Leslie Kean asks: "Is the the case UFO skeptics have been dreading?"

[LongTomH]

Answer: It probably is! Ms. Kean has an article over at HuffPost: UFO Caught on Tape Over Santiago Air Base, and it's going viral!

Journalist Leslie Kean is the author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record. The book has received praise from people as diverse as Dr. Michio Kaku, Astronomer Derek Pitts of the Franklin Institute, and Rudy Schild of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The case mentioned is a sighting from Chile in 2010, presented to the public in a March 13 press conference. In Ms. Kean's words:

It was a glorious, sunny morning on Nov. 5, 2010, when crowds gathered to celebrate the changing of the Air Force Command at El Bosque Air Base in Santiago. From different locations, spectators aimed video cameras and cell phones at groups of acrobatic and fighter jets performing an air show overhead. Nobody saw anything amiss.

But afterward, an engineer from the adjacent Pillán aircraft factory noticed something bizarre while viewing his footage in slow motion. He turned it over to the government's well known Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena, or CEFAA, for analysis.

The stunning conclusion: The Chilean jets were being stalked by a UFO.

Please note: Chile's CEFAA is only one of a number of agencies established by governments that think UFOs are worthy of serious, scientific study. Those other countries are: Brazil, Peru, Equador, Uruguay, Argentina, Belgium, France and Britain. France's GEIPAN is part of their national space agency: CNES.

What makes this particular incident harder to dismiss?

CEFAA officials collected seven videos of the El Bosque UFO taken from different vantage points. Bermúdez commissioned scientists from many disciplines, aeronautical experts, and air force and army photogrametric technicians to subject the videos to intense scrutiny. They all came to the same conclusions.

As I said, this has gone viral: There are articles on Business Insider, and MSNBC.com.

'Debunkers' like Robert Shaeffer are already weighing in on the case:

"They're 'unexplained cases' only if you ignore the explanation. That's what's going to happen in this case."

Sheaffer has admitted that he hasn't examined any of the videos:

Sheaffer said there wasn't yet enough data available to judge what really happened at El Bosque. "It's going to be like the Phoenix Lights in 1997. We're going to have to go and sit down and look at it," he said. (Coincidentally, Kean and Blumenthal's story came out on the 15th anniversary of the Phoenix Lights incident in Arizona.)

Here's one of the videos:

Ms. Kean has a Facebook page, linked from her website

Edited to add - for those who think the Phoenix Lights case has been thoroughly debunked: The explanation usually given was that witnesses saw flares dropped by Air Force jets during a training exercise. That's disputed by Ms. Kean and by Former Arizona Governor Fife Symington III:

Symington says he saw a large triangular "craft of unknown origin" with lights. "It was dramatic. And it couldn't have been flares because it was too symmetrical," he says. "It had a geometric outline, a constant shape."

Other witnesses also related the fact that the lights maintained a constant spacing throughout the sighting, unlike parachute flares which would drift with the wind. Also, the timing is off:

People sometimes confuse the sightings of the objects at around 8:30 that evening with the row of lights videotaped at 10 p.m. and shown repeatedly on television news. These later lights most likely were flares, according to video analysts. People who saw the earlier objects were outside watching the Hale-Bopp Comet, and saw something entirely different.