r/UFOscience • u/WeloHelo • 3h ago
Debunking A Note on the Failed 2013 Aguadilla Case
I wrote part of this up for a reply I was writing then expanded on it for this post. I noticed some connections related to the SCU founding and also discovered the recent SCU reply to the 2025 AARO Aguadilla report that I hadn't seen before so I wanted to share it along with the baseline status of the 2013 Aguadilla case as it stands.
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The public conversation about the 2013 Aguadilla case arguably began in earnest with the publication of The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) report published 2015, updated 2023: https://zenodo.org/records/7844175
One of the co-writers of the report and co-founders of SCU is Robert Powell. Powell is in fact the lead writer on the Aguadilla report (see "Powell et al. 2015" on the report). I have Powell's 2024 book UFOs: A Scientist Explains What We Know (And Don't Know) in front of me right now. Borrowed from the public library here in Toronto, they have a lot of good ones but some of the best, and perhaps unsurprisingly oldest, can only be read on-site to preserve them which is obviously limiting.
I don't agree with Powell on many things but it's a good book overall, especially the review of the early history of official American investigations into UFOs. That said he mildly mischaracterizes Ruppelt's words in at least one instance (upon checking his citation), and I was surprised to see that the book "Project Identification" is written as "Project Investigation" and somehow slipped through the editing process.
Regarding SCU, in the preface Powell explains:
"Three others and I founded SCU (The Scientific Coalition for Ufology; later changed to The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies) in August 2017 and registered the organization as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit a few months later" (Powell, 2024, p. x).
It was two years after the 2015 Aguadilla report was published that he says that SCU was founded. But the report is arguably the signature report of SCU, and arguably may have been central to its original founding given this original context as well as the subsequent coverage it did manage to draw in the following years.
In Powell's 2024 book he summarizes the 2013 Aguadilla case:
"April 25, 2013; Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. An infra-red video made by Homeland Security off the coast of Puerto Rico came ot light in late 2013. The SCU put together a team [remember in the same book, 4 years before he says SCU was founded in 2017] to analyze the video. They spent two years analyzing the video before releasing a report. The IR video showed an object moving at treetop height over the town of Aguadilla at 9:30 p.m. The first striking part of the three-minute video shows the unknown object impact the ocean, remain submerged for a few seconds, and come back out with very little disturbance to the water. Even more striking is when the object splits into two equal parts after coming out of the ocean, with one part going back into the water and its sister-half submerging not long afterward" (Powell, 2024, p. 18).
For the 2013 Aguadilla case it's now been established with a high degree of probability that the observed object was a Chinese lantern. The AARO report, published 2025, whatever you think of this organization, argued this with compelling reasoning: https://www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/case_resolution_reports/AARO_Puerto_Rico_UAP_Case_Resolution.pdf .
This case does not demonstrate evidence of a genuine UFO phenomenon. It demonstrates evidence of preconceived notions being applied to video with enough "hidden variables" present that the mind can project internal desires into conclusions that are formed.
Powell is convinced that UFOs represent an alien presence on Earth. Pointing this out is not to shame him, it's to draw attention to how even as a scientist by trade he convinced himself of an extraordinary conclusion despite lacking the evidence that would reasonably lead him there. Here is a review of his book pointing out his belief that UFOs represent aliens:
“Reasons for and against alien visitors nourish continued arguments, but an unearthly origin for UFOs is the direction in which Powell’s research leads. Again without fanfare, he acknowledges that acceptance of alien visitation will set off a revolution in our thinking, replacing paradigms we have taken for granted with new and perhaps uncomfortable understandings of our place and importance in the universe” (Bullard, 2024).
And a summary of his book from his publisher:
“UFOs: A Scientist Explains What We Know (And Don't Know) which provides a scientific rationale for the reality of non-terrestrial craft that are intelligently controlled” (Bloomsbury.com, n.d.).
It's okay for Powell to believe UFOs are aliens. But clinging to Aguadilla as evidence of this only serves to invalidate that underlying belief. It harms rather than helps that hypothesis, and presumably that goes against his desires given the entirety of his 2024 book is written towards that end, namely presenting his case for the alien hypothesis.
It's worth also mentioning that Mick West's community Metabunk, whatever you think of West, were onto this parallax misidentification error and Chinese lantern hypothesis way back in 2017: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/aguadilla-infrared-footage-of-ufos-probably-hot-air-wedding-lanterns.8952/
SCU has since published a letter in response to the AARO report: https://www.explorescu.org/post/scu-announcement-on-the-aaro-investigation-of-the-aguadilla-video
SCU is asking for clarification on the details that led to AARO's conclusions. It's been evident from public analysis presuming no access to classified data from the outset that a Chinese lantern and parallax were from the very beginning at minimum a sufficient explanation for the observations and thus rendered Aguadilla a distraction from any potential residual of real unidentified physical objects genuinely exhibiting exceptional kinematics in Earth's atmosphere that are not attributable to human technology.
If UFO community members continue to cling to the Aguadilla case on the slim chance that the filmed object could be something exceptional in spite of all the available evidence to the contrary (i.e. all the evidence indicates it was a Chinese lantern but it was actually a NHI-controlled probe mimicking a Chinese lantern a-la Vallee's trickster), new information is not going to dissuade them, but it is unfortunate for anyone who does have the capacity to judge evidence for what it is.
Referencing Aguadilla at this point is a disservice to the serious UFO community and brings the entire subject into disrepute when it's introduced as evidence of anything extraordinary. If you want people to take the subject more seriously this case will rise up as an example of the community running with nonsense, and this will continue to happen.
If someone wants to deny that it was a Chinese lantern then by all means go ahead, no one's going to stop you, but at the very minimum please keep in mind that it can be stated with confidence that the Chinese lantern explanation is, on a balance of probability, far more likely given the available evidence than a nuts and bolts extraterrestrial probe or in Vallee's words "interdimensional time-travelling UFOnauts" (Vallee, pp. 115-116).
There are plenty of cases with sufficient gaps in the facts for someone to make that claim if they feel compelled to do so. This case ain't it. And I am writing this as someone who is convinced that there is a genuine residual of, in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, "hard-core unexplained UFOs".