What happened
Chulucanas, a town in Peru's northern Piura region known for its pottery, has a long reputation for strange lights. On 13 October 2001, according to the account given by Peruvian Air Force investigators, hundreds of people watched eight red-orange spheres moving through the night sky in what looked like coordinated fashion for more than five hours. A couple of weeks later, someone filmed a bright, teardrop-shaped object estimated at about 80 feet long hanging near the town, and soon afterward other residents said they saw lights coming down into nearby woods. Commander Julio Chamorro, head of the Air Force's anomalous aerial phenomena office, told the Miami Herald that video taken at Chulucanas at the end of 2001 showed a huge craft, silent and motionless for nearly two hours, with what appeared to be windows. The case became the office's first officially documented UFO investigation, led by investigator Anthony Choy.
The official explanation
No official conventional explanation was published in the sources reviewed. Multi-hour displays of coloured lights are commonly traced to bright planets and stars low on the horizon, aircraft, flares or sky lanterns, and stationary objects on video are often distant lights or reflections. The details available come largely from the Air Force office and later retellings, without published analysis of the video.
The anomalous case
The case was taken seriously by the state: it was investigated by Peru's official Air Force office for anomalous aerial phenomena, and its head, a career radar officer, publicly described the footage as showing a large, silent, stationary craft with visible structure for close to two hours. The initial sighting reportedly involved hundreds of witnesses over more than five hours, which argues against a brief misidentification, and was followed by separate reports of a filmed object and of lights descending, according to the account given by investigator Anthony Choy and summarised by Foreign Policy. Chamorro said Chulucanas had a long history of such sightings. Without the video's release for independent analysis, the case remains unresolved in the public record.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- Peru's Air Force Opens a UFO Office, and It's Twitter-Friendly Foreign Policy
- Miami Herald, 28 September 2002 (Peru UFO office and Chilca) Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight (press archive)
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.