2004 Mexican Air Force UFO incident

2004 Mexican Air Force UFO incident

Type	Case
Also known as	Campeche UFO video, Campeche "infrared UFOs"
Date	Afternoon of 5 March 2004
Place	Over the states of Chiapas and Campeche, Mexico
Aircraft	Merlin C-26/A of Mexico's Defence Secretariat
Sensor	FLIR Systems Star SAFIRE II infrared camera
Made public	11 May 2004, by Jaime Maussan
Likely explanation	Gas flares on offshore oil platforms in the Bay of Campeche

The 2004 Mexican Air Force UFO incident refers to an infrared video recorded on the afternoon of 5 March 2004 by a Mexican military surveillance aircraft over the states of Chiapas and Campeche. It shows up to eleven bright points of light that the crew could not see with the naked eye, and that seemed at times to hover in formation, dart about and surround the plane. On the recording a crew member can be heard shouting "We are not alone!"^[1][2]

The Defence Ministry gave the footage to the journalist and UFO promoter Jaime Maussan, who presented it on 11 May 2004 and declared the objects real. The story ran worldwide. Within about two weeks skeptical analysts had identified the probable source — gas flares burning on offshore oil platforms in the Bay of Campeche, the centre of Mexico's oil industry — an explanation set out in detail by Robert Sheaffer in the Skeptical Inquirer.^[1][2]

The flight

The aircraft was a Merlin C-26/A of SEDENA, Mexico's Secretariat of National Defence, flying a routine patrol in search of drug smuggling or other illegal activity near the Gulf of Mexico. It carried a Star SAFIRE II infrared sensor made by FLIR Systems of Portland, Oregon. Flying at about 3,500 metres (approximately 11,500 feet), the crew recorded with this sensor a sequence of unidentified objects, at one point numbering as many as eleven.^[1][2]

According to the crew, the objects were first picked up on radar, and the infrared camera was then switched on to track them. Like most objects in UFO photographs, they appeared only as bright points of light, with no detail or structure. What made them different was that they could not be seen by eye at all, only in the infrared images. The film shows the blobs of light seeming to hover in formation or dart about, sometimes disappearing into cloud.^[1][2]

The pilots later told Maussan that they grew nervous when the invisible objects turned back during the chase and appeared to surround the plane. Major Magdaleno Castañón said that at one point the screens showed objects behind the aircraft, to its left and in front of it, and that he then felt a little tense. Another crew member can be heard calling out that they were not alone and that it was very strange.^[1]

Release of the video

The tapes were given to Jaime Maussan, a well-known Mexican broadcaster and ufologist who, in Sheaffer's description, had made a career of sensational promotion of supposedly unexplained mysteries. Mexico's most popular nightly news programme showed the video on Monday 10 May, and on Tuesday 11 May Maussan held a press conference at which he showed a 15-minute version that he said the Defence Ministry had given him permission to make public. The ministry confirmed to Reuters that it had supplied the video.^[1][2]

Maussan said the objects had been invisible to the eye but were certainly there, with mass and energy, moving about. The story was carried around the world by the Associated Press, CNN, Reuters, MSNBC, USA Today and Fox News, and Maussan soon put the video on his television show and on a website. Sheaffer criticised the website's claims — that "halos" around the objects showed a powerful magnetic field, and talk of their "frequency", "vortex" and violation of "entropy" — as pseudoscience. He also noted earlier claims by Maussan: in 2000 he told a UFO conference that "glowing extraterrestrials" were being widely seen in Mexico and said he had seen one himself, and he showed a photo of a supposed alien life form encountered by the Apollo 11 astronauts on the Moon. On 17 May 2004 an editorial by Raúl Trejo Delarbre in the Mexican newspaper La Crónica de Hoy argued that Maussan was the last person to turn to for an objective assessment.^[1][2]

Early explanations

Mexico has a long history of UFO sightings, most of them dismissed by scientists as space debris, missiles, weather balloons, natural atmospheric effects or hoaxes.^[1] In the first days after the release, several commentators offered quick explanations that Sheaffer considered hasty and damaging to skeptics' credibility. On 13 May the Urania Astronomical Society of Morelos told the newspaper El Universal that the objects might be a group of weather balloons. Dr. Julio Herrera of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) told the Associated Press they were electrical flashes in the atmosphere, and a few days later attributed them to ball lightning. Rafael Navarro, also of UNAM, told a press conference on 14 May that they were luminous sparks of plasma energy, and the astronomer José de la Herrán suggested that the stationary objects could be meteor fragments. Ufologists mocked these explanations; Sheaffer argued it would have been better to admit there was not yet enough information.^[2]

The oil-flare explanation

By 20 May some skeptical analysts had identified the probable source: oil-well gas flares on offshore platforms in the Bay of Campeche. The bay is the centre of Mexico's petroleum industry, with more than 200 wells on nine platforms, many of them close to Ciudad del Carmen; one of the voices on the video can be heard saying the objects are "at Carmen". It was first thought the flares might have been a temporary burn-off of excess gas, but it turned out that the flares in this region burn more or less continuously, and the area also has large plants pumping hot steam into the ground to help the oil flow. A worker on the offshore platforms wrote that each platform had one or two flares roaring around the clock, so that at night the bay looked like scattered forest fires in every direction.^[2]

