What happened
On November 11, 2014, a Chilean Navy Cougar helicopter was patrolling the coast west of Santiago. The crew spotted with the naked eye an object flying at an altitude of about 1,400 meters, several tens of kilometers away, and recorded it with a thermal camera. The footage, about nine minutes long, shows a dark object that at one point releases trails of a hot substance behind it. Controllers did not see the target on radar, and attempts to make radio contact with it failed. The material was sent to the Chilean committee CEFAA, part of the civil aviation authority, which consulted experts on it for two years. In January 2017 the footage was made public, and the then head of CEFAA, Gen. Ricardo Bermúdez, stated: “We don’t know what it was, but we know what it wasn’t.”
Witnesses
The pilot and camera operator of the Chilean Navy helicopter.
Explanations and hypotheses
CEFAA ruled out birds, drones, space debris, and a water drop from an aircraft, among other things. Independent analysts, including Mick West, pointed out, however, that the trajectory and timing of the recording matched an Iberia passenger jet (Flight IB6830) that had just taken off from Santiago, and that the trails were short-lived contrails in humid air. This interpretation has gained wide support, but CEFAA has not officially accepted it.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.