On July 9, 1968, Colonel Sergio Bravo Flores — Director of Chile’s Meteorological Office — sent a circular to 43 aeronautical installations across Chile, from Arica to the Antarctic territory, requesting reports of anomalous aerial phenomena. That letter was the first official act of Chile’s national UAP investigation programme. Fifty-eight years later, the programme is still running.
The 1968 Origin
Bravo Flores led the Comisión Chilena para Estudios de Fenómenos Espaciales No Identificados, operating from the Meteorological Office at the Quinta Normal Aeronautical Complex in Santiago. The committee included meteorologists, engineers, a physician, a physicist with a doctorate in Physical and Mathematical Sciences, and Air Force officers. Its stated objective was to establish with full seriousness the true causes of the reported phenomena.
In seven years of operation (1968–1975), the commission collected approximately a dozen formal reports from around Chile. Some were sent to the University of Colorado for analysis by the Condon Committee — the US academic panel conducting what became the official US government’s final civilian UAP study.
The Three Eras
- 1968–1975: Comisión Chilena para Estudios de Fenómenos Espaciales No Identificados. Informal commission under the Meteorological Office. Compiled initial national dataset.
- 1997–2021: CEFAA (Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos). Established October 3, 1997 by Resolution N° 01599. Formally institutionalised within DGAC.
- 2021–present: SEFAA (Sección de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos). Resolution N° 04/3/0113/1385 of October 18, 2021. Current structure under DGAC Communications Sub-department.
The Oracle Assessment
Chile’s programme predates GEIPAN by nine years. It predates AARO by 54 years. It predates Spain’s declassification by 23 years. It began not from political pressure, not from a presidential directive, not from a sighting scandal — but from a meteorologist in 1968 who sent a circular to 43 weather stations and asked them to tell him what they were seeing. The programme that circular started is still running in 2026 and publishing individual case PDFs every month. That is institutional persistence that most national UAP programmes cannot match.
Source: sefaa.dgac.gob.cl/historia/. sefaa.dgac.gob.cl/quienes-somos/. Chilean DGAC.