Incident · 11 November 2014 · Coast west of Santiago, Chile
Chilean Navy helicopter video
Also known as Chilean Navy UFO, Chile 2014, CEFAA 2014
Partly explained. CEFAA's committee concluded it was unidentified after two years, rejecting the airliner proposed by the French analysts it had consulted (IPACO, 2015); independent analysts later matched it to Iberia flight IB6830 climbing out of Santiago and leaving a contrail. (source)
On 11 November 2014 a Chilean Navy helicopter flying a routine training route along the coast west of Santiago filmed a slow-moving, double-lobed object on its infrared camera for nearly ten minutes. At two points the object appeared to release a dense dark trail. Neither the helicopter nor ground stations saw anything on radar, and the crew's radio calls went unanswered. Chile's official UFO committee, CEFAA, part of the civil aviation authority, examined the footage for two years. A French team it consulted proposed an airliner coming in to land, but the committee rejected that and in January 2017 released the video through the journalist Leslie Kean as unidentified; its director, Gen. Ricardo Bermúdez, said: "We do not know what it was, but we do know what it was not."
Within five days amateur analysts working on Metabunk, led by Mick West, used the helicopter's GPS and camera data and public flight tracking to match the object, position by position, to Iberia flight IB6830, an Airbus A340 climbing out of Santiago much farther away and higher than the crew assumed, with its contrail accounting for the trails. The airliner explanation comes from independent analysis rather than an official finding, and CEFAA's conclusion was not revised.
Sources: Leslie Kean, HuffPost (2017) · IPACO report (2015) · Skeptoid (2022) · Metabunk (2017)
Facts and claims
- claimed On 11 November 2014 a Chilean Navy AS532 Cougar helicopter on a training flight north along the coast west of Santiago filmed an object in infrared for about ten minutes; it twice seemed to release a dark trail, airports reported no radar contact, and the crew got no reply by radio. Source: skeptoid.com (archived)
- claimed CEFAA studied the video for two years; its director, Gen. Ricardo Bermúdez, said “We do not know what it was, but we do know what it was not”, and the official conclusion was that “the great majority of committee members agreed to call the subject in question a UAP”. The video was released through Leslie Kean in January 2017. — Ricardo Bermúdez Source: web.archive.org
- claimed The French image analysts CEFAA consulted (Antoine Cousyn, François Louange and Geoff Quick of IPACO, in a 2015 report prepared at CEFAA's request) concluded the object “was most probably a medium-haul twin jet airliner in a landing phase”; Kean reports that CEFAA's experts rejected this, citing the lack of primary-radar detection and radio contact. Source: ipaco.fr (archived)
- claimed Within days, analysts on Metabunk matched the object's position throughout the video to the ADS-B track of Iberia flight IB6830, an A340 climbing out of Santiago, whose aerodynamic contrail would explain the trails; the plane shows up in the radar data supplied by CEFAA. Source: metabunk.org (archived)
Connected files
Organizations
- CEFAA (Chile) (investigated by)
People
- Ricardo Bermúdez (investigated by) — He and a CEFAA scientist interviewed the two Navy officers at their base
Mentioned in this file
- Leslie Kean (Person)
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