UFO videos released by Chilean government

UFO videos were released this week from the Chilean government, and an enhanced version of the best part of the videos was provided exclusively to journalist Leslie Kean. She posted the video in a recent blog for The Huffington Post, where she outlined the details of the case and the investigation.

The videos were captured at the Academia de Guerra Aérea (AGA), or Air Force War Academy, in Santiago, Chile in 2012. After years of careful analysis, a scientific board has declared the UFO event an “anomalous luminous phenomenon” of unknown origin.

The investigation of the UFO incident was conducted by the Committee of Studies of Anomalous Aerial Phenomenon (CEFAA), the Chilean government’s official organization for the study of unknown aerial phenomena. CEFAA is a committee within the department of civil aeronautics (DGAC), Chile’s equivalent to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. However, they work in cooperation with the Chilean military and other governmental agencies.

This case is not to be confused with a recent story circulating among many major media outlets that falsely reported CEFAA had declared a separate UFO incident to be “not made by man.” Lee Speigel of The Huffington Post wrote an article clarifying the facts behind that case.

However, this case was also covered in The Huffington Post, in a blog post by investigative journalist and author, Leslie Kean. Kean is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “UFOS: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record,” and has worked closely with CEFAA for many years. They provided her with information for her Huffington Post blog, that could not be found elsewhere.

The incident took place at about 7:45 pm on September 3, 2012. The witnesses were a paramedic, an emergency medical technician (EMT), and a sergeant. The sergeant was responsible for the security of the AGA, and was assisting the other two in the refueling of their ambulance, when all of them spotted a group of five lights above the nearby Andes mountains.

The lights were in a horizontal line moving towards the ASA. Kean writes that the sergeant, a 27-year Air Force veteran,  first thought the lights might be helicopters. However, they made no sound. He soon realized they were something much more mysterious.

The sergeant then ran towards the main gate and shouted for the guard on duty. Meanwhile, the paramedic and the EMT took out their phones and began shooting video.

As the men watched the lights, they transformed from a straight line to a triangle, then a circle. Soon after, the lights moved back over the mountains and out of view. The entire event only took a few minutes, and the cell phone cameras were recording the entire event.

Not much can be seen in the videos (see screenshots below). They are posted on CEFAA’s website. However, the video provided to Kean contains the best part of the two videos and has been somewhat enhanced. To see the enhanced video, visit Kean’s Huffington Post Blog here.

Although the lights are difficult to make out, the excitement of the witnesses can be heard. Kean posted in her article a translation of what the EMT was saying as he filmed:

They’re UFOs! Damn I can’t capture them in my camera! Look at the formation they have now! I am seeing a formation of five luminous objects, that my cell phone doesn’t seem to catch. But if you were here you would see them perfectly!

Oh my God, look! They are coming down! I can’t see anything in my camera. Over here look! Before they looked super big. Now they are getting dimmer. Wow, this is amazing!

In a testament to the excitement of the moment, a retired Air Force general, who just happened to have stopped by the base within minutes of the sighting, reported his encounter with the excited sergeant. He said the excited sergeant approached him and asked: “‘Did you see the lights, General?’ ‘We had them right here on top of the Academy…five UFO’s, red in color…here, right on top of us… General, I thought one of them was going to land here!'”

The next morning, General Ricardo Bermúdez, director of CEFAA, received a phone call from the director of the AGA. The AGA director said he had arrived at the base about fifteen minutes after the incident. He had rushed to the base in response to an urgent phone call. He could also attest to the genuine excitement of the sergeant.

“The sergeant acted like someone who’s seen something very strange,” he told Bermúdez. “He also said he hadn’t believed in those things [UFOs] until after what had just happened.”

Besides the five lights witnessed by all three men, the sergeant said he had witnessed an additional object. The sergeant told Bermúdez, “I saw an oval shape, like a submarine. The upper part had windows with lights coming out and was shaped like a submarine, with a dome or something like it.”

The videos were analyzed by the Chilean criminal police department, which Kean describes as the equivalent of our FBI. In the following images, they enhanced still frames from the video so the lights could be seen.

Kean writes, ” The phenomenon clearly demonstrates intelligence.”

She points out that when the lights are in the triangular formation, it can be seen in the enhanced images that two of the three points of lights are actually two lights close together, making it appear there are three points of light instead of five.

CEFAA conducted a thorough investigation of the incident, which included psychologists, meteorologists, radar experts, and other scientists. In the end, Kean writes, “The CEFAA Scientific Committee concluded by consensus that this was an ‘anomalous luminous phenomenon’ of unknown origin.”

Read more about their investigation in Kean’s Huffington Post blog. A PowerPoint presentation reviewing the case can be found at CEFAA’s website, with link so the videos.

Although CEFAA found this object to be of unknown origin, they avoid using the term UFO. Often it is assumed a UFO is something of extraterrestrial origin, even though the U in UFO stands for Unknown.

In an interview with Speigel of The Huffington Post, last week, CEFAA International Affairs Director Jose Lay clarified CEFAA’s official position on UFOs.

“We believe the phenomenon exists, and we base this asseveration on the many reports made by our pilots — civilian and military — and by our ground traffic and radar controllers,” Lay told The Huffington Post. “We do not know its origin or its nature. That is why we continue investigating and hope many other countries will join us in this endeavor.”

CEFAA is one of several official government sanctioned UFO investigation organizations in South America, and actively seeks to work in cooperation with similar agencies in other countries.