[en] The mechanism that determines the emission of light complex projectiles with energies in the continuum, has been studied extensively over many years. Cross sections, and especially analyzing power of ejectiles, display angular and energy distributions which are typical of an intranuclear nucleon-nucleon multistep statistical reaction mechanism. For the formation of a complex ejectile in the final stage of the reaction, pickup of a correlated neutron-proton pair from an atomic nucleus would seem to be a most likely process in a (p,"3He) reaction. However, for (p,α) either pickup of a triton-like grouping, or α-cluster knockout are possible processes, with the latter preferred on dynamical grounds. The theory reproduces experimental distributions well under these assumptions. An overview of results for the reactions (p,"3He) and (p,α) on "5"9Co and "9"3Nb at incident energies between 100 and 160 MeV will be presented. The trend of cross section and analyzing power distributions as a function of incident energy and emission energy will be discussed, and remaining issues that still need to be explored will be described. (author)