What happened
In October 2013 the Peruvian Air Force revived its official UFO office, now called the Department for the Investigation of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (DIFAA), under its Directorate of Aerospace Interests. It succeeded the Oficina de Investigación de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos (OIFAA), founded by Commander Julio César Chamorro, a radar specialist who had grown used to unexplained lights while stationed at La Joya air base. The original office, which operated in the early 2000s, made headlines investigating the 2001 Chulucanas sightings before closing in the mid-2000s, citing administrative problems. The revived DIFAA was given an advisory council of eight civilians, including an astronomer, archaeologist, sociologist, physicist, philosopher and former pilot, plus two military officers, to review photos, videos and witness questionnaires. Defence Minister Pedro Cateriano told BBC Mundo that any unidentifiable object flying illicitly in national airspace is a threat to aviation safety the Air Force must investigate.
The official explanation
Officials framed the reopening as an aviation-safety and sovereignty measure rather than an endorsement of extraterrestrial visits. Air Force Colonel Julio Vucetich linked the move to rising reports driven by mobile phones and social media, which also produce many misidentified aircraft, drones, lanterns and astronomical objects. The office's purpose is to document and analyse, and it has not announced any finding of non-human craft.
The anomalous case
A national air force chose to reopen a dedicated office because, its investigators told BBC Mundo, most recorded cases could not be explained. Founder Julio Chamorro, a radar officer trained in Russia, said personnel at La Joya base regularly saw lights they could not identify, including a recurring bright light they nicknamed the 'star of David'. DIFAA investigator Marco Barraza said the unit cannot know what objects are without analysing evidence, a stance that leaves the hardest cases open. Chamorro also asserted that then-President Alberto Fujimori and his party saw a luminous ball rise from the Amazon on a fishing trip, a story Barraza corroborated. A defence minister publicly calling unidentified flying objects a security threat moved the topic into the mainstream of Peruvian state policy.
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
- Por qué Perú reabrió su oficina de búsqueda de ovnis (BBC Mundo) El Mostrador
- Cada día más personas avistan cosas extrañas en los aires Andina (Peruvian state news agency)
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.