Chilean Navy / CEFAA Infrared Video

November 11, 2014. Early afternoon, west of Santiago. A Chilean Navy Airbus Cougar AS-532 helicopter was on a routine patrol, flying north along the coast at about 4,500 feet. Two crew were aboard. A very experienced Navy captain at the controls. And a Navy technician, testing a WESCAM MX-15 HD FLIR infrared camera. Visibility was unlimited. Stratocumulus lay below.

Then the crew saw it. The pilot described "a flat, elongated structure" with two thermal spotlights. The technician saw something "white with a semi-oval shape on the horizontal axis," aimed the camera immediately and zoomed in with the infrared. On screen, two connected white hot spots. It seemed to match the helicopter's speed and altitude, some 35 to 40 miles away, traveling W/NW.

The pilot tried several times to reach it by radio. No response. The pilot contacted two radar stations, the coastal radar and the DGAC primary radar in Santiago. Neither detected it. Neither did the helicopter's own radar.

About eight minutes in, it discharged "some type of gas or liquid with a high thermal track or signal." It happened again at the end of the recording. The material "came out from two different parts of the object and then joined in space making one wake." Then the helicopter had to return to base. The camera stopped. The object disappeared behind the clouds.

The footage went to CEFAA, Chile's official UAP committee within the civil aviation authority DGAC. Its director, General (ret.) Ricardo Bermúdez, gathered scientists and Air Force specialists, from nuclear chemist Mario Avila to Alberto Vergara of the Air Force Photogrammetric Department. The study took about two years. The committee ruled out a landing aircraft, a weather balloon, a drone, space debris, birds and a hoax. The great majority agreed to call it a UAP. "We do not know what it was," Bermúdez said, "but we do know what it was not." José Lay called it "the first time we have ever seen the ejection of a substance from a UAP."

January 5, 2017. Leslie Kean published the video in HuffPost, and it went viral. Within days, skeptics had a candidate. On Metabunk, Mick West and forum members matched flight tracking data to the GPS overlay on the footage. They named Iberia flight IB6830, an Airbus A340 climbing out of Santiago. Its four engine glares, they argued, merged into the two hot spots. The plumes were aerodynamic contrails. "IB6830 is in exactly the right position," West wrote. IPACO had already concluded in 2015 that it was "most probably a medium-haul twin jet airliner in a landing phase".

CEFAA and Kean did not accept it. Kean noted that visibility was only about 30 nautical miles and the jet was farther away. An experienced pilot would recognise an airliner, Kean argued, and the helicopter's radar saw no plane. Robert Powell placed IB6830 about 18 degrees east of the camera's roughly 9 degree field of view. Rob Jeffs then found a possible 7 degree error in the azimuth reading, which would line it up. José Lay replied: "We respect every opinion... as long as they are made in good faith."

In January 2023 the full case file and the raw video were released through a transparency request and published by The Black Vault. Crew forms, the flight track, the GEIPAN report and 11 consultant reports. One meteorology report states: "A meteorological phenomenon is excluded." The Italian channel Omega Click argued that IB6830 does not fit. Metabunk kept defending the identification through 2024. For Kean, the significance lay elsewhere. A government agency had taken the report seriously.