El Bosque 2010: an air show, two videos and a case CEFAA left unsolved

At a Chilean Air Force ceremony at El Bosque on 5 November 2010, nobody saw anything unusual, but two video cameras caught a small oval object among the aircraft. CEFAA called it unexplained, two analysts disagreed over whether it was an insect, and the committee left the case unsolved.

33.5660° S · 70.6820° W · El Bosque Air Base, Santiago · 5 Nov 2010

Source: Chile · CEFAA

A change-of-command air show

On 5 November 2010 the Chilean Air Force held a ceremony at El Bosque Air Force Base in the south-western suburbs of Santiago. Ten formations of military aircraft flew over the runway in about five minutes, and spectators filmed them. Nobody noticed anything unusual at the time. Afterwards, a small, low-contrast, oval object turned up in the footage of two digital video cameras ^[1].

According to journalist Leslie Kean, the first person to notice it was an engineer from the adjacent Pillán aircraft factory, who saw it while playing his footage back in slow motion and handed it to CEFAA, the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena ^[6]. CEFAA was a small office of Chile's civil aviation authority, the DGAC, created on 3 October 1997 ^[5]. Retired Air Force general Ricardo Bermúdez Sanhueza ran it from January 2010 until December 2016 ^[3].

Nothing out of the ordinary was seen in the sky by the many military personnel and civilian spectators who were present at this Air Force ceremony.

— Richard F. Haines, NARCAP report prepared with CEFAA (2012), p.1 [1]

What CEFAA said in 2012

The case became public in March 2012. On 13 March Kean and Ralph Blumenthal published it in the Huffington Post, quoting CEFAA: officials had collected seven videos from different vantage points, and the analysts called in by Bermúdez "all came to the same conclusions" ^[6]. The article named astronomer Luis Barrera, who it said ruled out a meteoroid, space junk, a bird or an airplane, and digital-imaging expert Alberto Vergara. It also said scientists put the object's speed at "at least 4000 - 6000 mph", depending on its size ^[6]. That figure only holds if the distance to the object is known.

In a lecture, Bermúdez listed three lines of analysis: CEFAA's astronomers, the Air Force's Air Photogrammetric Service, and CEFAA's own staff ^[7]. He also said, "we are not finished with the analysis" ^[7].

At this time, this incident cannot be scientifically explained. As agreed by those who have studied the videos, we can affirm that there is an unidentified aerial object present. We do not know what it is or where it came from.

— Gen. Ricardo Bermúdez, CEFAA director, email quoted by Kean and Blumenthal (March 2012) [6]

Fly or flying object?

Within days, online critics argued that the object was an insect close to the lens. In the Skeptical Inquirer, Robert Sheaffer pointed out that the released clip was a short, edited extract from one video at ten frames per second. He also cited an amateur analyst who found the object passing in front of distant hills and the nearby ground, which a large, far-off craft could not do ^[9].

CEFAA's own examiners had first thought the same thing. Kean reported that when they saw the first tape, "they too thought it likely that the jumpy little thing was a bug". They changed their minds only after other videos from different positions appeared to show the object ^[7]. In April 2012 Bermúdez said that the existence of more than one video "inclines us to believe this is not just a bug" ^[7].

Even many who are favorably inclined toward UFO claims dismissed the El Bosque video as a flying insect.

— Robert Sheaffer, Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 2012 [9]

Two cameras, two answers

Only two videos were ever studied in detail. Kean learned from CEFAA staff that "the other five videos are no longer in the CEFAA's possession" ^[8]. The two best tapes went to two American analysts, and they reached opposite conclusions.

Richard Haines of NARCAP, working under a 2010 collaboration agreement with CEFAA, counted 21 separate object tracks ^[1]. He concluded that the same object was very probably caught at the same moment by two cameras about 32 feet apart. That would put it at least 42 feet from the first camera, which he wrote "would effectively eliminate all flying insects" ^[2]. Physicist Bruce Maccabee found that the two cameras never recorded the same object at the same time. Without that, the distance and size cannot be worked out, and he judged it "most likely that the objects were small and nearby such as insects" ^[8].

Retellings, including this site's earlier version, describe five or seven independent cameras triangulating a metallic craft at thousands of kilometres an hour. The documents show something different: one disputed match between two cameras about ten metres apart, a triangulation that one of the two analysts could not reproduce, and no agreed distance, size or speed ^[2][8].

Unfortunately, the two most promising videos did not show the same object at the same time from two locations.

— Bruce Maccabee, analysis of the El Bosque videos, quoted by Kean (November 2012) [8]

Unsolved, then left off the list

In September 2012 Bermúdez told Kean that the case was "now being put to rest, but it remains unsolved" ^[8]. CEFAA's written position was that the images showed nothing that proved they were bugs, "but since we are unable to identify the objects in the videos, the case remains unsolved" ^[8]. The Chilean entomologist CEFAA consulted, Mario Elgueta, said no entomologist could give a definite answer from the images. CEFAA's own Chilean photo analysts also disagreed: one favoured a fly or botfly, and another saw a metallic object ^[8].

No later CEFAA report reclassifying the case has been found. In 2019 CEFAA published a review of its history with 22 selected cases from 1956 to 2018 ^[4]. El Bosque is not among them, although the list includes another 2010 case in which Halcones aerobatic aircraft were photographed over Santiago ("Bandera") ^[4]. In English (our translation), the publication says: "Below is a list of the cases that were selected for this publication by the former Directors, Sergio Napoleón Bravo and Ricardo Bermúdez Sanhueza" ^[4]. In other words, the list was chosen partly by the director who had presented El Bosque. In October 2021 CEFAA was renamed SEFAA, the Section for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena ^[5].

A continuación se detalla una lista de los casos que fueron seleccionados para esta publicación por los ex Directores, Sergio Napoleón Bravo y Ricardo Bermúdez Sanhueza

— DGAC/CEFAA, Fenómenos aéreos anómalos y la investigación oficial en Chile (2019), p.17 [4]

Last fact-checked: 2026-10-03. Every claim cites its source.