did the chilean navy really track a ufo?
Here’s a bizarre story blowing up on the web lately. A helicopter piloted by two Chilean naval officers tracked a UFO that emitted trails of hot gas as it flew along the coastline. If you’ve ever followed any military UFO sightings in any articles or documentaries, this far from the first time you’ve heard a story that starts like this. There are sightings of weird formations and heat sources spotted by routine patrols, or bizarre objects on radars of air force installations, and counterintuitively, the military’s command structure often makes figuring out exactly what happened harder than it should be. But in this case, two years of review turned up no possible answers to what exactly was being tracked and why it was there. Almost every theory has been shot down as soon as it was raised because it didn’t fit with the observations. It really boggles the mind to put it mildly, and after two years of inquiry, you’d think that some idea would’ve fit the video. A plane spotted at an odd angle, space debris breaking up in the atmosphere, something. But no.
Obviously, my last thought here would be alien spacecraft because the sheer amount of coincidences it requires is mind-boggling. Just consider that any plausible alien explorers from the closest candidate for a habitable world we know of would’ve missed our civilization by 1.5 billion years, and may of the most authoritative-sounding claims of inside knowledge of possible visitors from other solar systems come with just as little evidence as those from any other devoted ufologist. If we ever spy anything alien, it would most likely be indirectly, either by spotting a distant megastructure, a mining operation, or trails of relativistic propulsion, not with a helicopter flying down a coast, belching out invisible hot gasses. Still, that leaves us with the fact that there was something unknown flying down the coast of Chile, spewing out heat in its wake, caught on video by a military patrol. If it’s very unlikely to be alien in nature as many ufologists and conspiracy theorists already rush to claim, then what could it possibly be, without violating Occam’s Razor?
My guess? Some kind of stealth jet or drone testing its engines. One of the first theories about the video was that the object was a plane descending to Santiago and the thermal trail was contrails forming. The investigators who reviewed the footage rejected it by noting that contrails couldn’t form when the plane was descending, they usually form at cruising altitude. But if this was a stealth drone of some sort, its thermal trail would be distorted by the geometry of its exhaust. Of course, I have no definitive proof for this, but it is the first thing to come to mind after considering the top contenders and getting a little creative while staying within the realm of plausibility. It’s not exactly a secret that the USAF is constantly testing new airframes and very advanced technology, something they’ve been doing since the end of WW2 from several famous and infamous bases. Why would these tests suddenly stop? Why wouldn’t they try to push autonomous technology and stealth as far as they can go? And since anti-access and area denial weapons are a top priority for the USAF and the Navy, wouldn’t this be a great test?
