After the US Air Force used the conclusion of the Condon Report as an excuse to officially close down its involvement in the investigation of UFOs, Blue Book abandoned all concerned citizens wishing to file an official report of a sighting. That void was unevenly filled by civilian organizations like MUFON, and more recently with social channels like Youtube, which allows the almost instantaneous dissemination of audiovisual content purportedly showing anomalous objects in the sky. The convenience & ubiquitousness of the Internet has turned into a double-edge sword, though: Even if the photo or video doesn’t appear to be a blatant hoax, if the poster doesn’t bother to include pertaining information about the circumstances of the sighting –location, date, duration, etc– barely nothing of true value can be learned from it.
But some countries still take UFOs seriously, and they have even established official agencies in charge of gathering & analyzing all reports of unidentified aerial phenomena occurring within their national territory. Such is the case of CEFAA (Commitee of Studies of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena), the Chilean agency subordinate to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC). It’s mission statement according to their webpage, is to study such cases “through a serious, scientific and objective investigation, with the purpose of determining if the security of aerial operations has been compromised, thus contributing to aviation safety in Chile” [My translation].
The latest case CEFAA investigated –which has received a lot of attention from the Spanish-speaking media this week– was a series of 2 photographs taken during the mid of April of 2013 at the Collahuasi mine in the north of Chile, located 4,300 meters above sea level. The images, taken by a digital Samsung camera model Kenox S860, show a silvery ‘flattened disk’ of approx. 5 to 10 meters in diameter at an altitude of around 600 meters, which was observed by several witnesses (35 technicians & mine workers) performing a series of aerial maneuvers –vertical & horizontal displacements, showing sometimes the disk as a lenticular object, other times as an ovoid– for a span of 1 to 2 hours, denoting some sort of intelligent control or predetermined flight.
A meteorologist concluded the object could not have been a lenticular cloud, and after an expert analyzed the photographs using a series of filters, the official conclusion of the agency is that the object is a real UFO –which does NOT mean they’re saying the disk is an interstellar alien ship; it simply means the object is not a conventional aeoronautical craft, nor a known meteorological event.
In her best-selling book UFOs: Generals, Pilots & Government Officials Go on the Record –the kind of book you need to keep a copy in your library, in order to shut the mouth of lazy debunkers claiming the phenomenon is not taken seriously by anyone other than woo woo peddlers– Leslie Kean included the testimony of General Ricardo Bermúdez Sanhueza (ret), who was the director of CEFAA from 1998 to 2002. In it, Bermúdez stated that of all the cases analyzed by the agency, approximately 4% remained unexplained. He also went as far as to affirm that although there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support the Extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) in his opinion the possibility should not be discarded beforehand “just because it may sound harebrained.”
In this age of Photoshop & digital manipulation, photographic evidence is barely evidence of anything. Yet it is still comforting to know there are still researchers out there, committed to apply scientific rigor in the analysis of an image showing what very well may be a truly extraordinary phenomenon. Even more comforting, is knowing there are nations not willing to let the United States dictate them what is or isn’t of significance to their national security; and if the USA wishes to retain their position as leaders of the world perhaps they should start by getting their head off the sand and acknowledge that, no matter how much they refuse to look up, the UFOs are not going anywhere.
They should also improve their performance at the World Cup, while they’re at it –I mean, srsly guys.
Link: Ovni visto en Chile; científicos confirman autenticidad
Original CEFAA file: Informe Caso Collahuasi (Power Point)
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UPDATE: Leslie Kean wrote about the Collahuasi photos for the Huffington Post. He also contacted Ret. General Bermúdez for comment, along with veteran UFO researcher Bruce Maccabee:
“This is clearly not a normal thing seen in the sky (bird, plane, cloud, etc.),” added Dr. Maccabee in an email. “That makes it either the real thing – UFO – or a hoax, and it doesn’t appear to be a hoax, although the inability to question witnesses does reduce the credibility. Certainly this case is worthy of further study.”
