Ricardo Bermúdez

Military Career

General Ricardo Bermúdez was a highly accomplished Chilean Air Force officer with a career spanning decades of command and institutional leadership. A trained fighter pilot, he commanded the Third Air Brigade in southern Chile (responsible for aerospace operations in the sensitive Patagonian region) and served as an air attaché in London. Within the Chilean Air Force, he held several directorial roles: Director of the Technical School of Aeronautics, Director of the School of Engineers, and Sub-Director of Chile's Air Force Academy. These assignments positioned him at the intersection of military operations, scientific training, and institutional governance—experience that would prove foundational to his most significant contribution.

CEFAA: Founding and Leadership

In 1997, Bermúdez founded the Committee for the Studies of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA), a government body lodged within the General Directorate of Civil Aeronautics (DGAC) under the Chilean Air Force's authority. As Director from its inception through the end of 2016, Bermúdez established CEFAA as a unique institutional model: a scientifically rigorous investigative body staffed with doctorate-level researchers, aviation experts, and academics who approached UAP cases with instruments, data collection protocols, and the skepticism of peer review. This approach—scientific without being dismissive, institutional without being secretive—distinguished Chile's official UAP investigation from counterparts in other nations.

Under Bermúdez's direction, CEFAA explicitly avoided speculation about extraterrestrial origin while producing detailed technical analyses of each investigated case. The agency issued no classified findings but instead published case summaries, collaborating openly with Chilean media and international researchers. This transparency, unusual among government UAP programs, made CEFAA a model for international UAP governance discourse.

The 2014 Chilean Navy Incident

Bermúdez's most visible contribution to UAP disclosure came in 2014, when the Chilean Navy released a declassified helicopter video—approximately 10 minutes of infrared footage captured by a Navy helicopter over the Pacific. The object displayed characteristics that defied easy classification: no visible propulsion, no acoustic signature detected, and thermal signatures inconsistent with known aircraft. Bermúdez led CEFAA's investigation of the incident, bringing in specialists to rule out civilian aircraft, military assets, balloons, and natural phenomena. When the investigation concluded inconclusively, Bermúdez articulated the agency's restrained, epistemic stance: "We do not know what it was, but we do know what it was not." The statement became emblematic of a scientific approach to unknowns—rejecting both premature closure and unfounded speculation.

Retirement and Legacy

Bermúdez retired from active duty on January 1, 2017, but remained an advisor to CEFAA. By that time, he had steered Chile's official UAP research for nearly two decades, establishing an institutional legacy that influenced how other nations framed their own government investigations. His leadership demonstrated that official UAP inquiry need not compromise scientific rigor or transparency, and that military authority could be exercised in service of methodical investigation rather than secrecy.