File / aguadilla-2013
Aguadilla
The most famous “transmedium” footage, and the 3D reconstruction that dismantled it
Infrared footage from a border patrol aircraft shows an object flying over terrain, entering the ocean, emerging, and splitting in two. For years it was presented as the best evidence for objects moving between media.
Official position
AARO performed a 3D trajectory reconstruction. It established with high confidence that the objects did not enter the water and did not split, and that they moved at approximately wind speed; with moderate confidence they were identified as a pair of sky lanterns.
Alternative hypotheses
- Two sky lanterns carried by the wind — consistent with the speed, the trajectory and the thermal signature.
The most important solved contemporary case
Aguadilla is in the database as methodological exhibit number one.
What a viewer sees on the footage is unambiguous: an object flies, dives into the ocean, surfaces, splits in two. It is hard to imagine more persuasive visual material.
All four of those observations turned out to be artefacts of viewing geometry:
- “water entry” — an object passing behind a shoreline viewed from above at a shallow angle,
- “splitting” — two objects present from the start, momentarily unresolvable at the sensor’s resolution,
- “enormous speed” — an illusion produced by the motion of the observing aircraft, not the target.
Actual speed: on the order of the wind.
What follows for the rest of the corpus
A camera recording is not a trajectory. A camera recording is the projection of a trajectory onto an observation plane, from a moving platform, at an unknown range to the target.
Before any UAP footage is called extraordinary, exactly the analysis AARO performed here has to be carried out. Very few people do it — and that is the single largest weakness in public discussion of UAP.
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