The Aguadilla Video

On the night of April 25, 2013, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection DHC-8 aircraft at Rafael Hernández Airport in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico recorded several minutes of thermal video of a small object crossing land and water at speed. In the footage the object appears to descend to the ocean surface, continue moving in and out of the water, and finally seem to split into two objects. The video leaked to researchers and became one of the most analyzed UAP clips of the pre-Navy-videos era.

The tower had delayed a commercial departure because of an unidentified traffic; the CBP crew acquired the object with their sensor turret and tracked it across the airfield area, shoreline, and sea. The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) obtained the video and published a 160-plus-page analysis in 2015 estimating anomalous speeds, water transit without deceleration, and the apparent split, concluding no conventional explanation fit.

The full sensor video with embedded metadata, tower audio, and the SCU's technical reconstruction. The source of the leak has remained anonymous. CBP later effectively acknowledged the footage's authenticity through FOIA-era releases of related materials.

No agency ever published an official analysis. The case circulated through the UAP Task Force era among the videos briefed informally.

The detailed skeptical solution, developed principally at Metabunk, identifies the object as two wind-drifting objects, most likely a pair of wedding or sky lanterns (a wedding at a nearby resort that night is documented), with the dramatic dynamics produced by parallax from the moving aircraft: the "high speed" and "water entries" resolve, in this reconstruction, into a slow drifting heat source whose apparent motion is the plane's own, and the final "split" into the two lanterns separating. SCU contested the reconstruction's wind and geometry assumptions in follow-up exchanges. The case remains a reference standoff between instrumented-data enthusiasm and parallax discipline, and it made SCU's name either way.