Peru.OIFAA / DIFAA · Peruvian Air Force office

Peru was one of the first Latin American countries to give itself a state window for the UFO phenomenon. In the late 1990s, driven by FAP Commander Julio César Chamorro, OIFAA (Office for the Investigation of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena) was born within the Peruvian Air Force. In December 2001 it was formalized as DIFAA (Department for the Investigation of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena), the name under which it gained public visibility. Lawyer and investigator Anthony Choy, a key figure in Peruvian ufology, took part in that founding stage, contributing field methodology and case archiving.

The office's first major public test was the Chulucanas wave, in the province of Morropón (Piura), in late 2001: a series of sightings of an unidentified object recorded on several videos by a local resident between October and November. DIFAA conducted a field investigation whose report —over eighty pages— was sent up to high command in April 2002, an unusual level of formalization for a body its size. It later also investigated episodes such as the Pucallpa 'lights' (2008).

The office had a bumpy history: it closed in 2005 for lack of budget and remained inactive for several years. In October 2013, faced with a rise in reported sightings —many by pilots and air-traffic controllers—, the FAP reactivated DIFAA. The office convenes civilian and military specialists (astronomers, meteorologists, psychologists, aeronautical personnel) and assesses each report with technical criteria: comparison against known air traffic, astronomy, weather, image analysis and, where it exists, radar records.

Unlike markedly debunking bodies, DIFAA has gone so far as to speak publicly of cases as genuinely unidentified. The most-cited example is the double sighting of 27 February 2019 in the area of Lima's Jorge Chávez airport. An honest caveat is in order here: press accounts conflicted —some notes spoke of an FAP denial— but the DIFAA investigator in charge, FAP Colonel Marco Barraza (also referred to as Marcos Barraza), clarified to CNN that the objects were not over the terminal but over the sea, near San Lorenzo island, and validated the episode as a real, observation-backed sighting. Together with Uruguay's CRIDOVNI, Chile's CEFAA and Argentina's CIAE, OIFAA/DIFAA is one of the four official offices the corpus documents as institutions.

OIFAA/DIFAA completes the corpus's quartet of Latin American official commissions —CRIDOVNI (Uruguay), CEFAA (Chile), CIAE (Argentina)— and gives Peru its own institutional piece, not only through its individual researchers. Its distinctive trait is twofold. First, a fragile history —created in the late 1990s, formalized in 2001, closed in 2005 for budget reasons and reactivated in 2013— which starkly illustrates a corpus constant: state UAP offices depend less on the strength of the evidence than on the political will and budget line of the moment, and can be switched on and off with the institutional climate. Second, a comparatively open tone: against bodies that tend to close everything by default, DIFAA has gone so far as to speak publicly of unexplained cases and to defend the reality of a sighting (Lima 2019) rather than shelving it by default.

That contrast of tones is exactly what makes it valuable to have all four Latin American offices as entities in the corpus. It allows comparing how different states in the region process the same phenomenon with different institutional cultures: from the markedly debunking style of Argentina's CIAE, through the technical and prudent methodology of Chile's CEFAA and Uruguay's CRIDOVNI, to the more confirmatory disposition of Peru's DIFAA. The methodological lesson matters: there is no single 'official stance' on UAP, not even within Latin America, and each office's degree of openness depends as much on its mandate and people as on the data it examines. Peru also reminds us that the phenomenon and its state handling are global and predate the recent U.S. cycle by decades.