Chile.Collahuasi (CEFAA)

In April 2013, a group of workers —on the order of 35 people, among them several specialized technicians— at the Doña Inés de Collahuasi copper mine, in the Tarapacá region —over 4,300 meters above sea level, under some of the clearest and driest skies on the planet—, observed an object that slowly approached the area. According to the account collected by CEFAA, the object remained nearby for about an hour, making short rising, descending and horizontal movements some 600 meters over the surface, before moving off to the east. Several of those present photographed it with their personal cameras; they described it as a flattened disc, of brilliant color, between 5 and 10 meters across.

The images show an object of discoidal appearance with a dome or upper section. Two of the sharpest photographs were submitted by CEFAA —the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena, part of the Directorate General of Civil Aeronautics (DGAC) and under the jurisdiction of the Chilean Air Force— to a sequence of analyses over about a year: visual study, measurements and thermal image processing, with the participation of specialists described as 'generally very skeptical'. The analyst who handled the case concluded that the object 'emitted its own energy, which does not coincide with the natural sunlight that is also reflected off it': at noon, the brightness underneath could not be due to the sun, which was reflecting off the top. His verdict was that it was 'an object or phenomenon of great interest, which can be qualified as a UFO', and a drone was explicitly ruled out.

CEFAA was, as in its other cases, transparent about the limits of the file. The witnesses did not want to cooperate with the investigation: 'We tried to contact them and got no reply', noted José Lay, the committee's director of international relations, which prevented a precise reconstruction of camera conditions, exact time and geometry. And CEFAA's director, General (ret.) Ricardo Bermúdez, stressed that the 'UFO' conclusion came from a single analyst among several: 'We recognize that this is the determination of only one CEFAA analyst among several, so we still must be cautious'. The material and the report were made public in July 2014, adding to the Chilean body's record of open disclosure and giving it international press exposure.

Collahuasi matters for the body, not the photo. It is another CEFAA file —the official committee of Chile's DGAC— that reached formal technical analysis (optical and thermal) and open publication, in line with the methodological transparency that makes Chile an international reference. But the corpus reads it with the caution General Bermúdez himself requested: the 'UFO' conclusion came from a single analyst, the witnesses did not cooperate, and a discoidal object hovering for an hour in broad daylight is exactly the profile where a prosaic explanation (balloon, drone, optical phenomenon) remains alive and cannot be ruled out. It counts as a Tier A institutional case for the official process, not as hard evidence: it illustrates both the strength of the Chilean model —investigating openly— and its limit when the material's provenance is weak.

The contrast with other CEFAA files is instructive. When the committee had a chain of custody, a time and a geometry —as in the 2014 naval-helicopter infrared video (the 'Chile Navy' case)— it could sustain a far more demanding technical analysis. Collahuasi lacks precisely that: photographs from personal cameras with no reconstructable metadata and witnesses who withdrew from the investigation. The analyst's strongest argument —that the object emitted its own energy incompatible with solar reflection at noon— is interesting but depends entirely on inferences about photos whose orientation, exact time and exposure could not be fixed. That is why the corpus's calibrated reading aligns with Bermúdez's own: a file worth recording for the seriousness of the process, not a datum that on its own shifts the balance toward the anomalous. Its real value is methodological —how a state investigates— rather than evidential.