolved by name: Antonio Fernando González, David González and Francisco Barrera, and the archive holds no outside confirmation of those particular names. The gap between the workers described and the three resolved is the difference between what the source reports and what the archive can attach a name to. The larger figure is not our count and is not presented as one.

Repetition is the useful feature here. A single pass at dusk is easily mistaken for an aircraft, and four or five passes low enough to touch the crop is a different kind of observation, made by people who work outdoors and know what agricultural aircraft look like at low level.

The obvious follow-up did not happen, or did not survive. An object low enough to graze cotton plants might leave marks in the crop, and the archive holds no examination of the field, no photograph, and no official report. The second sighting days later rests on one of the same witnesses, so it extends the account rather than independently confirming it.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3, the archive's tier for multiple independent claimants describing one connected event. Named farm workers describing the same repeated passes carry it there. Nothing physical was recorded. What came over the Gerena field is not resolved here.