Thursday, November 20th, will mark half a century since the death of General Franco. Strange things were happening back then. On September 6, 1975, shortly before the dictator's death, the television program DirectoThe film, directed by José María Íñigo, surpassed 20 million viewers during the appearance of the Israeli magician Uri Geller (Spain only had 35 million inhabitants, and viewed in that light, the number of viewers is even more impressive). The appearance of a man bending spoons thanks to his supposed paranormal powers in that Spain of berets and wick lighters, stony and naive, violent and at the same time docile, constituted a truly remarkable phenomenon. socialGeller's little act was witnessed by young and old, rich and poor, country folk and city dwellers, supporters of the dying dictatorship and its detractors alike: a veritable communion of hopes and uncertainties amidst the widespread folly of the 1970s. Great social changes already have this. Twenty-five years ago, the anthropologist Gerard Horta studied the relationship between anarchism and the spirit in Catalonia at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries in his essay From mysticism to the barricades (2001), where he showed how these two currents converged in Catalan working-class and popular culture. They shared anticlericalism, criticism of the state, and the defense of self-management and solidarity. It attracted workers and freethinkers who sought an emancipatory spirituality opposed to the established order. The final result was confused and politically unviable.
Franco's death ushered in a period of transition not only politically and culturally, but also—or perhaps above all—mentally. In this context, the fascination with UFOs became a popular phenomenon, reflecting the need to fancifully imagine new horizons and escape decades of repression. In the 1970s, Martians wore tight, shiny frogs and surely smoked menthol cigarettes while piloting their UFOs. The world was generally obsessed with extraterrestrials as a consequence of the Cold War, but it was especially during the immediate post-Franco era that the phenomenon acquired a fascinating cultural dimension here. Although it may seem incredible today, the monarchist and conservative newspaper ABC It inaugurated a section dedicated exclusively to flying saucers. It's still going. A year and a half ago (May 28, 2024), journalist Israel Viana recalled this: “We must summon the masses, create the conditions to overthrow capitalism and the bureaucracy of the workers' states and establish socialism. We must tell beings from other worlds, if they appear, that they must intervene now, collaborate with them; a call,” wrote Homero Rómulo Cristalli in 1968 [...]. He titled it “Flying Saucers, the Process of Matter and Energy, Science, the Revolutionary Class Struggle, and the Future of Humanity.” Marxist ufology. Wow.
The anthropologist Ignacio Cabria, in his book Cultural history of UFOs in Spain 1950-1990 (2022) explains that UFO sightings became part of everyday life and were widely publicized by the media, especially during the period immediately following Franco's death. They became a symbol of escapism and hope in a country that was leaving behind—excuse me: that I believed Leaving behind censorship and repression, they sought to imagine alternative futures with the vibrant aesthetic of the seventies. After Franco's death, utopia was Demis Roussos in a tunic and gold boots and Nadiuska's films. Other possible worlds still smelled of reheated cabbage and Zotal. The fascination with UFOs also revealed the fragility of a society in (mental) transition, where the need to believe in extraordinary things served to compensate for political and social uncertainties. The sarias of the soreta suddenly transformed into fantastical "antigravity engines." It was no longer a matter of a few inches... More than mere curiosities, post-Francoist extraterrestrials became metaphors for freedom, for an undefined threat, and also for the naiveté of a Spain that was beginning to reinvent itself in the worst possible way: by feigning an attack of collective amnesia. We come not only from an ancient and very long silence, but also from the insubstantial and at the same time pretentious stridency of the 1970s, when that military man who had caused unprecedented devastation passed away while UFOs flew over El Pardo.
