What happened
Chile's official UFO committee was born out of a radar case. In the early hours of 31 March 1997, controllers in the tower at Chacalluta airport in Arica, near the Peruvian border, reported three objects over the Pacific that were seen visually and tracked on radar for about two hours before speeding off toward the Andes. Days later the civil aviation authority, the Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil (DGAC), confirmed the radar returns. By the end of that year Chile had created the Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, CEFAA, attached to the DGAC and staffed with air force and aviation specialists. Its first chief was Colonel Enzo Dinocera, director of the civil aviation school. CEFAA's remit was aviation safety: studying anomalous aerial phenomena in Chile's vast area of airspace responsibility, from Arica to the South Pole, mainly through pilot, controller and radar reports, and producing analyses that usually found ordinary causes.
The official explanation
Chilean officials present CEFAA as an aviation-safety body rather than a hunt for aliens. Chile's tourism board notes the committee's reports generally reach scientifically explicable conclusions, and the committee itself has attributed pilot sightings to things such as military aircraft or ships' lights reflecting off cloud. Its existence reflects the volume of reports from crews, not an official view that the phenomena are exotic.
The anomalous case
Chile created a standing government body because its civil aviation authority, not civilians, had confirmed an unidentified radar-visual target at a working international airport. The Arica objects were tracked by DGAC and air force radar, per contemporary Chilean press reports. CEFAA brought together air force officers, controllers and scientists and invited experts in image analysis to examine cases, and under later director General Ricardo Bermúdez it publicly presented cases it could not explain, including the 2010 El Bosque air show video. Journalist Leslie Kean described the committee to The Clinic as a pioneering entity doing very important work. That a national aviation regulator considered anomalous aerial phenomena a flight-safety issue worth a permanent office is itself an argument that some reports are not trivial.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- Officials and UFOs in Chile Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight
- Ufología en Chile: destinos para avistamiento de ovnis Chile.travel (official tourism board)
- Los ovnis son muy diferentes a los que se ven en La Guerra de los Mundos The Clinic
Witness reports elsewhere
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