OVNIs
The Files That Sleep in Torrejón: J.J. Benítez and the UFO Archive as Reading
The presentation of 'Están aquí' turns our gaze back to the UFO files kept in Torrejón. Reading them requires distinguishing the document from the story and wonder from judgment.
By Pedro J. Pérez ·
A Safe as a Starting Point
There are books that begin with a minimal, obstinate image. In the case of 'Están aquí', by J.J. Benítez, that image is a safe. As El Periódico de España reports, the author points to Torrejón as the place where the largest number of UFO files is stored. This is no small claim: it turns a Madrid municipality into the center of gravity of a conversation that has been open for decades.
It is worth pausing on what that scene has of the literary before the polemical. A closed archive, a researcher who names it, a reader who imagines folders stacked in the half-light. UFO literature has always lived on that gesture: pointing to a concrete place where the unexplained becomes paper, a registration number, ink. The mystery ceases to be fog and acquires an address.
What a File Is and What It Is Not
A file is an administrative document. It gathers statements, reports, sketches, sometimes photographs. Its existence proves nothing by itself: it proves that someone reported an event and that an institution recorded it. Distinguishing the two is the first duty of any serious reader. The UFO archive is not a verdict; it is a trace of questions formulated in the past.
That is why the value of a book like this lies not in the final answer but in the map it traces. Benítez has been traveling that territory for decades, and his work functions as a guide to names, dates and places. Anyone who reads it attentively will find a network of cases and not a closed system. There lies its usefulness and also its limit: the story orders wonder, it does not resolve it.
The Voice That Sustains the Story
J.J. Benítez writes from a personal conviction he does not hide. That voice, recognizable and sustained over time, has created a pact with his readers: one reads what he tells knowing from where he tells it. He is not a neutral researcher, nor does he pretend to be. His authority is born of constancy, of having turned a marginal subject into an extensive and coherent body of work.
That pact has demands. The reader who enters his pages accepts a tone, a way of linking clues, a trust in testimony. In exchange he receives a reading experience not found in an official report: that of someone who has made the question his profession. Recognizing this does not diminish the book; it places it with precision.
Torrejón and the Geography of Mystery
That the largest volume of files is kept in Torrejón has something paradoxical and revealing about it. A subject associated with open skies and rural nights ends up stored in safes near an air base. The geography of mystery is also an administrative geography: papers, signatures, protocols. Wonder, when institutionalized, takes the form of the archive.
That image invites us to think about how much of what we call mystery is in fact accumulated memory. Each box contains a date, a witness, a description. Reading about them is reading about the bureaucracy of wonder: the way a society decides to preserve what it cannot explain. Benítez's book makes that depository visible and, with it, returns to us a question about ourselves.
Reading Without Demanding Proofs the Book Does Not Give
A frequent mistake consists of demanding from UFO literature what belongs to a laboratory. Books of this genre do not prove the existence of anything; they narrate, order, propose. Their terrain is interpretation and testimony. When they are asked for definitive proof, they are condemned in advance to failure. When they are heard as what they are, they can teach something about how we think the unknown.
The reasonable stance is twofold: openness and judgment. Openness so as not to dismiss out of prejudice what is not yet understood. Judgment so as not to confuse a safe with a conclusion. The adult reader can hold both at once. In fact, that tension is what makes the genre interesting: it forces us to think about the limits of knowledge without renouncing curiosity.
What Remains After Closing the Book
On finishing 'Están aquí' what remains is not a certainty but an orientation. The reader knows where to look, what questions to ask, what names to seek. That is the legacy of a work built over decades: not a verdict but a door left ajar. And doors left ajar, in literature, are worth more than sealed ones, because they invite us to keep reading.
Perhaps Benítez's greatest merit is having kept alive a conversation that many considered finished. He does so with a voice of his own, debatable and firm, that asks not for adherence but for attention. To read him with respect and with critical distance is the best way to honor what he offers: a story that orders wonder and leaves the reader the task of thinking for himself.