14.08.2026
File 2. The afternoon with Juanjo Benítez
We had a small rented place where we studied parapsicology, occult sciences and, above all, UFOs. It was 1975: no internet or anything like it, but somehow we had put together a fairly complete file of newspaper clippings, news and information on the subject. We were deep into it back then.
And Juanjo Benítez was famous. Juan José Benítez, the writer of The Trojan Horse, the book that sold enormously about these matters: UFOs, ancient civilisations. He’s from Pamplona, Navarra. Imagine our surprise when he showed up at our group, at our little place: he took the trouble to come visit us and we talked with him for a while.
What’s curious about that time is that there were no touch-tone phones — well, there were rotary ones, but nothing like now — and still a bunch of young researchers managed to gather a huge amount of information. There were libraries, newspapers, photocopies. That we did have. The photocopier was back then almost what AI is now: something new, being able to make a copy of a paper. But our archive was made of real newspaper clippings, of the different cases. For example, the Adamsky case, the San José de Valderas one; here in Spain we had several.
I don’t remember exactly what we talked about that afternoon. But you can imagine: he touches a lot on ancient civilisations and all those subjects. What stays with me is that, being someone already famous at least in the circle of those of us into these topics, he took the trouble to find out we existed and to come himself. I don’t know how he contacted us. I don’t know how he found out we were there. But he showed up.
It’s one of those things you don’t forget: that someone famous went out of his path to come talk for a while with two young men who thought they were discovering the world.