Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP Case
The Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP Case is a 2013 Border Protection infrared video of an object over Aguadilla's airport, argued to be transmedium by researchers and sky lanterns by AARO.
One April evening in 2013, an infrared camera aboard a U.S. Customs and Border Protection DHC-8 turboprop recorded about three minutes of thermal video of a small, warm object near Rafael Hernández Airport at Aguadilla, on Puerto Rico's northwest coast. On screen the object seems to race across the airport and nearby neighborhoods, pass behind trees, reach the Atlantic, dip in and out of the water and finally split in two. Early analyses date it to April 25 at about 9:20 p.m. local time; the Pentagon's 2025 review gives April 26 at 9:22 p.m. The video was never released officially. Researchers said an anonymous source they had vetted gave them a copy in October 2013.
The case became widely known through a 2015 report by the group then called the Scientific Coalition for Ufology, now the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. Its authors split the video into 7,027 frames and obtained FAA-origin radar data from the Air Force's 84th Radar Evaluation Squadron through a Freedom of Information Act request. They reported that the radar matched the patrol aircraft's track and showed targets without transponders north and northwest of the airport. Relaying their source, they wrote that the crew saw a pinkish-to-reddish light approach from the sea and that the control tower saw it but could not identify it. The report put the object at three to five feet long, moving at about 40 to 120 mph in the air and averaging about 83 mph underwater, and concluded: "No bird, no balloon, no aircraft, and no known drones have that capability."
Skeptics reached the opposite conclusion. Rubén Lianza, a retired Argentine Air Force commodore who headed the service's committee for aerospace phenomena research, posted excerpts of his analysis in 2017. He concluded that the object was "a simple pair of wind-driven hot air lanterns in the shape of hearts, tied together," probably released from a wedding upwind of the airport, and noted winds from the east-northeast that night. In 2020 Mick West reconstructed the camera's lines of sight from the aircraft's on-screen position data and wrote that the object "goes nowhere near the ocean, and it moves slowly, with the wind," matching Lianza's work and a 3D simulation by Lance Moody.
On March 20, 2025, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office published a case resolution, "The Puerto Rico Object." Using a Systems Toolkit reconstruction of the aircraft's flight path and sensor angles, it assessed with high confidence that the objects showed no anomalous behavior or transmedium capability, and with moderate confidence that they were a pair of sky lanterns, which local hotels and resorts commonly release at celebrations. It placed them at about 656 feet, drifting southwest over land at about 8 mph, close to the recorded wind. It found two objects moving near each other rather than one splitting, and attributed the apparent water entry to thermal crossover, a loss of contrast with the ocean in the hours after sunset. AARO rejected partner suggestions of marine birds and Mylar balloons, and said the video's poor quality limited its confidence in the lantern identification.
The resolution did not end the dispute. In April 2025 the coalition sent AARO questions about its flight path, data sources, radar and pixel analysis, and AARO said it was not yet ready to answer them. Advocates still cite the video as evidence of transmedium craft; in a Joe Rogan podcast clip shared in May 2026, Luis Elizondo described an object that "enters the water" and later splits in two. That month the coalition's board said Douglas Buettner was revisiting the case for its July conference "not to defend a predetermined conclusion." West wrote afterward that Buettner's slides, marked as a work in progress, avoided firm conclusions.
For more than a decade the Aguadilla video has been cited as evidence of an object moving between air and water, and it now also carries a formal government resolution. Working from the same three minutes of infrared footage, the coalition's analysis and AARO's reconstruction still disagree on nearly every measured value: speed, altitude, whether the path crossed land or sea, and whether the screen shows one object or two.