Aguadilla UAP Incident
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft over Rafael Hernández Airport on April 26, 2013 recorded a three-minute infrared track of what appeared to be a dark, unlit object crossing Aguadilla, skimming past airport buildings, moving out over the ocean, seeming to dip through the water and split into two; years later AARO argued the scene was two drifting sky lanterns, while independent UAP analysts challenged that reading, leaving the film’s strangest question in the frame itself: why did a routine thermal track look like an object ignoring the boundary between air and sea?
On the night of 2013-04-25 local time, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection De Havilland Canada DHC-8 aircraft operating near Rafael Hernández Airport in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, recorded an infrared sequence that became one of the most debated UAP videos of the 2010s. The video shows a small, dark thermal target or pair of targets crossing the camera view while the aircraft circles the airport area. In later public retellings, the object appeared to move at high speed, vanish against the ocean background, reappear, and separate into two similar forms.
The case first spread through leaked or anonymously circulated copies of the infrared footage and was later studied in detail by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, then known as the Scientific Coalition for UFOlogy. Its 162-page report treated the video, radar data, witness accounts, and FOIA correspondence as a coherent event, concluding that the object remained unexplained by birds, balloons, aircraft, or drones known to the authors. That report became the main reason the Aguadilla incident was widely cited as a potential example of transmedium behavior.
The record is not simple. The direct witnesses were not publicly named, some testimony was relayed through an intermediary, local tower logs were not obtained, and military radar data from the nearest installation was reportedly not released to the civilian investigators. The French aeronautical association 3AF, through its SIGMA2 commission, later reviewed the case and found that the radar returns and infrared target may have been distinct phenomena. SIGMA2 did not identify the object with certainty, but it considered wind-drifted or drone-like trajectories plausible in some scenarios.
A major skeptical explanation came from retired Argentine Air Force officer Rubén Lianza, who argued that the video could show two heart-shaped sky lanterns, possibly released from a nearby event and carried by the wind. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office published an official case resolution under the title The Puerto Rico Object. AARO assessed with high confidence that the objects did not show anomalous performance or transmedium behavior, and with moderate confidence that they were a pair of sky lanterns. AARO's reconstruction argued that the perceived high speed was caused by motion parallax from the moving aircraft, that the objects remained over land, and that the disappearance against the ocean was a thermal imaging effect rather than entry into water.
This case file classifies the incident as unresolved in the broader mystery-site sense because the public record remains disputed and because the original direct witness testimony, tower recordings, and complete underlying government records are not all publicly available. The most current official U.S. position, however, is that the case has been resolved as non-anomalous, most likely sky lanterns.