IncidentThe Chilean Navy / CEFAA IR Case (11 November 2014)

A Chilean Navy Airbus Cougar AS532 helicopter on coastal patrol carried a pilot and a technician testing a WESCAM MX-15 HD FLIR camera, recording ~9-10 minutes of infrared video of an object first seen with the naked eye at an estimated 35-40 miles, near the helicopter’s ~4,500 ft altitude. The pilot described ‘a flat, elongated structure with two thermal spotlights’; the object did not appear on the helicopter’s radar, and twice trailed a high-thermal plume described as ‘gas or liquid.’ CEFAA (Comite de Estudios de Fenomenos Aereos Anomalos), an agency under Chile’s civil aviation directorate, investigated for ~2 years with meteorologists, a nuclear chemist, an astrophysicist, image experts, and Air Force analysts, and released the footage in 2017 with director General Ricardo Bermudez saying they could only determine what it was NOT. Within days, analysts led by Mick West (Metabunk), with Scott Brando and French IPACO-linked groups, argued the object was a distant climbing commercial airliner (candidate flights Iberia IB6830, an A340, or LATAM LA330): the two ‘hotspots’ are engine thermal bloom, the ‘plume’ a transient aerodynamic contrail rendered dark by IR auto-leveling against the cold sky, and the apparent slowness a distance/parallax effect, with radar missing a high object beyond helicopter range. A strong South American official sensor case that doubles as a clean instrumented-vs-mundane test.