Puerto Rico, U.S..Aguadilla Puerto Rico

On April 25, 2013, around 21:20, a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) DHC-8 Dash 8 aircraft, equipped with a WESCAM MX-15 thermal camera system for anti-narcotics surveillance, took off from Rafael Hernández International Airport in Aguadilla, on the far northwest tip of Puerto Rico. Both the crew and, per the report, control-tower personnel detected a small object moving at low altitude, and the FLIR system operator began tracking it with the thermal camera.

Over just over three minutes, the infrared video records an unusual sequence: the object moves over land at low altitude, crosses the coastline out over the Atlantic Ocean with no appreciable change in speed or trajectory — the air-water 'transmedium' behavior that defines the case — submerges and re-emerges, and at one point splits into two discrete objects that continue on separate trajectories. The object appears as a cold thermal signature against the background, which in the subsequent debate has been read both as evidence of a cold solid body and of a low-thermal-inertia object.

The footage, which CBP never officially released, reached researcher Robert Powell in 2015. A Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) team performed an extensive technical analysis, published in 2018, including photogrammetry, immersion-depth modeling, and reconstruction of the camera-to-object lines of sight. From those computations the team estimated a size on the order of one meter and a speed of roughly 100 km/h in the over-water segment, concluding that the characteristics did not match known aircraft, birds, drones, or unmanned underwater vehicles available in 2013. Kevin Knuth later complemented the physical analysis in a 2019 publication. The video's chain of custody, having been leaked rather than officially released, is a legitimate point of contention.

It is the only known case with a FLIR video of government origin showing sustained air-water transmedium behavior and, additionally, the object splitting into two during a continuous recording. Its methodological importance is twofold: on one hand, it is the central piece of the unidentified submerged object (USO) category, underrepresented in the corpus despite its relevance; on the other, the SCU study constitutes one of the most rigorous and reproducible civilian investigations ever conducted on a U.S. UAP video, with explicit methodology that third parties can review.

Editorial honesty requires giving weight to the serious skeptical explanation, which exists and is well articulated. The most cited counter-analysis, associated with engineer José Lianza and discussed extensively on the Metabunk forum, holds that the object is actually two paper sky lanterns, possibly tied together, carried by the wind, and that the apparent 'entry into the water' is a parallax effect: the object passes in front of the coastline and low cloud banks as seen from the aircraft's angle, without actually submerging. The SCU rebuts this reading with two central arguments: that the reconstructed speed (on the order of 16 mph or more relative to the wind) exceeds what a lit lantern would sustain in stable flight, and that the hypothesis explains neither the immersion nor the observed sub-surface trajectory. The case therefore remains a genuine, unresolved technical dispute between two quantitative analyses: its force for the corpus lies in the fact that no proposed mundane explanation has consensually accounted for the full set of observed features — transition, immersion, and splitting — within a single coherent hypothesis.

That situation changed in status, though not in substance, when the responsible office weighed in. AARO published a case-resolution report dedicated to Aguadilla concluding that the video shows two small objects drifting at wind speed and direction, and that their apparent velocity is explained by motion parallax: the optical effect by which an observer in a moving frame of reference perceives a nearly static object as fast-moving. A trajectory-software reconstruction, the report adds, shows that the objects did not exhibit transmedium performance. This is substantially the thesis already circulating in independent skeptical analysis, but now signed by the U.S. government body charged with resolving these cases.

What should be recorded is the shift in status, not a closure. The mundane reading stopped being a forum hypothesis and became the standing institutional position, and that weighs on this case's judgment; but the analyses by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies and by Knuth remain published and in disagreement, and the report did not persuade those who reconstructed the geometry from the frames. The corpus moves its distribution toward the mundane without declaring the case closed: an official resolution is weighty evidence, not a verdict that excuses one from watching the technical dispute that continues.