On January 5th, writer Leslie Kean released a story at the Huffington Post about an infrared video of a seemingly mysterious object traveling through Chilean airspace on November 11, 2014. The images were captured by a camera mounted on a helicopter of the Chilean Navy. They gave the video to their official UFO investigative group (the CEFAA) to study and see if the object could be identified. They declared it unidentified and passed the story on to Kean.

On January 6th, using the information provided in the article, a preliminary analysis by  the skeptical group Metabunk guessed that the object was a passenger aircraft departing from the Benítez International Airport in Santiago. Being a licensed pilot, I took an immediate interest in this case. By January 7th, after going through all of their analysis points in detail, I found that I agreed with virtually all of their findings and said so at the RM facebook page. On January 17th, Kean magnanimously wrote a follow-up article that basically said she and the CEFAA were most likely in error.

Alejandro spoke about this saga, and how it is another lesson for the UFO community and interested parties. I offered my observations about the skeptical explanation, and we discussed how it became obvious very early on how the assumptions made by the Chilean authorities were wrong. Later, we asked who are the “authorities” we listen to and how we determine that they actually are authoritative.

In the last third of the program, we discussed the upcoming International UFO Congress, the speakers, and their subjects, some of which are surprisingly progressive for a major gathering.

Image credit: Metabunk.org