The Aguadilla Incident

Rafael Hernandez Airport, Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. April 25, 2013. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft running a surveillance flight filmed something small, fast, and strange on its thermal-infrared camera — an object that appeared to cross the runway threshold, hug the coastline, split into two, and then dip toward the Atlantic. The footage leaked. Analysts argued about it for a decade. In March 2025, the Pentagon's AARO office published a formal case resolution. The argument did not stop.

What happened

The CBP aircraft was operating near Rafael Hernandez Airport when its thermal camera picked up a small object moving at low altitude. The object appeared to travel at high speed along the coast, then — in the footage — seemed to split into two distinct objects before descending toward the water. The video circulated publicly and became one of the more technically debated pieces of UAP footage of the 2010s, largely because it came from a government platform, not a shaky phone camera.

The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies conducted a frame-by-frame infrared and radar analysis and concluded the object was genuinely anomalous — not a known aircraft, bird, balloon, or lantern. Their report described apparent transmedium behavior (the object appearing to enter the water and re-emerge) and argued the split represented a real division into two objects. SCU has not retracted the report.

The evidence

The competing read came from Metabunk's Mick West, who applied GPS data and a 3D reconstruction to argue the object never actually crossed open water. In West's analysis, the apparent speed is a parallax effect from the aircraft's own motion, the 'split' is simply two sky lanterns that were always separate, and the 'water entry' is a thermal-imaging artifact — the lanterns cooling past the thermal crossover point and briefly blending with the ocean surface in the infrared image.

In March 2025, AARO published a formal case resolution report. Their reconstruction modeled the objects drifting at approximately 8 mph — consistent with wind speed at the time. AARO concluded with high confidence that the footage shows two small objects drifting at wind speed, and with moderate confidence that those objects were sky lanterns. The 'split,' per AARO, reflects the look angle of the camera resolving two separate objects. The 'water entry' is a thermal-imaging effect, not transmedium flight.

What the explanations don't explain

The lantern explanation is coherent. It is not airtight.

SCU's analysis disputed the parallax framing directly, arguing the apparent speed exceeded what wind-drift and camera motion could account for. Their report also addressed the split as a genuine bifurcation, not a resolution artifact. The Black Vault noted the tension between AARO's resolution and SCU's prior work — two groups, both doing technical analysis, reaching opposite conclusions from the same footage.

The core dispute is methodological: how you model the aircraft's flight path and camera geometry determines whether the object's apparent speed is explainable by parallax or not. AARO and West say it is. SCU says it isn't. Nobody has produced the original raw sensor data with full metadata, which would settle the geometry question.

What's still open

AAR0 called it resolved. SCU hasn't budged. The footage is the same footage both groups analyzed. The disagreement is about the reconstruction — the 3D model of where the aircraft was, where the camera was pointing, and what that implies about what the object was actually doing. That model depends on data neither side has fully disclosed in a form the other accepts.

Sky lanterns over a Puerto Rico coastline at night is not a wild hypothesis. It fits. Whether it fits this footage, frame by frame, is still genuinely contested between two groups of people who have both done the work.