The Aguadilla Incident

On April 25, 2013, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft filmed a small, fast-moving object on thermal-infrared video near Rafael Hernandez Airport in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico — an object that appeared to split in two and briefly enter the ocean before flying away. A decade later, the case is still contested: the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies calls it genuinely anomalous, while Mick West at Metabunk and a 2025 Pentagon AARO report say it's sky lanterns drifting in the wind, with the dramatic behaviors explained by parallax and thermal-imaging artifacts.

What happened

A CBP aircraft on patrol near Aguadilla picked up an unidentified object on its thermal-infrared camera. The object appeared to move at high speed, low to the ground, before seeming to pass over the runway threshold and continue toward the water. At some point in the footage, it appeared to split into two objects — and then, in what became the most-discussed moment in the clip, seemed to enter the ocean and re-emerge. The footage eventually leaked and landed in the hands of researchers.

The evidence

The SCU's frame-by-frame analysis concluded the object was not a known aircraft, bird, balloon, or lantern. Their report argued the split was a genuine bifurcation into two distinct objects, that the apparent speeds were real and not explained by camera motion, and that the water-entry sequence was a transmedium behavior — the object crossing from air into water and back. SCU has not retracted the report.

On the other side, Metabunk's reconstruction used GPS data and 3D modeling to argue the object never actually crossed open water — the apparent water entry is a thermal crossover artifact, where the object's heat signature becomes indistinguishable from the water's in certain infrared bands. The apparent high speed, West argued, is a parallax illusion caused by the camera platform's own motion. The split is simply two lanterns that were always two lanterns.

The 2025 AARO case resolution report came down firmly in the lantern column. AARO's reconstruction modeled an approximately 8 mph drift consistent with wind speed at the time, and attributed the split and water-entry moments to look-angle geometry and thermal-imaging effects. Their confidence level: high that the objects were small and wind-drifted; moderate that they were specifically sky lanterns.

What the explanations don't fully resolve

The lantern explanation is coherent. It fits the speed, the split, and the thermal behavior. The problem — flagged by The Black Vault's coverage of the competing analyses — is that SCU's analysis and AARO's analysis used the same footage and reached opposite conclusions about basic facts: whether the object crossed water, whether the speed was real, whether the split was one object becoming two or always-two objects. That's not a disagreement about interpretation. That's a disagreement about what the data shows. SCU hasn't retracted. AARO hasn't engaged SCU's specific methodology point by point, at least not publicly.

Sky lanterns are the simpler answer. They don't require new physics. But "simpler" and "proven" aren't the same thing, and the methodological gap between the two analyses is real.

Why this case matters

Aguadilla is a useful test case for exactly the problem that makes UAP research hard: the same footage, analyzed by credentialed people on both sides, produces different factual conclusions. AARO's March 2025 resolution is the official U.S. government position. The SCU report is still up, still uncorrected. The honest answer is that the lantern explanation is strong — probably correct — but the competing analysis has not been formally rebutted on its own terms. That's where the case sits.