Aguadilla 2013: the best transmedium footage there is
A US federal aircraft filmed an object crossing an airport, descending to the sea, submerging and splitting in two. It is the most analysed USO recording in existence — and a mundane explanation has been argued in detail.
Photo by Lensloji on Pexels
In late April 2013 — accounts give the date as the 25th or 26th, the flight running close to local midnight — a US Customs and Border Protection aircraft operating from Rafael Hernández Airport in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, recorded roughly three minutes of thermal infrared footage of a small object. It crosses the airport environment, descends to the sea, appears to submerge, re-emerges, and then splits into two objects flying in parallel.
It is, by a distance, the most detailed transmedium recording in the public domain, and it has been analysed harder than any other USO case.
What is documented
The recording was made on a Wescam MX-15D electro-optical and infrared turret, a professional-grade federal law enforcement sensor operated by trained crew on a routine flight. The aircraft was a DHC-8. The footage subsequently leaked rather than being formally released.
The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies published a long technical analysis in 2015, reconstructing the object’s trajectory, speed and size from the video geometry and the known camera parameters. Their conclusion was that the object’s performance did not match any conventional aircraft, drone or animal, and that the water entry and the split were both real features of the recording rather than artefacts.
What was claimed
The SCU analysis put the object at low altitude, moving at speeds inconsistent with a balloon or a bird, entering the water without the deceleration a physical object should show, and then dividing. Taken at face value that is an extraordinary set of behaviours.
The conventional explanation, stated properly
The strongest sceptical case is that the object is one or more small balloons — the kind released at celebrations — drifting on the wind, and that the apparent water entry is the object passing in front of, rather than into, the sea from the camera’s viewing angle. The apparent "split" is then two balloons that had been overlapping in the frame separating.
This explanation has been argued in detail and it accounts for a great deal: the object’s track is broadly consistent with the prevailing wind, and thermal imagery flattens depth in exactly the way the reading requires. The counter-argument from the SCU side turns on the reconstructed speeds, which they hold are too high for wind drift.
What remains unexplained
The range problem is the crux. Everything — speed, size, whether the object touched water — follows from how far away it was, and a single infrared camera cannot measure that directly. The SCU derived range from geometry and known landmarks; critics dispute the derivation.
That is an unglamorous place for the most famous transmedium case to sit, but it is where the evidence puts it. Anyone claiming this case is settled, in either direction, is going beyond what three minutes of monochrome infrared can support.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
Does airport radar data for the period survive?
It would independently fix the object’s range and speed, which is the one measurement the video cannot supply and the one everything else depends on.
- 02
Was any balloon release recorded locally that evening?
The sceptical reading is testable in principle. Nobody appears to have checked local records, which is a strange gap in a case this heavily studied.
Be the first to comment
Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP incident report
Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies · 6 Aug 2015
Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
Office of the Director of National Intelligence · 25 Jun 2021 · no public copy located
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