CHILEAN NAVY VIDEO

Opening

On 11 November 2014 a Chilean Navy Airbus Cougar AS-532 helicopter was flying a routine daytime patrol north along the coast west of Santiago, between San Antonio and Quintero. Besides the pilot, a Navy captain, it carried a technician testing a new WESCAM MX-15 HD camera. At 13:52 the crew saw an object out ahead of them, heading west-northwest, and filmed it for 9 minutes and 12 seconds, mostly on infrared. Twice it seemed to release a long plume.

Neither of two radar stations reported anything there, and the pilot's radio calls got no answer. CEFAA, the Chilean government committee that studies anomalous aerial phenomena, spent two years on the footage and released it in January 2017 under the label UAP. Within a week, analysts working online had matched it to an airliner climbing out of Santiago.

Timeline

11 November 2014, 13:52The helicopter is at about 4,500 feet and 132 knots. The crew estimate the object is 55 to 65 km away. The technician tracks it with the camera while the pilot calls the radar operators, a station on the coast and the civil aviation authority's primary radar in Santiago. Neither sees it.

Same dayThe Navy captain's report describes a flat, elongated structure. Because the camera was set so that hotter areas show darker, the hottest parts of the image, including two points on the object, appear as dark shapes.

2015François Louange of the French firm IPACO, brought in through France's official UAP office GEIPAN, reports for CEFAA that the object was probably a medium-haul airliner landing and dumping waste water. He had not been given the camera's specifications and assumed a different model, a EUROFLIR 350. CEFAA rejects the idea on radar, air traffic clearance and pilot recognition grounds.

2015 to 2016CEFAA's team meets at least eight times. Most members vote to call the object a UAP.

5 January 2017Journalist Leslie Kean publishes the video and CEFAA's findings in the HuffPost.

8 January 2017Mick West posts a 3D Google Earth reconstruction on the Metabunk forum. Users there narrow the search to departures from Santiago, first a twin-engined A320, LA330, then Iberia flight IB6830, a four-engined Airbus A340 bound for Madrid.

11 January 2017West says he has a very high degree of confidence in IB6830.

17 January 2017Kean publishes a follow-up, "Is It A Plane?", calling the airliner possibility a legitimate one. Robert Powell of the Scientific Coalition for Ufology has the radar data from CEFAA. British analyst Rob Jeffs finds that the camera's displayed bearing was off by about 7 degrees, and corrected, it points at IB6830.

25 May 2017West describes the work in Skeptical Briefs as "Curated Crowdsourcing in UFO Investigations".

Key figures

General Ricardo Bermúdez directed CEFAA, which sits inside Chile's civil aviation authority, the DGAC, and had run it since 1997. Nuclear chemist Mario Avila interviewed the two officers. The analysts included astrophysicist Luis Barrera, Air Force photogrammetric analyst Alberto Vergara, meteorologist Luis Salazar and, from France, François Louange. José Lay handled CEFAA's international contacts and later served as interim director.

Leslie Kean brought the case to English-language readers and then reported the airliner match herself. Mick West, a former video game programmer who runs Metabunk, led the identification, with Robert Powell and Rob Jeffs testing it against radar and camera data.

Physical and documentary trail

This is one of the better-documented UAP cases. The full infrared and daylight video survives, with the camera's on-screen bearing, elevation and time data. CEFAA's radar track files were released and are posted on John Greenewald's Black Vault. IPACO's 2015 report and CEFAA's reasons for rejecting it were described in Kean's articles. West's reconstruction, the flight-by-flight elimination and the azimuth correction are public on Metabunk and in Skeptical Briefs.

What is not public is a later CEFAA statement accepting or rejecting the IB6830 match. I have not found one.

We do not know what it was, but we do know what it was not.

Things you might not know

• Black meant hot. The camera was in a mode that shows heat as dark, so the two dark blobs on the object were the hottest parts of the image, which is what jet engines look like.
• The first expert had the wrong camera. IPACO worked from the specifications of a EUROFLIR 350 because nobody had told it the helicopter carried a WESCAM MX-15 HD.
• The camera's compass was off. Rob Jeffs found a bearing error of about 7 degrees in the on-screen data. Without that correction the object appears to be where no airliner was.
• The object was getting farther away the whole time. On West's reconstruction, IB6830 was roughly 35 miles from the helicopter when the filming began and about 65 miles away by 13:57.
• The plumes were intermittent. West read the two "ejections" as short-lived contrails, which can appear and vanish as a plane climbs through air of different humidity.
• The radar did have the plane. IB6830 is in the radar data CEFAA released. It was simply not where the crew and controllers were looking for an unknown.

Competing explanations

An airliner, Iberia IB6830. The departure time, climb, heading and distance line up with the camera's corrected bearings across the whole video. A four-engined A340 at that range would show as two hot points, its engines on each wing merged, and the plumes match short contrails. West, Powell and Jeffs worked from CEFAA's own radar files.

A genuine unknown, CEFAA's position. An experienced Navy pilot and a technician watched it for nine minutes and did not recognise an airliner. The controllers did not report anything where the crew were pointing, and nobody answered the radio. CEFAA's committee had more data than the online analysts at first, and most of its members voted that nothing they had tested could explain it. Kean's follow-up listed questions she still considered open, including what the crew could actually see and what other traffic was in the area.

A landing airliner dumping waste water. IPACO's 2015 idea. It was built on the wrong camera specifications and CEFAA turned it down for good reasons. It is now mostly of historical interest.

Later life of the case

The video went around the world in January 2017 as a government-certified UFO, and the identification followed so quickly that the case became a standard example of open-source analysis, cited by sceptics and in Brian Dunning's Skeptoid episode 838 in June 2022. Kean went on to co-author the December 2017 New York Times story on the Pentagon's UAP program with Ralph Blumenthal and Helene Cooper. CEFAA's label has not been publicly withdrawn.

Finding

The strongest reading is that the Chilean Navy filmed Iberia IB6830 climbing out of Santiago. The match uses CEFAA's own radar files and the camera's own data, and it explains the shape, the two hot points, the plumes and the direction of travel. CEFAA's team did careful, open work with the data it had, and the crew reported honestly what the camera showed them.

What still will not resolve: why two radar stations and an experienced crew could not connect the object to a scheduled airliner in real time, and whether CEFAA ever reviewed the identification. Its published conclusion still reads UAP.