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called Open Minds, which has a website and a magazine and organizes conferences. So he’s a prettywell-respected authority on UFOs. It was also good to have someone local with us anyway, as they help explain differences in culture and how locals might see things. I meet him at the hotel and we get to know each other over a coffee. Not that Antonio really needs the coffee – he’s quite a hyperactive dude and he never seems to stop talking, which I could see I was going to have to get used to over the next few days.
    The first incident we are off to investigate with Antonio is the case of El Bosque Air Force base. El Bosque is just outside Santiago, where something very strange happened a couple of years ago. Every four years at El Bosque they have what they call a change of guard of the Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Air Force (FACH). They bump off the last dude (not literally) and get some new kid in to take his place. It’s a pretty big deal for them so they have this whole ceremony, a big show-of-power thing, with loads of the Air Force planes doing flight passes and demonstrations at El Bosque, like the Chilean answer to the Red Arrows.
    The last time they changed Commander-in-Chief and had this big parade was in 2010, when the current dude, who’s called General Jorge Rojas Ávila, became the new chief, and the big all-singing, all-dancing, all-flying ceremony took place in El Bosque in the morning of 4 November. Everything on the day seemed to go according to plan and nobody noticed anything unusual during the ceremony.
    So far, so pretty dull. But this is where it gets interesting.Although no one noticed anything on the day, when these military dudes and their families went home and started watching the footage they’d shot on their video cameras or mobiles or whatever, a few of them spotted something very weird on their footage. Antonio shows me the footage on his iPad. It’s pretty crazy. This unidentified object, whatever it is, shoots across the sky in broad daylight, just behind the jet fighters that are in formation. I think the fact that it’s moving so bloody quick is probably one of the main reasons why no one on the ground really spotted it at the time. When they watched the footage they were like, ‘Hang on, what the fuck is that?’ They weren’t UFO spotters or anything, they were just normal Chilean Air Force cadets and engineers who were there.
    You can’t see it with the naked eye because it’s moving so fast – it’s only when you slow it down you can see what looks like a tiny craft shooting across the sky during the ceremony. Seven different dudes caught the same thing on camera that day, and all their different footage shows this small, dome-shaped, flat-bottomed metallic object zooming across the sky. It’s buzzing around the fighter planes in the Air Force display and moving much, much faster than them. Antonio says that none of the pilots on the day noticed anything unusual. I ask Antonio what speed he reckons the unidentified object was doing.
    Antonio tells me about the top scientists and military specialists who have seen the footage. ‘One of the rough estimates was eighteen times the speed of the planes. Oneof the great things about this footage is they know the speed of the planes, so they can judge the speed of the [unidentified flying] object against the planes, and also you can judge the size and speed of it against the mountains. Usually, footage is in the dark, so you have nothing to judge it against. Here we have known parameters to measure it against which we don’t normally have.’
    I know what he means as half the footage you see of what people think is a UFO just looks like a blob in the sky, and there’s no way of judging how big it is – it could be an insect or it could be a craft the size of the Starship Enterprise .
    Antonio explains how there have been numerous cases of pilots reporting weird flying objects over the years, but virtually no footage like