Chile has one of the highest concentrations of large telescope observatories in the world, mostly in the Atacama Desert in the northern part. It could be due to the dry air, its isolation from city lights or its 330 clear nights per year on average. Those conditions could also be why Chile also has such a large number of UFO sightings. It could also be due to its multitude of mines, where ‘alien’ ships might conceivably pick up parts or fuel. The city of Concepcion in particular has a place in UFO lore for its ‘tiny alien skeleton’, which for decades fascinated and baffled many before DNA tests proved it to be a human fetus. That’s why a recent UFO sighting in Chile deserves more than a cursory view.

“UFOs, or strange lights captured in Concepción in front of the Catholic university.”

That was the caption on July 6, 2019, under a YouTube video taken the day before by a security camera which showed two unidentified flying objects quickly crossing the sky and changing directions multiple times. (Watch it here.) There are obvious trails behind them, suggesting they could be meteors or skydivers, but their speed and their drastic directional changes seem to negate both of those possibilities. The video was reported by the local media source Pagina 7 (Page 7), which identified the location – over the Catholic University of the Most Holy Conception – and asked local meteorologist Eduardo Sáez for his opinion.

“Indeed, at first sight it is difficult to know what it is. If it were a thermal image, it could be the motor temperature, but I do not know what kind of image it is. For a plane, but if we think of meteorites, of course. But I already say that there is no meteorological phenomenon that generates that kind of light.”

Since this is Chile, there are plenty of UFO investigators around, so Pagina 7 then asked local paranormal investigator Hugo Mazuela for his analysis of the video.

“I find it very interesting. I have two theories about it, the first is that they can be objects called ‘Foo Fighters’ or moving lights, which are a kind of UFO with voluntary movements as we see in the video. Sometimes these UFOs are usually so fast that it is difficult to see them, they are characterized by being alive or not being manned.”

Foo Fighters? What about a camera anomaly? These security cameras aren’t high quality, but Pagina 7 says no other anomalies were seen on other footage from it. Yes, there’s one more possibility we haven’t addressed – the ubiquitous drones – but Mazuela says the same thing applies to them as to meteors or skydivers … the movements were too fast and sharp to be a drone, so he’s sticking with Foo Fighters.

No other reports of these UFOs come up in searches, but another one allegedly occurred on July 7, also over Concepcion, that was captured on a cellphone video. (Watch it here.) This sighting looks more like a drone, plane or possibly one of those experimental triangular crafts that keep appearing more frequently. In fact, some comments on the video say this is actually an older sighting from December 2018 of exactly that, but it’s Chile so one should never jump to conclusions.

Chile has been called the best place in the world to see UFOs,and these videos add to that sentiment. While many can be blamed on the military or drones, that doesn’t apply to all. And we haven’t even brought in the fact that Chile has a chain of over 2,000 active and inactive volcanoes (second-longest next to Indonesia) and there have been many UFO sightings near volcanoes that lead to speculation that they may be ports or refueling stations. Or they could just be anomalies.

In any case, Chile deserves all of the attention it gets as a UFO hotspot. Hopefully, the experts there will soon explain the unusual sighting on July 5th over Concepcion.

UFO authority Timothy Good stated the following in his 1987 book, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up: “In 1959 Stan Steers, President of the Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau [which was created in 1956] at the time received a phone call from a man requesting a meeting in a large car park in Brisbane, hinting that Seers might learn something to his advantage about UFOs.” Seers, by his own admission, at first thought that this was someone’s idea of a not too amusing practical joke. All thoughts of pranks went quickly out of the window, however, when – after a couple more phone calls with the mysterious man at the other end of the line – Seers was finally able to meet the clandestine character at that aforementioned car park. He was nothing less than an employee of  the Australian Security Intelligence Organization(the ASIO).

“Mr. D,” as Seers tantalizingly termed the man, was seemingly intent on playing a game of “bad-cop”-“good-cop,” but all on his lonesome. The ASIO agent began in somewhat hostile fashion and “dangled the Communist bogey,” as Seers succinctly put it. The man then proceeded to reel off significant background information on both Seers and two of his colleagues in the QFSRB. In an instant, Seers realized something amazing and more than a bit alarming: I’m being watched. Closely. By the Government. Shit. Mr. D’s tone soon changed, though, when he suggested to Seers that perhaps the ASIO could provide significant UFO-themed data to Seers and his friends – if and when the circumstances were deemed to be right; whatever that meant.

The Australian government handing its UFO files over to a group of ufologists? It sounded way too good to be true. No surprise: it turns out that’s exactly what it was. Mr. D carefully, skillfully and ultimately ruthlessly wormed his way into the UFO group, causing major dissention in the ranks, and fracturing friendships as he did so. This is what Seers astutely came to believe was the entire point of the operation: to infiltrate the QFSRB, to weaken it, and to ensure that the ASIO was able to keep a careful watch on it and its members at all times – and particularly so those in the group who had what was referred to as by the ASIO as having “some Communist influence.” A now-declassified ASIO document, titled The Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau, and dated August 4, 1959 – the very same time-frame in which Stan Seers was approached – reveals that the ASIO had undertaken a wealth of background data on the UFO group, as the following extract from an ASIO document shows:

“The Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau is an organization with a present membership of 163 which meets regularly on the second Wednesday of each month in the Canberra Hotel and conducts a discussion group on the first Wednesday of each month in…Elizabeth Street, Brisbane. The members are of great diversity in outlook, politics and religion but all have a common purpose in endeavoring to establish the authenticity of unidentified flying objects which have been sighted throughout the world, including Australia, particularly in the last ten years. There is some Communist influence in the Bureau due to the presence of the Secretary, Gordon Leslie Jamieson and members of the Souwer family of Slacks Creek, to whom he is related by marriage.”

