CEFAA — Chile's official Air Force UAP investigation function

The Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos — universally known by the acronym CEFAA — is the official Chilean Air Force unit responsible for receiving, investigating, and cataloguing UAP reports involving Chilean airspace. CEFAA was established in 1997 within the Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil (DGAC) of the Chilean Air Force and has operated continuously since establishment as the principal Chilean institutional UAP-investigation function. CEFAA is one of the small set of contemporary national institutional UAP frameworks operating in Latin America (alongside the Brazilian FAB-Ordinance 551/GC3 framework and the Argentine CEFAe function) and represents the South American institutional UAP landscape at its most institutionally engaged.

CEFAA's mandate and operational structure

CEFAA's mandate is to receive UAP reports from Chilean civil and military aviation sources, to conduct investigative analysis of the reports drawing on the Chilean Air Force's institutional resources, and to maintain a national case archive of the resulting case material. The unit operates under formal Air Force institutional authority and has access to Chilean civil-aviation radar data, military-aviation sensor records, and meteorological data needed for case investigation.

The unit's operational scale is modest — typically a small staff of investigators working alongside other Air Force institutional functions — but the institutional pathway is structured and the case-handling discipline is consistent across the unit's operational history. The unit's investigative methodology draws on the Chilean Air Force's broader aviation-investigation framework and includes systematic engagement with conventional-explanation candidates before any case is closed.

CEFAA's public-facing engagement

CEFAA has, across its operational history, maintained a substantially more publicly engaged posture than most international peer institutional UAP functions. The unit has, on multiple occasions, released specific case material to public availability, has engaged with the Chilean and international press on specific investigations, and has participated in international cross-jurisdictional UAP-research engagements. The most institutionally consequential individual release in CEFAA's operational history was the 2017 public release of the Chilean Navy helicopter video of November 2014 — discussed in detail in a separate entry in this SkyLens archive.

The publicly engaged posture distinguishes CEFAA from the more institutionally reserved postures of, for example, the contemporary US AARO function or the closed UK MoD UFO Desk model. The Chilean institutional approach has been to treat individual cases as substantive subjects for analytical attention while maintaining careful institutional discipline on the interpretive framing applied to released material.

The institutional comparison

CEFAA is institutionally most similar to the French GEIPAN framework among international peer institutional UAP functions, in the combination of structured case-investigation methodology, public-facing engagement with selected case material, and institutional discipline on interpretive framing. The unit is smaller in operational scale than GEIPAN and operates within a defence-related institutional context (the Chilean Air Force) rather than within a civilian scientific agency (CNES in the French case), but the operational posture is broadly comparable.

CEFAA is one of the institutional functions that demonstrates that contemporary national engagement with UAP can be sustained at a modest operational scale within a defence-aviation institutional context. For comparison with the Brazilian FAB-Ordinance 551/GC3 framework, the Argentine CEFAe function, and the parallel French and US frameworks, see the SkyLens UAP files page.

Editorial note: Independent SkyLens analysis of a publicly documented UAP case or institutional framework from Chile. The case index linking the broader international UAP record is on the SkyLens UAP files page.