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CASE FILE / 016 — 2013

The Heat Signature over Aguadilla

In April 2013 a Customs and Border Protection plane climbing out of Aguadilla swung its infrared camera onto a dark heat signature. For nearly four minutes it seemed to race over rooftops, dive into the Atlantic without a splash, surface, and split in two. The Pentagon later rebuilt the flight path and put a pair of sky lanterns over the airport instead. Everything turns on whether a smudge passed behind a telephone pole.

Black-hot infrared frame from the official Customs and Border Protection video, showing Aguadilla terrain, sensor telemetry, a tracking box, and a small dark unresolved target near the center.
2013
Authentic CBP infrared-video frame; the target’s identity and distance cannot be determined from this still alone.

A warm light approaches the old bomber field

Rafael Hernández Airport sits on the northwestern shoulder of Puerto Rico on the bones of Ramey Air Force Base, with a runway 11,702 feet long—the longest in the Caribbean, built for bombers and now used by FedEx freighters, the Coast Guard, and the Customs and Border Protection aircraft that patrol the island’s approaches. At 9:16 p.m. on Thursday, April 25, 2013, a CBP De Havilland Dash 8 took off toward the east with four aboard: pilot, copilot, radar operator, and the operator of the infrared turret slung under its nose. The story of what happened next reached the public through one anonymous link after another. By that account the pilot looked out his left window and saw a pinkish-red light over the ocean to the northwest, higher than his own aircraft. The tower said it could see the light too and had no idea what it was. As it neared the shore its glow went out—and the infrared operator, swinging the camera toward it, picked up something small and warm.

Sources: 2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP: detailed analysisRafael Hernández AirportAnonymous letter confirms Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, UFO video

One night, two dates

The clock burned into the video reads 01:22:07 on 04/26/2013—Zulu time, four hours ahead of Puerto Rico. The evening on the ground was April 25. The Pentagon’s later report and the government video site both call it 9:22 p.m. on April 26, joining the UTC date to the local hour; the anonymous letter that accompanied an early copy of the video had it right in 2014. The confusion is a small warning about the rest of the case: everything about it depends on what one reads off a screen.

Sources: Puerto Rico Objects: official infrared video2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP: detailed analysisThe Puerto Rico Object: case resolutionAnonymous letter confirms Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, UFO video

The little black shape in the box

For three minutes and fifty-four seconds the camera holds a tiny black-hot smudge inside its tracking box while roads, trees, rooftops, fields, and finally coastline slide beneath it in gray. The turret was a Wescam MX-15D, working in the mid-infrared, and the target never resolves into anything: no wings, no rotor, no exhaust, no lights. It sharpens, blurs, flickers, and now and then winks out. Because the sensor is magnifying a small patch of ground from an aircraft that is climbing and turning, the sequence gives an overwhelming impression of speed and none at all of distance.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection infrared footage, published by DVIDS in 2024. The video is an authentic government sensor record; labels about speed, water entry, and identity are interpretations added from later analysis. Video source Open video

Sources: Puerto Rico Objects: official infrared video2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP: detailed analysisThe Puerto Rico Object: case resolution

The moment Aguadilla became a transmedium legend

About two minutes in, the background turns to water. The smudge loses contrast, disappears, reappears, and then—at 01:24:42 on the burned-in clock—becomes two smudges of equal size, side by side, which drift on together until each in turn fades into the sea. To anyone following the shape with their eyes, an object had flown low over a town, dived into the Atlantic without a splash, come up again, and split in half. Nothing else in the public record of government sensor footage looked like that. A copy was in the hands of researchers by October 2013; by the summer of 2014 it was on YouTube, where a commenter writing in Spanish claimed it had been examined at Quantico, that two more videos existed, and that residents of the old base had called the police about lights coming out of the sea two weeks earlier. An anonymous letter that reached The Black Vault with a high-definition copy that September called the thing “a forward flying horseshoe.”

