The Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos) began on 3 October 1997 within Chile's Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil (DGAC). Its creation followed a wave of March–April 1997 pilot reports near Arica and direct encouragement from former air-force commander General Ramón Vega. DGAC director General de Aviación Gonzalo Miranda signed Resolution 01599, housing the fledgling office at the Escuela Técnica Aeronáutica in Santiago and tasking it with safeguarding civil and military flight operations through scientific analysis of any unexplained event in Chilean airspace.1
Pre-history 1968–1997
CEFAA revived earlier public work begun in 1968 by the meteorological service's Comisión Chilena para Estudios de Fenómenos Espaciales No Identificados, led by Colonel Sergio Bravo and controller Gustavo Rodríguez Navarro. That commission collected a dozen cases before closing in 1975 but provided CEFAA with methodology, an archive and its first executive secretary—Rodríguez.2
Leadership timeline
Since October 2021 the office has been renamed Sección de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos (SEFAA) and moved under DGAC's communications department, but it retains the CEFAA acronym in international liaison.4
Investigative process
CEFAA fields reports from airline crews, radar controllers, the Chilean air force and the public via web form or airport paperwork. Multidisciplinary panels—astronomers, aeronautical engineers, meteorologists, image analysts and psychologists—classify each event into:
- Astronomical / atmospheric
- Aircraft / human activity
- Insufficient data
- FANI (fenómeno aéreo no identificado)
Only category 4 summaries are released quarterly, reflecting the agency's transparency charter adopted in 2020.5
Notable case files
El Bosque airshow, 5 November 2010
Seven independent videos captured a lenticular object executing three high-speed elliptical passes around FACh display teams near Santiago. Photogrammetry groups inside army and air-force labs measured velocities above 4 000 km h⁻¹ without sonic boom. The final report classified the event as FANI.6
Navy helicopter FLIR, 11 November 2014
An Airbus Cougar on coastal patrol recorded an elongated thermal target expelling a plume inconsistent with contrail physics. After two years of study CEFAA/SEFAA published the footage in January 2017 when all prosaic explanations were excluded.7
Scientific outreach and partnerships
CEFAA maintains memoranda with France's GEIPAN, Argentina's CIAE, Uruguay's CRIDOVNI and Peru's DIFAA, sharing radar data sets and photometric tools. Joint workshops in Paris (2014) and Santiago (2018) standardised Latin-American investigation forms. The section also delivers continuing-education talks to club pilots and DGAC regional staff and publishes methodological explainers under the series "#SEFAAeduca."8
Key contributors
Current projects
SEFAA is digitising 1 675 historical case files into an open-access repository and deploying machine-vision software to screen incoming cellphone imagery for lens artefacts, satellites and drones before analyst review. A parallel study with the University of Santiago examines atmospheric plasma signatures in high-altitude lidar returns.