Chilean Government Establishes UFO Bureau by J. Antonio Huneeus Consulting Editor, FATE Magazine Reprinted by permission At the end of 1997, Chile joined the handful of nations which at one time or another have conducted official UFO probes. The Chilean Air Force (FACH) recently announced the formation of CEFAA, the name of which translates into English as the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena. CEFAA is attached to the General Administration of Civil Aeronautics (DGAC), the Chilean equivalent of the FAA. It will study aircraft and radar cases, but will not collect UFO reports from the public. The director of the School of Civil Aeronautics, Colonel Enzo Dinocera, will head CEFAA. Gustavo Rodriguez Navarro, a retired air traffic controller with an interest in pilot UFO sightings, will serve as secretary. According to La Tercera, Chile's largest daily newspaper, the promoter of the project was General Ramon Vega, former FACH commander in chief and head of its Foundation for Aerospace Studies, who is also a senator. A few months before the official announcement, I had the opportunity to interview General Vega and Gustavo Rodriguez during a visit to Chile. I was attending a UFO symposium at the University of Santiago. One of the speakers was Dr. Mario Dussuel, a psychiatrist who studies abduction cases. He arranged a meeting in General Vega's private office. Argentine UFOlogist and filmmaker Alex Chionetti was also present at the informal conversation. From the start, it was obvious that General Vega was totally convinced of the reality of UFOs and wasn't interested in discussing whether they exist. He said he was working on "a project to collect UFO aircraft and radar cases" and he was well-acquainted with UFOlogical, aeronautical, and metaphysical subjects. General Vega acknowledged he had had two UFO sightings during his FACH career. One looked like a fireball flying horizontally above a mountain outside Santiago. The other occurred in the north when he was flying in formation with two other jets. The base notified the pilots it had picked up an unknown object in their vicinity. "I looked up from the cabin and I very briefly saw something like a white sheet passing above my jet," recalled General Vega. "Everything went so fast that one of the other pilots never saw it." Documented Cases Abound UFO cases involving both civilian and military pilots go back several decades in Chile. In 1968, the FACH Meteorological Office even created a short-lived UFO Commission, and many stories have been published in the press or told privately to investigators. Rodrigo Fuenzalida, the young sociologist who runs the Chilean UFO organization AION, mentioned an incident of a "flying city" seen by army pilots in 1988. Fuenzalida explained that "an army reconnaisance plane with a crew of two pilots flying north... spotted what they first believed was Antofagasta," a large port city in the north of Chile. However, this "city" rose and began to fly. The pilots were so affected that their bowels loosened up and they returned immediately to base. Another "flying city" was reported in April 1996 between Punta Arenas and Puerto Williams on the southern tip of South America, where most of the UFO activity in Chile has moved since the mid-1990s, according to Fuenzalida. I interviewed first-hand witnesses like Joaquin Jimenez, an airplane mechanic who works at the old airport of Los Cerrillos in Santiago. He was one of at least 60 witnesses at Los Cerrillos and a nearby police station who saw a UFO over the city during the first week of October 1996. "This object was coming from Maipu [south of Santiago] at approximately 50 miles per hour at a maximum of 600 feet high," said Jimenez. "The object approached the tip of the runway and stopped in front of the Los Cerrillos control tower. It descended but didn't touch down, and then emitted some red lights." The UFO then took off and flew north. The sighting lasted 15 minutes. Jimenez was in the police station, along with about 30 of the witnesses. "We could see a phosphorescent green enveloping the object, but the center was solid and it shot down some red lights," he said. Jimenez told of several other sightings. On December 14, 1992, he was a crew member on a DC-3 flying from Punta Arenas to Puerto Williams. "We were in front of Ushuaia [in the Argentine sector of Tierra del Fuego] when we were followed by a luminous sphere approximately six feet in diameter," said Jimenez. "The pilot asked the tower if they were detecting an object that was following on one side of the plane. The tower responded affirmatively. They had an object on radar but there was no known air traffic. The pilot described a luminous sphere of yellow to amber color. It followed us until we approached Puerto Williams and continued flying toward the Atlantic side, where we lost sight of it." CEFAA secretary Rodriguez is a 54-year-old senior air traffic controller who retired in 1989 after 27 years of service. He is now a professor at the Technical School of Aeronautics. He worked at various airports in Arica, Easter Island, and Santiago, and was the chief of the Area Control Center and the Operations Department at the Cerro Moreno Airport in Antofagasta. Rodriguez has followed the UFO problem from the inside, but kept a low profile during his active career with DGAC. During the 1980s, Rodriguez published at least three articles about aircraft cases reported in Chilean airports in the DGAC's official magazine, Informacion Aeronautica. However, he cautioned that the material represented his own opinion and not that of the DGAC. "The magazine, which has since been discontinued, provided an opportunity to various people [in the DGAC] to write about things that interested them," Rodriguez said. "I took advantage of that medium to reach all my colleagues in the country and began publishing some of the UFO reports I had, asking air traffic controllers to pass me [UFO] information if they had it and to mark down the exact time [in the log book], etc. I started receiving some facts that I can now discuss more freely since my retirement, but I've always talked personally and not as a spokesman for the institution." Rodriguez encountered UFO reports in the course of his professional career dating back to his first post at the Chacalluta Airport in Arica. This northern region has been Chile's traditional UFO hotbed (the famous 1977 Corporal Valdes incident occurred here), although in the 1990s a lot of activity has shifted toward Punta Arenas in the continent's southern tip. Rodriguez recalled some important cases, many of which were his own experiences as an air traffic controller. A pilot flying from Iquique (another northern city) to Arica radioed that "he was seeing a bright object flying alongside the plane to his left" Rodriguez said. "He described the object as very bright and changing colors rapidly as if rotating. He was very worried. The object escorted him for about 15 minutes until they approached the Arica airport. The pilot kept me informed throughout, and said at one point it made an incredible acceleration to the north." Rodriguez paused and commented on another pilot case. "I have a tape of a case in Arica where the pilot indicates that he's having communication problems during the approach of an object he is seeing. Then there's quite an important communication failure from this electromagnetic effect. [The pilot] tells the control tower, 'I'm having a communications failure. I have a problem' and you get the impression that the pilot said the complete phrase but only the beginning and the end were taped." A couple of months before our interview, on the nights of March 30-31 and April 2 and 6, 1997, Arica was revisited by a UFO. An official DGAC release reported that on March 31 the director and the whole staff of the Chacalluta Airport witnessed "a stationary luminous object southwest of the city over the ocean." It went on to say that "it was not possible to determine if it was meteorlogic, astronomic, or a phenomenon of other kind." The document disclosed that a second similar sighting occurred the following night. There was no radar detection on either case. This was the first time the DGAC issued an official UFO press release. Rodriguez bemoaned the marketing of unreliable and sensationalist UFO stories in popular books and other media. "We don't have an official organization here in Chile to collect [UFO] information systematically," he said. "So data is lost from the aeronautical sector, the army, and the police, particularly those police stations in remote areas of the country where phenomena are observed." Since our interview, this has changed for the better over and now CEFAA is taking its first steps. UFOs Over Chile, Part 2 J. Antonio Huneeus has reported on UFOlogy for print and broadcast media around the world. His FATE column, "UFO Chronicle," appears on alternate months. FATE Magazine is published monthly by Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd. 1 year subscriptions are $21.50. E-mail FATE at fate@llewellyn.com, or visit their website at http://www.fatemag.com. Nebula: UFOs & Extraterrestrials UFO message board: Share your views The ParaStore: Books on UFOs & Aliens