On the afternoon of January 28, 2004, residents of the mining town of Calama in Chile's Antofagasta Region, in the Atacama Desert, began photographing and filming a metallic disc-shaped object hovering silently over the city at an estimated altitude of 600 metres. The sighting lasted approximately ninety minutes in clear daylight and was simultaneously observed by hundreds of witnesses, documented by multiple independent video sources, and tracked by Chilean Air Force (FACh) radar at the El Loa military airbase. In the course of the encounter, a FACh P-3A Orion maritime-patrol aircraft on routine operations from Iquique was diverted at the commander's request to attempt visual contact with the object.
The P-3's four-man crew, including aircraft commander Rodrigo Bravo Garrido, observed the object for approximately six minutes at close range and recorded two minutes of 16mm gun-camera footage showing a clearly-delineated metallic disc with sharp shadowing and rotational motion. Captain Bravo — who became Chile's most-decorated operational UFO witness — subsequently stated in Chilean Air Force channels that the object 'possessed flight characteristics impossible for any known aircraft' and that it departed vertically at a rate he estimated at more than 25,000 kilometres per hour when his aircraft closed to within five nautical miles.
The Calama case was formally investigated by Chile's Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos (CEFAA), the national UFO-investigation office within the Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil. CEFAA released a detailed 2014 report including the P-3 film, witness photographs, and radar transcripts, classifying the case as 'UAP — unidentifiable with current knowledge.' Chile remains one of the few nations with an active, formally-staffed governmental UFO investigation office, and the Calama encounter is the single most significant daylight military-UFO event in its archive. The case has been cited by Pentagon UAP researchers as among the strongest non-U.S. international corroborating records.