Chile.Arica · tower controllers and a police pilot see a white light

On the evening of February 20, 2018 the sky over Arica, in Chile's far north, was clear: the Chacalluta aerodrome's weather reports record a light breeze, no fog or camanchaca and full visibility. At about 20:35 local time, with the Sun already below the horizon, a controller climbing up to the tower saw a light directly over the airport. His colleague at the control position thought it was the Carabineros aircraft patrolling the border area, the C52, visible on the tower's traffic display, which is not a radar. They asked for its position: it was not the aircraft. Chacalluta had no other traffic; commercial flights arrive from the south and, according to the controller, there is usually nothing overhead except the occasional overflight announced from Tacna, in Peru.

The tower then called C52, which had been patrolling the border with Peru, near boundary marker 10, and was descending from 8,000 feet. The audio, preserved and transcribed by SEFAA, is short. The tower asks which radial it is crossing (the bearing line, measured from a navigation beacon, that it is on); the crew member answers "075". Then: "Carabineros 52, I have an unidentified flying object to the left of your position. Are you by any chance able to observe it?". The pilot replies that he has it in sight, announces a turn to close in and, shortly after, reports that the object moved away and disappeared: "it was a white light… it could not be identified from this position what it was". The tower closes: "yes, we observed it from this position".

The controller would later recall that the light moved slowly from overhead toward the east, toward the mountains, and that when the aircraft turned it lost it "very fast". They checked with Iquique control: it did not have it on radar either. Asked about its apparent size, the same controller compared it to an aircraft: "it gave off the same light as a plane and looked as close as a plane. If we hadn't had a track on the screen, we could have thought it was the plane."

The former CEFAA, now SEFAA, interviewed the witnesses. The C52 pilot, interviewed in Iquique on November 28, 2019, a Carabineros captain who had been his institution's representative to CEFAA itself, gave the most vivid account: a yellowish-white light, large and strong, "five, six, seven times Venus", which his co-pilot told him to chase and film; while he was reaching for his phone, the light faded or, according to his co-pilot, moved off "at a very fast speed".

He insisted there was still "daylight"; of the video he shot, which he had not watched again, he said, referring to the light on the phone's screen: "I don't remember, I couldn't see it when zooming in." He called himself skeptical, but firmly ruled out an aircraft and a flare, and said he did not feel he was getting closer to the light during the chase. He offered the phone video and the flight log, which the investigation never received.

SEFAA published its report in October 2025. It established that the Sun was 6° below the horizon and that Venus, very bright, was almost touching it in the west, at 2.9°, so it could not be what was seen. It noted inconsistencies between the accounts regarding the appearance, the movement and the aircraft's position. Its conclusion is that what was reported could be consistent with an aircraft able to hover, with no transponder and not picked up by the Iquique radar, specifically a small unmanned aircraft or drone; to a lesser extent, with a space phenomenon. With no images to set against the testimony, "it was not possible to advance its identification without incurring bias"; it closed the case as an "Account" (Relato) and added that there had been no danger to air operations.

The alert was recorded as it happened (not the light, which no radar picked up): a recording of the conversation between the tower and an aircraft in flight, with the words "unidentified flying object" spoken by an on-duty controller, and an entry in the tower's log. Three professional witnesses saw it (two controllers and a police aircrew), and the official investigation was published with transcripts, weather conditions and an astronomical check. It was carried out by SEFAA, the section of Chile's civil aviation authority that succeeded CEFAA and puts its files online.

SEFAA does not declare the case inexplicable or attribute it to an extraordinary origin: it rules out what it can (Venus, the Sun, known traffic), notes the contradictions between witnesses and proposes the hypothesis that fits best (a drone without a transponder, which the radar did not detect). The "Account" category means that: there is testimony, with the inconsistencies the report itself notes about appearance, movement and the aircraft's position, but no instrumental evidence to confirm it. The video on the pilot's phone never reached the investigation.