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Santiago, Chile. November 11th, 2014. A Chilean Navy helicopter patrols the skies on a routine daytime mission. On board, the captain and a naval technician. His job, to run tests on a new state-of-the-art infrared camera system. This military helicopter is made to spot things on the ground. It is looking for targets on the land, anything man-made that gives out a different thermal signature. 1:52 p.m. The chopper flies to 4 and 1/2 thousand feet at 150 miles an hour.
Out of a cloudless sky, they spot a strange flying object. The technician switches on the infrared camera to get a better image. You see a black blob that seems to be maybe almost oval-shaped. And you also see that it seems to almost have a little bit of a halo around it. The pilot estimates the object is traveling at the same altitude as the chopper, around 35 to 40 miles away. Close enough to pose a threat. But, there was no response. Which, rather deepens the mystery.
Stranger still, the onboard radar is unable to detect the object. The pilot checks with air traffic control at Santiago Airport, 35 miles away. They get back to him. They don't see anything in the airspace that he described. It makes you wonder if what could it be? What has those properties of being visible on infrared, but not visible on radar? The military chopper's camera picks up anything with a heat signal.
The hotter the object, the darker it appears on screen. 8 minutes into the strange encounter, the infrared camera records the unidentified craft ejecting a thick plume. Whatever it is, the plume is registering intense heat. The pilot has no idea what level of threat he's facing. If you have something that's unidentified flying in your airspace, you need to figure out what it is. The crew tracks the strange object for 9 minutes. But a critically low fuel supply forces them to return to base. The encounter is so alarming, the pilot's report goes straight to the Chilean government agency investigating UFOs.
They analyze the tape. They got all spun up, put an investigation together, and start really trying to determine what the image shows, and what is going on in their airspace. Yet after 2 years, they draw a blank. In desperation, the Chilean government releases the footage online. Conspiracy theories flood the internet. What is beyond dispute is that there is something flying in the air that is a different temperature than the air around it, and it seems to be expelling something into the air.
Analysts consider how the object can be invisible to radar. Maybe there's some sort of stealth aircraft involved in the incident. Now, a stealth aircraft is one that's made to evade radar. The shape of the aircraft, the materials that it used, it's all being done to baffle a radar return. But a stealth craft doesn't usually show up in infrared or emit a visible plume. So, the idea that it's a stealth aircraft that can't be seen on radar, but has such a big infrared signature cast some doubt on the on that theory entirely.
Robert Fisher of Edinburgh University, Scotland, is an expert in optical phenomena. He suspects the infrared image could be disguising a more familiar object. I think what we're looking at is potentially a passenger plane. Kind of just moving away from us. It's got its four jet engines. It's putting out lots of heat. The problem is that the featureless black blob on the infrared footage doesn't look anything like a regular airplane. Fisher constructs an experiment to test his theory.
Now, what these candles are going to represent are the four heat signatures from the four engines. And if my theory is correct, as we move away from our simulated airplane here, we should see that the heat signatures of these four engines merge into just a single blob. You can see that they're sort of merging down to about two blobs. And as I get a bit further back, as you can see, really we just got one blob, one dark blob representing the four very bright lights now merged together. The blob that you see in the video could really be just the heat signatures from the four jet engines of that of an airplane taken at quite a distance, and all merged down just like I've done right here. If Robert Fisher is correct and this is
a plane, then his theory may also solve the mystery of the trailing plume. It could be just a regular everyday airplane that we saw its contrails pointing off to the side. Contrails are thin linear clouds created by aircraft engine exhausts. Water vapor within the exhaust freezes leaving an icy trail across the sky. Yet there's an immediate problem. An anomaly that throws the aircraft theory into doubt. The military chopper's infrared image registers a clear heat signature on the mystery craft's trail.
Normally contrails are below freezing, and yet this looks as though it's hot. Um, that doesn't make any sense to me. Experts suspect an unidentified object captured by a Chilean military helicopter may simply be a regular airplane. But they're baffled as to how the craft's freezing cold contrail shows up as superheated on the infrared image. Aviation specialist Mick West thinks the heat detection sensors on the camera may be masking the truth. And that the problem lies with the camera using the cold sky as its reference point. The temperature of the sky on infrared footage shows up as being very, very cold, well below the freezing point of water. So, even things like ice, even things like contrails, actually show up as being hot.
Yet contrails usually form above 30,000 ft. Mick West believes that this is a special kind of contrail visible at lower altitudes. This type of contrail is one called an aerodynamic contrail, which forms at much lower altitudes than regular contrails, like around 15 to 25,000 ft. The problem with this theory is that the helicopter has reported the altitude of both the helicopter and the object as being 4 and 1/2 thousand feet. Now, this is way too low to form a contrail.
Robert Fisher believes he has an answer. He thinks the pilots may have misjudged the craft's altitude. It's very difficult to work out by eye how far away something is just by looking at it. Even the most experienced crew can have some difficulties. You really need some kind of a reference point, but here we don't have anything. We just have open sky everywhere. If the craft is flying at a higher altitude, then investigators may have been looking in the wrong place for an answer. Mick West reexamines commercial aircraft flight data within 50 miles of the Navy chopper. He identifies an aircraft flying out of Santiago Airport at exactly the time of the Chilean chopper's mystery encounter.
Further checks confirm it's a four-engine plane heading to Madrid, Spain. We spotted one that followed visually the same path that was traced out by this object. West suspects the aircraft's true position may offer an explanation for why it doesn't show up on the helicopter radar. At the end of the video, the object is actually around 200 miles away from them. So, because they were only looking for things that were nearby, they didn't find the actual object. They should have looked a little bit further. But the mystery of why the jet fails to respond to calls from the military helicopter remains.
A pilot should respond to all radio calls directed at them. Especially from a military helicopter. That can be fatal if you ignore it. Mick West believes the commercial aircraft crew is simply following standard aviation protocols. Because this was a plane that was departing the airport, it would have been in contact with the departure control for Santiago airport. It would have been talking to them, and so it wouldn't have heard the helicopter trying to hail it on the open frequency. West believes evidence points to the mystery craft being a regular commercial aircraft. But for the Chilean government, it remains an unidentified
aerial phenomenon. Considering their many resources, if they aren't able to identify what it is, it really makes us wonder, will we ever be able to know?
