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UFO Trail Goes Chile

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)!

Editor
  1. from the Help-My-Wave-Function-is-Collapsing-Dept.
    i love it :3

    i especially love just how prosaic and ordinary it is — no sturm n drang, no shock n awe…quite Canadian :3

    1. Needs Investigation Now
      If multiple video shots exist that show this object from different perspectives then we have something truly important.

      If these additional videos do not come to light, and soon, we have little better than nothing at all, and a bit of a black eye for Ms. Kean.

      I hope swift action is taken to follow through on this.

      1. from the Responsibility-Dept.
        all i really hope is that everyone involved take care in being a part of any ‘controversy’ or being forced into a ‘side’, like that cosmic log article wanted to do to people :3

        and i’m gladdened that, thanks to the internet, there are countless more eyes (greater variety of worldviews, cultures, biases etc) to examine a report on things…

        1. What this shows to me is that
          What this shows to me is that no skeptic is ever — EVER– interested in looking at any piece of evidence that challenges his beliefs. If he ever says anything to the contrary, he’s a barefaced liar. These people are all embittered zeta-males looking for people they can mock so they can take their mind off their countless failures and inadequacies, hence all the stupid “Bubba butt-probe” jokes. The one’s who aren’t outright shills, that is.

  2. A Disk Not a Dome?
    This looks like an out and out disk to me.

    The ‘dome’ which seemingly changes shape and size is quite possibly the sun reflecting intensely on its upper surface (much like on extremely bright days all those millions of white flashes you see sparkling on the curved surface of each blade of grass is a distorted image of the sun [making it a bitch to paint realistically but very Buddhist in a million moons in a million bowls of water kind of way]).

    It also seems to be perfectly flat which’s probably how it does its suddenly disappearing act.

    It may be some smart arse Yankee Imperialist pig technology deliberately being tried out at an airshow to (although the Iranians amongst others seem to be making progress in the area of drones).

    But in some ways it reminds me of a life form somewhat like the ‘abstract angels’ that used to pay me yearly ‘visits’ until we moved three years ago though they tended to be triangular self luminous and very elegant whereas this’s more like a clumsy and immature kid overly impressed by its ability to run rings round the competition.

  3. The Relative Usefulness/Uselessness of Tininess as Information
    I’ve just been reading Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log piece and I love this quote from Phil Plait: “It’s a tiny thing in a low-res video”.

    As tiny as the units of information most modern astronomy’s based on?

    Eg the gravity lensed reflection of the reflection of the reflection of what might be a 13 billion year old photon after it’s undergone countless transformations and negotiated near infinite volumes of constantly expanding space held together or/and torn apart by vast reams of dark matter and dark energy after its been sieved through algorithms based on theories built on theories built on theories built on…well you get the drift?

  4. Pseudoskeptics Attack
    Huffington Post originally posted Kean & Blumenthal’s article in their science section, but it’s since been removed to the Huff’s pseudoscience section due to complaints by guess who.

      1. Flinging Woo
        [quote=Inannawhimsey]Whom?[/quote]

        Well I don’t have actual names, but it’s the usual suspects, boorish pseudoskeptics who think all UFOs are hoaxes or the light of Venus reflecting off swamp gas. They must be sad, lonely little people if all they can do is complain loudly to the Huff Post for posting woo in the science section.

        I doubt they even read the article. 😉

        1. from the Search-for-Signs-of-Humour-Filled-Life-Dept.
          save us from those who want to save us :3

          Barack should make it mandatory that impacted humour extractions become free for all! :3

          1. It’s a religious cult
            It’s a religious cult organized online to recoil and splutter every time a tenet of their religion is contradicted.

        2. Sheesh
          If they can cry and demand the UFO section to be taken out of the Science section, then we should demand the Skeptic section to be put where it truly belongs: in the Humor section.

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