Is this the UFO case of 2012? At the Huffington Post, investigative journalist Leslie Kean (author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record) has co-written an article regarding a recent sighting of an unidentified flying object over Santiago Air Base in Chile, which was caught on video from multiple viewpoints. Here’s one of the (seven) videos in question:
As usual, Alan Boyle of Cosmic Log is on the case, and has posted an excellent summary and further discussion with Kean and UFO skeptics Phil Plait and Robert Scheaffer:
The case goes back to an air show that was staged in November 2010, at Chile’s Air Force academy, which is headquartered at the El Bosque Air Force Base in Santiago. Nothing untoward was noticed by anybody during the show itself, but Kean said an engineer at the nearby aircraft factory noticed an anomalous spot as he was sifting through video taken from the show, looking for an image that could be used as a poster photo.
The spot appeared to move quickly from frame to frame, and the engineer thought it looked enough like some sort of craft to notify the Chilean government agency in charge of investigating anomalous aerial phenomena, known by the Spanish acronym CEFAA.
The way Kean tells it, CEFAA investigators looked around for other video clips of the event and pieced together six additional views of the spot-shaped phenomena. Ricardo Bermudez, a retired Chilean Air Force general who is now CEFAA’s director, told a UFO conference last month that his agency consulted with other officials, image-processing experts and “non-believer astronomers.” CEFAA’s conclusion was that the spots were caused by an object traveling through the scene at speeds in excess of 4,000 mph — so fast that it went unnoticed by air-show spectators.
Now for most of the video above, my thought was simply “it’s a bug not far from the camera”. The last shot of the video above though, appears to both be similar to the classic ‘X-Files’ UFO (too similar?) and also features a strange fade-out effect on the object (though perhaps that could be due to changes in light reflection as a bug changes orientation?).
The other videos mentioned are really key to progressing any further, and here is what Kean says at the Huffington Post about them:
CEFAA officials collected seven videos of the El Bosque UFO taken from different vantage points. Bermúdez commissioned scientists from many disciplines, aeronautical experts, and air force and army photogrametric technicians to subject the videos to intense scrutiny. They all came to the same conclusions.
Each video included three different, mainly horizontal loops flown by the UFO within seconds of each other. The object made elliptical passes either near or around each of three sets of performing jets. It flew past the Halcones, F5s and F16s at speeds so fast it was not noticed by the pilots or anyone on the ground below.
If, as this seems to imply, these videos also feature the object – and most especially, in a way that can be synced between videos – firstly in time, to show it is the same object, and secondly, in space, to pinpoint exactly what distance it was from the camera – *then* we might just have something here (although that something could still be a well-orchestrated hoax…).
But, given that a UFO – in the strict definition of the word – has been sighted, and we have further videos that are said to corroborate the sighting in multiple details, I have to say that I definitely look forward to further investigation and discussion of this case (though skepticism, as always, is advised)!
