CEFAA

CEFAA (Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos) is Chile's official committee for the study of anomalous aerial phenomena, housed within the DGAC, the country's civil aviation authority. Established in 1997, it is one of Latin America's most prominent state UFO offices.

A wave of Chilean sightings and aviation-safety concerns prompted the air force-adjacent DGAC to create the office, on the logic its directors have repeated since: anything unidentified in controlled airspace is an aviation problem before it is a mystery.

CEFAA collects reports from pilots, controllers, and the public, convenes an advisory committee spanning astronomers, meteorologists, psychologists, and military representatives, and publishes conclusions. Its long-time director, retired general Ricardo Bermúdez, cultivated international cooperation and press engagement, stating that the committee had documented cases it considered genuine unexplained phenomena, while attributing the great majority to conventional causes. Its highest-profile actions were the 2014 releases and analyses culminating in the 2017 Navy helicopter video publication, which independent analysts promptly identified as an airliner's contrails, the office's most instructive episode.

Bermúdez defined its public era; journalist-liaison work with Leslie Kean carried its cases to global audiences; successive DGAC appointees run it more quietly.

Active at modest scale, still receiving and classifying reports, and cited alongside GEIPAN whenever transparent state investigation is discussed, including in AARO-era policy debates.

The Navy-video episode cuts both ways: critics cite it as proof official committees can misfire on checkable facts; defenders note CEFAA released everything, enabling the correction, which closed the case in days rather than decades. Chilean skeptics have also criticized earlier CEFAA-endorsed cases (a 2010 air show video among them) that dissolved under analysis as insects or artifacts.