On 26 May Captain Alejandro Franz of the private Mexican UFO research group Alcione — a former pilot who had flown extensively in the region and was far more skeptical than Maussan — independently reached the same conclusion on the online forum UFO Updates. He identified the lights as steady flames on the platforms of the Cantarell field, Mexico's largest oil field, about 80 kilometres offshore and between 50 and 90 kilometres from Ciudad del Carmen, and published photos comparing the burning platforms with the infrared objects. Sheaffer wrote that no reasonable person could see those comparisons and reject the likelihood that they were the same.^[2]

Where the camera was pointing

Sheaffer corrected one point in Franz's analysis: the aircraft was heading east, at about 80 degrees, not north. This is confirmed by an event near the end of the half-hour recording, 26 minutes in, when the crew are briefly startled by a large, round object on the screen, zoom in, and laugh as they realise it is the moon rising. The moon rose at about 17:20 local time at an azimuth of 75 degrees, and the sensor was then pointing about 5 degrees left of straight ahead, which fixes the aircraft's heading. The sun was at that time at 260 degrees, directly behind the plane.^[2]

The Star SAFIRE II records the altitude and bearing of whatever it is imaging. Throughout the main part of the encounter the objects were within a degree or two of the horizon, and the sensor was pointing at about −134 degrees — roughly the seven o'clock position, behind the aircraft and to the left. Plotted on a map against the aircraft's position and heading, that direction points towards the largest complex of oil platforms in the Gulf of Campeche. All the objects recorded were on the left side of the aircraft, towards the Gulf of Mexico, and most were at about that bearing. The video shows they were over water, though their height above it cannot be judged.^[2]

What the zoom shows

When two brilliant objects are seen behind clouds, the camera is on its medium zoom, with a field of view of 3.4 by 2.6 degrees; Sheaffer identifies these as the two main oil platforms. Soon afterwards the operator switched to the narrowest field of view, 0.04 by 0.03 degrees, which makes the objects appear about nine times larger, and individual flames on each platform can then be made out — producing nine or more "UFOs". These match a daytime photo of the flaming platforms published by Alcione.^[2]

The objects seem to move relative to the clouds passing in front of them, but their bearing hardly changes while they are being filmed. Sheaffer explains the apparent motion as an effect of the aircraft moving past the clouds, comparable to filming a distant mountain through a telephoto lens while walking along a tree-lined path: the trees seem to move while the mountain stays still. For an overworked, stressed crew watching a three-dimensional scene on a flat display, he argues, it is easy to become confused about what is moving.^[2]

How the infrared camera works

To understand the recording, Sheaffer consulted John Lester Miller, the author of more than forty scientific papers and four textbooks on infrared and electro-optical technology and a member of the group Oregonians for Rationality. The Star SAFIRE II detects radiation in the 3 to 5 micron band at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels; objects hotter than their background appear to glow, and infrared passes through haze better than visible light, which is why such sensors are useful in humid climates.^[2]

Miller said ufologists' concern that the objects could not be seen by eye was meaningless: these systems are built precisely to detect what the eye cannot, which is the only reason to fit them to aircraft. He noted that the images were taken in about the worst atmospheric conditions possible — hot, humid and partly cloudy, at a boundary between land and sea, during the thermal instability of sunset — so it was no surprise that nothing could be seen by eye and that the infrared images were blurred and distorted. Smaller images below the main ones could be reflections from water or ground, or even mirages, and bending of light through atmospheric layers made the angles unreliable.^[2]

A flat image alone cannot show how far away something is unless its brightness and size are known, Miller explained, and this sensor had no laser rangefinder. The vertical lines and dark blotches on the video are typical "fixed pattern noise", which appears when the sensor's pixels are not periodically recalibrated, and the halos around the bright objects are scattered light from the camera's diffractive optics. The sensor also compresses its 13- or 14-bit range of brightness into ordinary 6- to 8-bit video, losing much of the information.^[2]

The radar contacts

At some points two unidentified objects were reported on radar, but their positions and number did not come close to matching the infrared objects, so whatever the radar targets were, they were not the ones on the video. No radar data was recorded on the aircraft, leaving only the crew's memory of what it showed, and the military radar operator in Ciudad del Carmen, when contacted, was not showing any unknown objects. The "radar UFOs" were ahead of the aircraft, in the opposite direction to the infrared ones.^[2]

The UFO researcher Brad Sparks plotted the direction and distance of the aircraft's radar returns on a map and found that some of them matched the position of Yucatán Highway 186. Their measured speed, 52 knots (about 60 miles per hour), was consistent with trucks, and he concluded that some, though not all, of the moving radar targets were trucks on the highway.^[2]

References