Chile.Pudahuel · the silvery object over Santiago airport

On Friday 17 October 2008, between 10 and 11 in the morning, control tower staff at Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport, in Pudahuel, saw something over the airfield and phoned the weather office to ask whether they had launched a balloon. They had not, and the meteorologists went outside to look. That is how it is summarised in the record drawn up in 2010 by the former CEFAA, the committee of Chile's Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) that studied anomalous aerial phenomena, from an email by an airport meteorologist that had reached a ufology group, CIFAE Chile: for half an hour, several people watched an 'anomalous element' over the airport, and one of them filmed it on his mobile phone; the group said it had that video, 'including the audio'. The DGAC's General Secretariat ordered that the request be answered; the CIFAE representative had filed it through the Office of Information, Complaints and Suggestions (OIRS), and the record lists 'No. of witnesses: 02'.

On 10 March 2010, the head of CEFAA, Ricardo Bermúdez, and its executive secretary, Gustavo Rodríguez, visited the tower and interviewed the staff on duty that day. They saw a great many plastic bags caught on the fence protecting the perimeter of runway 17R. According to SEFAA's published report, the meteorologist described a 'fairly small object', 'not very striking to the naked eye', that 'reflected the sunlight', northeast of the tower at an elevation of about 45°. To the naked eye it looked rigid and geometric, but through binoculars 'it looked rather amorphous, it did not look like a pyramid'. In the roughly 20 minutes they watched it, it drifted north, 'very slowly', growing smaller and dropping in elevation, until it could no longer be seen. He himself suggested that, if it was debris, it might have been falling, and added that at the airport 'there is packaging material that looks aluminised, there are bags that blow away and can be seen up there and draw attention'. The tower shift supervisor told a different story: a small, solid, silvery object, which he associated with a radiosonde balloon, that 'started to rise from the ground' and stayed at about 200 feet 'for a good while', in all 'at least 3 minutes'. He saw it as round, 'not so much a triangle, as my colleagues saw it, my female colleagues', 1.5 to 2 metres across and between 500 metres and a kilometre away. He said the weather office and the rescue and firefighting service ruled out a radiosonde balloon or a bird-scaring device, and that there was no radar record, 'not even as a primary track'. That morning's weather reports gave clear skies, visibility of at least 10 kilometres and a light surface wind; higher up, the wind came from the southeast, at up to 8 knots, up to 172 metres, and from the south-southeast and south, at up to 14 knots, between 172 and about 830 metres. In 2010 the committee concluded that it was not an anomalous phenomenon as such, 'given that it was observed taking off from taxiway Delta, that is, from inside the airport', and added that along the runway perimeter fence, on its 'west side', a great many plastic bags piled up that 'from time to time are lifted by the prevailing wind'. It noted: 'Resolved: plastic bag'.

On 6 May 2018, the director of CIFAE wrote to the committee asking for the 'UFO CASE PUDAUEL (sic) AIRPORT 2008' to be reopened. SEFAA re-examined the file and was unable to obtain the meteorologist's original images. Its conclusion, of 12 October 2022, is that there is no reason to change that of 2010: it was not an anomalous phenomenon, but 'an inert body carried by the wind, very possibly some kind of rubbish bag'. The header of the case report classifies it as 'Resolved'; the publication report says it was closed as 'Probably explained'.

It is an airport case with professional witnesses and the most prosaic of explanations, and it is valuable for what it shows about method: CEFAA went to the site, looked at the runway fence and found the likely source of the object hanging from it. The explanation fits several facts in the file itself, and some checks made for this record, not by the report, reinforce it. The 2010 record bases the conclusion on the object having been seen taking off from taxiway Delta, inside the airport, and on the bags the wind lifts from the west side of the fence. The upper wind came from the southeast and south, so it pushed towards the north and northwest, and the object drifted north; the meteorologist, however, placed it northeast of the tower. At that hour the Sun stood about 42° high to the east-northeast, close to where the meteorologist placed the object, to the northeast and at 45°, which fits something small that 'reflected the sunlight'. The witness with binoculars saw an amorphous shape, and he himself mentioned the bags and the aluminised packaging that the wind lifts at the airport.

The file is not free of cracks, however. What counts against the bag is the tower supervisor's account: a 'solid' object, 1.5 to 2 metres across, that rose from the ground and hung at about 200 feet 'for a good while'. And the two testimonies do not describe the same thing: the meteorologist speaks of an object high up, to the northeast, followed for about 20 minutes, amorphous through binoculars; the supervisor, of a round one that stayed still for some three minutes, and he mentions female colleagues who saw it as triangular whose accounts the report does not include. The interviews took place almost a year and a half later, the video the ufology group said it had never reached the office, and neither did the meteorologist's photograph or recording. The two SEFAA documents attribute the first quotation to different people: the case report to a controller, the publication report to the meteorologist. The publication report dates the event to 2018 in its header instead of 2008, and the classification differs between 'Resolved' and 'Probably explained'.

None of this points to anything other than a light object carried by the wind, but it does explain why the conclusion carries a 'very possibly': nobody recovered the object and there is no image showing it. The case also documents how these files reach the official office: through a personal email that left the airport, a civilian group that spread it, and a request to reopen it ten years later, which SEFAA answered with the same 2010 file.