Three Missing Hours and a Ghost Gas Station: A Spanish UFO Story from 1977
According to radio personality Pedro Mateo and his wife, on June 26, 1977, after a silent, disk-shaped object appeared, three hours vanished without a trace from their trip between Zaragoza and Barcelona. The story rests solely on the couple's account given some two decades later, and several of its details remain unverifiable to this day.
Pedro Mateo and his wife, Gloria Jiménez, set out from Zaragoza for Barcelona around five in the morning; from there they were to fly to Düsseldorf that day, and before that they planned to have lunch with Mateo's brother, who lives in Barcelona. Mateo remembers the date precisely because, as he tells it, he writes most of the things that happen to him in a notebook.
According to Mateo, it was already light when, in the Les Garrigues area of Lleida province in Catalonia, a disk-shaped, oval object with a blurred edge appeared in the sky. At first it seemed distant and harmless, then suddenly and silently it moved above their car. The frightened radio personality accelerated to 160 kilometers per hour, and that was when he noticed a sign indicating a gas station in 1000 meters. A few seconds later the object disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and the couple again saw the same "Gas Station 1000 Meters" sign in front of them.
At the station, which by Mateo's description consisted of two posts and a broken down shed, with an old pump of the kind seen in American movies, they were met by an unusually tall man in faded blue coveralls. When Mateo asked whether he had seen anything strange in the sky, the man covered his face with a sandwich-like object he was holding and replied that nothing had happened all morning. The couple continued on their way without buying fuel.
According to Mateo, the airport was no more than an hour's drive away, and they had planned to get there around eleven in the morning. Instead, they arrived at 2:15 p.m., when their flight was already being called over the loudspeakers: roughly three hours were missing, and they did not know where they had gone. According to Mateo, they did not talk about the incident on the plane or for a long time afterward.
The oddities did not end there. In Düsseldorf, while changing clothes at the hotel, Gloria Jiménez noticed that her underwear was torn on one side. On the way home it turned out that all their cassette tapes had been erased, and later, at home, it was not possible to record over them either. Mateo's reading glasses, left in the glovebox, had disappeared and never turned up. And the paint on their red Seat 1430 faded over time to a pinkish color on the roof, the hood and the passenger side.
Mateo also recounted that after the incident someone gave him a book about an American couple who had reported an experience similar to theirs. Years later, while having dinner with friends at a restaurant near Les Garrigues, the couple say they confirmed that the gas station had never existed on that stretch of road.
The story was recorded by Spanish researcher Javier García Blanco based on his interview with Mateo, some twenty years after the events. The English translation of the piece originally appeared in 1999 in issue 3 of the journal Inexplicata, and the blog republished it on July 19, 2026. The article mentions no photograph, other witness or official investigation, nor does it make clear whether the incident itself appears in Mateo's notebook.
The sober take
Every element of the account rests on the couple's recollection some twenty years later, and Mateo himself says that after the incident he read about a similar American story. This is almost certainly the 1961 case of Betty and Barney Hill, which made the "missing time" motif known worldwide, and so it could easily have shaped the later interpretation of their own experience. Fatigue after the early-morning departure, a misjudged travel time or a prolonged detour could also explain the delay. Red paint fading to pinkish was common on cars of that era in strong sunlight, and a tiny rural gas station could easily have closed and vanished over the years, so that later no trace of it could actually be found.