Sources: Puerto Rico Objects: official infrared video2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP: detailed analysisAnonymous letter confirms Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, UFO video

The 162-page extraordinary reading

The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies received its copy on October 20, 2013, from a source who, it said, feared for their job. Six members led by Robert Powell spent a thousand hours over a year and a half on it, stepping through all 7,027 frames, matching the sensor telemetry to maps, and prying a set of FAA radar returns loose under the Freedom of Information Act—fifty primary hits, with no transponder, north and northwest of the airport in the half hour before the recording. The tower manager, they reported, was aware of the events of April 25 and unwilling to talk; the tower’s own logs, kept by a contractor, were destroyed after ninety days. Their reconstruction hinged on the moments the smudge seemed to pass behind a tree and a telephone pole, which would put it under forty feet up and close to the camera. From that anchor followed everything else: an object three to five feet long, moving at forty to 120 miles an hour, hitting the water at 109.7, travelling beneath it at 82.8, surfacing, and dividing. “No bird, no balloon, no aircraft, and no known drones have that capability,” they concluded.

Sources: 2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP: detailed analysisAguadilla incident report and alternative-hypothesis responses

A pair of lanterns enters the argument

In 2017 a retired commodore of the Argentine Air Force, Rubén Lianza, who ran that service’s aerospace-identification center, published the opposite reading. Look closely at the flickering shape, he argued, and it is two shapes, each “unmistakably manufactured in the shape of a heart”: a pair of hot-air sky lanterns of the kind sold for weddings, tied together, released from a beach and drifting on the seven-knot easterly recorded at the airport that night. In his geometry the lanterns were miles from the camera and over land throughout; the sea merely filled the background as the aircraft climbed. He found a resort east-northeast of the airfield whose general manager confirmed that “those kinds of balloons were launched from our beach in the past,” though the practice had stopped in 2015 and no one could say what had gone up on April 25. SCU answered that any windborne object would have had to travel at least sixteen miles an hour, too fast for a lantern to stay lit, that lanterns do not pass behind trees or into the ocean, and that two of them would have shown as two from the start.

Sources: Alleged UFO captured by infrared camera over AguadillaAguadilla infrared footage: windborne-lantern analysis and debateAguadilla incident report and alternative-hypothesis responses

The Pentagon rebuilds the flight

On November 19, 2024, the director of the Pentagon’s UAP office, Jon Kosloski, told a Senate subcommittee about “a case that we thought would be a transmedium case as it was reported… known as the Puerto Rico case.” His analysts had gone back to the aircraft’s recorded position and the turret’s azimuth and elevation and rebuilt the sight lines in aerospace-modeling software. “We assessed that it was actually flying over the airport the entire time,” he said. “It is not that the object actually goes into the water.” The objects—plural—were “likely a pair of balloons or sky lanterns,” drifting at about seven knots and descending to about two hundred meters. The video went online the same day. The written resolution followed in March 2025: two objects first seen near the airport’s northeastern side at about 656 feet, moving southwest in a straight line at eight miles an hour while the wind blew at 9.8 from the east-northeast; an aircraft that climbed 1,725 feet in an arc while its range to the targets nearly tripled; contact lost over the airport’s central parking apron. The speed was parallax. The dive into the sea was a line of sight crossing a coastline.

Sources: Hearing on the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office: stenographic transcriptAARO chief details findings on GoFast, Puerto Rico, and Mount Etna UAP casesThe Puerto Rico Object: case resolution2013 Puerto Rico Object Reconstruction

It never reached the ocean

The report took direct aim at SCU’s anchor. “AARO employed pixel analysis,” it says, “and found that the objects did not pass behind the pole.” Without that occlusion, nothing fixes the target close to the ground, and the low altitude, the high speed, and the water entry all dissolve. AARO also found the split long before the famous one: separations at 29.56, 40.76, and 47 seconds into the recording, two small objects travelling so close together that they merged into a single blob on a long-range sensor and parted as the aircraft’s viewing angle steepened. The heat signatures faded, it argued, because the objects were smaller than a meter, because the range was growing, because the aircraft passed into scattered cloud at 3,000 feet, and because of thermal crossover, the period after sunset when a warm object and the ground behind it reach the same temperature. Its confidence was graded: “high confidence that the objects did not exhibit anomalous behavior or transmedium capabilities,” and “moderate confidence that the objects were a pair of sky lanterns,” since hotels and resorts in the area told AARO that they released lanterns at celebrations as a matter of course. The video’s poor quality, the report conceded, kept it from naming the objects categorically.

