The Mexican Air Force has released footage of what appear to be unidentified flying objects picked up by an infrared camera as they whizzed around a surveillance plane.
A longtime believer in flying saucers, journalist Jaime Maussan, told a news conference Tuesday that the objects were real. At one point the shapes appeared to change direction and surround the plane that was chasing them. Maussan said the shapes showed up in the infrared footage but could not be seen by the naked eye.
“They were invisible to the eye, but they were there, there is no doubt about it. They had mass, they had energy and they were moving about,” he said, after showing a 15-minute video that he said the Defense Ministry gave him permission to publicize.
The ministry confirmed to Reuters that it had provided the video, filmed by the Air Force on March 5 over the eastern coastal state of Campeche.
“We are not alone! This is so weird,” one of the pilots could be heard yelling, after the plane’s crew switched on an infrared camera to track the objects, first picked up by radar.
The film, recorded by a plane looking for drugs trafficking near the Gulf of Mexico, shows 11 blobs of light that appear to hover in formation or dart about, sometimes disappearing into cloud.
Mexico’s most popular nightly news broadcast showed the video Monday night.
Interviewed by Mausson on another section of the video, the pilots said they grew nervous when the objects, still invisible, turned back during a chase and surrounded the plane.
“There was a moment when ... the screens showed they were behind us, to the left and in front of us. It was at that point that I felt a bit tense,” said Maj. Magdaleno Castanon.
Mexico has a long history of fanciful UFO sightings, most of which are dismissed by scientists as space debris, missiles, weather balloons, natural atmospheric phenomena or hoaxes.