Aguadilla, Puerto Rico

Aguadilla, Puerto Rico is anchored here at Rafael Hernandez International Airport, the BQN/TJBQ airfield on the island's northwestern coast that inherited the former Ramey Air Force Base and serves passenger, cargo, military, and border-security traffic.¹² Its UAP significance comes from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection infrared recording made from a De Havilland Canada 8 aircraft near the airport in late April 2013; older civilian analyses label the local event as April 25 at about 9:20 p.m., while AARO, DVIDS, and the official case-release record publish it as April 26.³⁴⁵⁶

See the Aguadilla Puerto Rico Case event file for the incident-level chronology.

  Airport Context

The Puerto Rico Ports Authority describes Rafael Hernandez Aguadilla International Airport as the second-busiest commercial-service airport in Puerto Rico, located in Aguadilla on the northwest coast and serving a mix of passenger and air-cargo operations.¹ The same airport-background material traces the field from a late-1930s U.S. Army Air Corps installation into a 1950s Strategic Air Command B-52 base, then into Puerto Rico Ports Authority ownership in the 1970s after its Ramey Air Force Base period.¹

The airport setting matters because the 2013 recording is not a generic coastal clip: the published flight-path accounts place the observing CBP aircraft above or around Rafael Hernandez Airport, with the sensor looking across runway, apron, coastal, and offshore sight lines as the aircraft climbed and turned.³⁴⁵ FAA airport-diagram material for BQN/TJBQ shows the long Runway 08/26, a tower, terminal, U.S. Coast Guard area, hangars, FBO facilities, and general-aviation parking within the same compact operating environment.²

  Origin of the Case

The civilian technical trail begins with a report that a CBP DHC-8 crew saw a pinkish or reddish light over the ocean northwest of the airport, contacted the tower because of inbound traffic, and received confirmation that tower personnel also had a visual sighting but no identification.⁶ According to that account, the visible light went out as the object neared shore, and the aircraft's thermal imaging system was then used to follow it.⁶

AARO and DVIDS describe the official video record more conservatively: on April 26, 2013, an infrared sensor onboard a U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft captured footage of a UAP event over Rafael Hernandez Airport near Aguadilla.³⁴⁵ DVIDS lists the public-domain video as 3 minutes and 54 seconds long, taken in Aguadilla on 04.26.2013 and posted on 11.19.2024 under the title "Puerto Rico Objects."⁴

  What the Video Appeared to Show

The published government description acknowledges why the case became famous: the footage appeared to show a UAP moving at high speed, splitting into two objects, entering and exiting water, and disappearing into the Atlantic off Puerto Rico's northwestern coast.³⁴ AARO's own case synopsis lists the reported behavior as "split or replicated" and "transmedium behavior," while distinguishing that from its later assessed behavior.⁵

The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies report took the most anomalous reading of the video. Its authors reported splitting the thermal sequence into 7,027 frames, using Wescam MX-15D imagery and FAA-originated radar data obtained through an 84th RADES FOIA response, and estimating an object between three and five feet long moving between roughly 40 and 120 mph.⁶ The report argued that the object showed little water disturbance, no ordinary exhaust plume, apparent heat persistence, and a later division into two similar parts, which the authors judged inconsistent with known natural or human-made explanations.⁶

  Official Reassessment

AARO's March 20, 2025 case-resolution report reached the opposite conclusion. It assessed with high confidence that the objects did not exhibit anomalous behavior or transmedium capabilities, and with moderate confidence that the footage showed a pair of sky lanterns.⁵ The report assessed the objects at about 656 feet altitude, about 8 mph, and smaller than one meter, with a path consistent with recorded wind speed and direction rather than powered high-speed flight.⁵

AARO attributed the apparent high speed to motion parallax from the moving CBP aircraft, the apparent split to two nearby objects becoming easier to separate as the sensor viewing angle changed, and the apparent water entry to a reconstruction showing the objects remained over land.⁵⁷ The same assessment cited thermal crossover after sunset, increasing sensor distance, and scattered cloud cover as reasons an infrared target could flicker, vanish, or appear to merge with the background.⁵ DVIDS repeats the Intelligence Community reconstruction finding that the objects traveled in a straight line at wind speed and did not enter the water.⁴

  Independent Technical Review

The French 3AF/SIGMA2 review sits between the SCU and AARO positions. It reported that the SCU panel submitted the Aguadilla report to SIGMA2 in May 2015 along with radar and video data, and that SIGMA2 then reviewed witness information, infrared video data, radar data, and the SCU environmental material.⁸ SIGMA2 concluded that the radar returns and the video object likely represented distinct phenomena, that the radar returns probably corresponded to low-altitude cloud formations, and that the video object could not be identified with certainty.⁸

SIGMA2 also judged the imaged object to be emissive, structurally suggestive of a hot spot, and less than 1.3 meters in main dimension, while saying the causes of image erasure, apparent sea impact, and apparent doubling could not be determined with certainty.⁸ Its most conservative reconstruction note is important for the later AARO reading: a stable flight profile was difficult to restore except in the case of an object drifting with wind and slowly descending.⁸

  Documentation Trail

  References

  References

1. Puerto Rico Ports Authority - RFQ for Runway 8-26 Conversion to Taxiway and Taxiway Improvements at Rafael Hernandez International Airport (https://docs.pr.gov/files/Puertos/RFP/RFQ%20-%20Anuncio%202nda%20Fase%20Pista%20Aguadilla%20CDBG.pdf) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. FAA - Rafael Hernandez Airport Diagram, BQN/TJBQ (https://aeronav.faa.gov/d-tpp/2601/01016ad.pdf) ↩ ↩²

3. AARO - Official UAP Imagery, Puerto Rico Object entry (https://www.aaro.mil/UAP-Cases/Official-UAP-Imagery/) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. DVIDS - Puerto Rico Objects video, Video ID 944204 (https://www.dvidshub.net/video/944204/puerto-rico-objects) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

5. AARO - The Puerto Rico Object Case Resolution, 20 March 2025 (https://www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/case_resolution_reports/AARO_Puerto_Rico_UAP_Case_Resolution.pdf) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

6. Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies - 2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP report PDF mirror (https://filedn.com/lA1dAM6GJzOy8eCDm2eVX88/uap/2013%20Aguadilla%20Puerto%20Rico%20UAP%20Final%20Draft%20v5s.pdf) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

7. U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee - AARO case slides, The Puerto Rico Object (https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/download/aaro-case-slides-111924) ↩

8. 3AF/SIGMA2 - The Aguadilla airport case annex report (https://www.3af.fr/global/gene/link.php?doc_link=%2Fdocs%2F2021175110_annex-report-aguadilla-en-18-oct-2021.pdf&fg=1) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