Sources: The Puerto Rico Object: case resolution2013 Puerto Rico Object Reconstruction

Five questions and one wrong sunset

SCU did not concede. In April 2025 it published the questions it had put to AARO—the three-dimensional flight path, the source of the cloud data, the objects’ coordinates frame by frame with error margins, the tower logs or military radar, and the pixel analysis itself—and reported that the office was “not currently prepared to provide answers to those questions.” Readers of the report found something else. It states that sunset on the night in question was at 7:48 p.m., placing the recording inside a two-hour crossover window. Sunset at Aguadilla on April 25 is in fact about 6:49 p.m., which puts the recording two and a half hours later, outside the window the report itself describes. The overall reconstruction does not depend on that number. The explanation for why the lanterns vanished partly does. The oldest problem with the case is also still there: nobody from the crew has ever spoken by name, and Customs and Border Protection has never said a word.

Sources: SCU announcement on the AARO investigation of the Aguadilla videoThe Puerto Rico Object: case resolution2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP: detailed analysis

From leaked mystery to official case study

For a decade the clip circulated as the government video too strange to explain, on cable programs and in every compilation of the best UFO footage. It is now the Pentagon’s showcase of the opposite: proof that an authentic sensor, an anonymous crew, a climbing aircraft, a coastline, and a pair of warm dots can manufacture an impossible machine without a single faked frame. Two reconstructions of the same 7,027 frames still stand in the record, one with a craft under the waves and one with lanterns over a parking lot. Which is right turns on whether a smudge passed behind a pole. Nobody has released the pixels.

Sources: The Puerto Rico Object: case resolution2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP: detailed analysisThe Aguadilla UFO Incident: an analysis of the object’s movement

GO TO THE SOURCE

Sources & interviews

Puerto Rico Objects: official infrared videoU.S. Customs and Border Protection footage · Defense Visual Information Distribution Service · Published November 19, 2024 · Public-domain federal work · 3 minutes 54 secondsAnonymous letter confirms Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, UFO videoJohn Greenewald Jr. · The Black Vault · April 4, 2015 · The 2014 letter that accompanied an HD copy of the video2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP: detailed analysisRobert M. Powell, Morgan Beall, Larry Cates, Carl Paulson, Richard Hoffman, and Daina Chaviano · Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies · Version 2 · August 2015 · ZenodoAlleged UFO captured by infrared camera over AguadillaRubén Lianza, with an IPACO annex by François Louange · 2017 · Windborne-lantern analysisAguadilla infrared footage: windborne-lantern analysis and debateMetabunk · From July 2017 · Includes Lianza’s report, counteranalysis, simulations, and discussionAguadilla incident report and alternative-hypothesis responsesScientific Coalition for UAP Studies · August 15, 2018 · Updated May 23, 2024The Aguadilla UFO Incident: an analysis of the object’s movement“flarkey” · Independent reconstruction published by Mystery Wire · February 7, 2021Hearing on the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office: stenographic transcriptU.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities · November 19, 2024 · Testimony of Jon KosloskiAARO chief details findings on GoFast, Puerto Rico, and Mount Etna UAP casesDefenseScoop · November 19, 2024The Puerto Rico Object: case resolutionAll-domain Anomaly Resolution Office · U.S. Department of Defense · March 20, 2025 · 7 pages2013 Puerto Rico Object ReconstructionAll-domain Anomaly Resolution Office · Systems Toolkit visualization · March 20, 2025SCU announcement on the AARO investigation of the Aguadilla videoScientific Coalition for UAP Studies · April 28, 2025 · Five questions put to AARORafael Hernández AirportWikipedia · Airport history and orientation · Consulted September 17, 2026

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Connected files

The Sphere at the WaterlineThe other government infrared clip in which a warm dot seemed to meet the sea—with no reconstruction yet to say whether it did.The Fleet Behind the GimbalGoFast, resolved the same way: a small target, a moving camera, and parallax doing the work of speed.The Nimitz EncounterThe infrared clip the Pentagon has not resolved, and the standard against which the others are measured.The Disc over O’HareAn airport mystery with the opposite problem: plenty of eyes and no footage at all.
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