The Lights over Matanzas

It began with a child on a porch. "Daddy, look, fireworks," Cándido Domínguez heard his eight-year-old daughter shout shortly before 19:00. He went out and saw "a very bright white ball followed by lighted tail, something like a comet". Then the lights multiplied. Six or seven of them ran in a line, each with its own tail, on a north-to-south path. They stayed visible for about thirty seconds.

What is on the record

The source is a Cuban radio report that the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service translated, not a CIA investigation. Domínguez reported from Matanzas on the Havana Radio Progreso network at 12:00 GMT on 23 December 1993, two days after the sighting. FBIS logged it as "Unidentified Flying Objects Sighted in Matanzas Skies". The CIA released the single page.

He named two other observers. Specialists of the Territorial Meteorology Section of the Cuban Academy of Sciences saw it from various parts of the city. One of them was Jesús Gómez, who watched from Jovellanos 42 km to the south-east. Orestes Gribao, a meteorologist who had studied UFOs for years, saw it from the Versalles district. Gribao showed people a book with what the broadcast calls a 1913 photograph from the Toronto Observatory. "We all agreed" it was almost identical.

That comparison points to the Great Meteor Procession of 9 February 1913. Wikipedia describes it as a slow train of fireballs seen across Canada and the United States, which the Toronto astronomer Clarence Chant took for a natural body briefly in orbit. Its familiar picture is a painting by Gustav Hahn rather than a photograph. No source found identifies the Matanzas lights. A Cuban listing of sightings describes four spheres between 19:00 and 19:30.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L3 · INDEPENDENT WITNESSES. The broadcast names three people who saw the lights from different places. All three reach the archive through one radio report, and no primary record sits beside it. The tier measures sourcing rather than truth. What crossed Matanzas that evening is not resolved here.