The ASIO continued: “Recently an announcement appeared in the daily papers which stated that a difference of opinion has arisen amongst two groups of eminent Soviet physicists concerning the origin of an explosion which took place in Siberia in 1908 [the controversial “Tunguska” affair] and which has been for the past fifty years accepted as the landing of a giant meteorite. The difference has arisen due to the fact that a small group of scientists have now put forward the theory that due to the unnatural nature of the explosion and the fact that a large number of persons in the area suffered from leukemia the explosion could have been the destruction of some space vehicle, possibly trying to land or in some mechanical trouble.”

There was also this from the ASIO: “At the May meeting of the Bureau, Gordon Leslie Jamison had prepared for dispatch to the Soviet Union a letter asking for any additional information that may be available from the scientists. To date no reply has been received but it is quite possible that with the re-introduction of the Soviet Embassy to Australia this could easily afford an avenue for contact between the V.O.K.S. representative and the Bureau with offers from the Soviet Embassy to assist in the supply of information.”

The ASIO’s concerns about VOKS – Vsesojuznoe obschestvo kul’turnykh svyzei s zagranitsei – liaising with the QFSRB were completely valid and warranted. It was a body that highlighted matters of a cultural nature between the East and the West. It wasn’t widely known outside of the world of intelligence, however, that many of those Russian cultural characters were really Soviet agents seeking information that might have been useful to the KGB. The ASIO was fully aware that VOKS was filled to the absolute brim with agents of the Soviet Union, and not just with cultural representatives. And, although the VOKS program was shut down in 1958, the QFSRB had been in existence since 1956. Two years was an ample amount of time for the UFO group to have cultivated a chain of communication with VOKS, something that the ASIO feared just might already have happened.

It’s not surprising, then, that the ASIO became very concerned that those same Soviet agents could have tried to “turn” one or more QFSRB members. And, in a worst-case scenario, did turn them. Such a grim picture was seen as being disturbingly all too possible. For example, although Stan Steers was described by the ASIO as being “the most level headed and rational member of the Bureau,” the QFSRB’s secretary, Gordon Jamieson and his family were described by Australian Intelligence  as “pacifists and communists.”

Most people who have lived in Southern California their entire lives would be quick to tell you that earthquakes there are nothing out of the ordinary.

However, with the arrival of the Fourth of July holiday, residents north of Los Angeles had more than just fireworks to shake things up, as a swarm of earthquakes rattled desert communities throughout the region well into the following week.

NBC Los Angeles reported that as of Monday morning, “nearly 3,000 aftershocks [were] recorded in the area since Friday’s magnitude-7.1 main shock and magnitude-6.4 Independence Day quake, the strongest earthquakes to hit Southern California in the last 20 years.” The earthquakes were centered just outside the town of Ridgecrest in the Mojave Desert, approximately 150 miles northbound from Los Angeles.

Although earthquakes aren’t uncommon in the region, that isn’t to say that last week’s wave of holiday tremblors was anything typical, either.

USGS map depicting mainshock and aftershock locations shortly after the M7.1 event, which displays a distinctive “T” pattern, created by the two perpendicular fault zones.

(USGS/Public domain).

Geologists note that there is only around a 5% likelihood that a significant earthquake will be followed by an even larger one; however, this was only one way that initial pair of earthquakes that struck the region seemingly defied the odds. Live Science reported that the Independence Day earthquake occurred on an unmapped fault region along the Little Lake fault zone near Ridgecrest, and involved right angle ruptures, which may be more easily detected today than they were only years ago.

“This is very interesting geologically,” geoscientist Michele Cooke told Live Science. “We don’t have a lot of earthquakes in our record that show simultaneous slip on two perpendicular faults,” she said.

“Many of us are wondering if these complications are actually the norm and that our instruments 10+ years ago were not sensitive enough to pick up these complications,” Cooke also said, suggesting that these “rare” seismic events may not be so unusual after all.

However, geologists weren’t the only ones noticing odd things coinciding with the recent California earthquakes. According to the National Association for Amateur Radio (ARRL), disturbances in HF propagation on the west coast appeared to coincide with the July 4 earthquake as well, resulting in a “massive short-wave radio blackout” over the holiday weekend, a phenomenon that was observed by a number of HAM radio operators in the region.

Alex Schwarz, an amateur radio operator out of British Columbia, Canada who operates the RF Seismograph, reported that there were correlations “between earthquake activity and HF band conditions, said the radio disruption began at around 1600 UTC on July 4, and continued into July 5.”

According to the ARRL, “[Schwarz] said that on July 4, the blackout was total except for 20 meters, where conditions were ‘severely attenuated’… The RF Seismograph also detected the magnitude 7.1 earthquake on July 6 in the same vicinity.”

Finally, NASA was also monitoring the quakes, with a little help from the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) and one of their satellites, which resulted in colorful imagery of the areas affected by the earthquakes:

Image depicting earthquake elevational displacement following the July 4th seismic events

(Credit: JPL/Caltech/NASA).

According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the space agency’s Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) team borrowed data collected by synthetic aperture radar, which was then colorized to reveal minor changes that were visible in the area of the earthquakes.

“Each colour… represents 12 centimetres (about 4.8 inches) of lifting or sinking in the landscape, with evidence of cracks in the lines cutting through the fringes of some colours,” Science Alert reported.

Despite the significant strength of last week’s earthquakes, few injuries were reported since the epicenter of the quakes had been located in a remote area. It is also possible that more earthquakes and aftershocks will continue over the next several weeks, although the unique data being collected in their aftermath may help reshape our understanding of similar seismic phenomena for decades to come.