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OIFFA, had been previously stationed at La Joya air base and was a witness to the incident involving Oscar Santa Maria Huertas in 1980, when the base was put on alert. He told me that Peru funded its Air Force agency because "these anomalous events had occurred frequently enough over national territory to create a danger, and we recognized that they needed to be taken seriously." Chamorro says that, as director of the OIFFA, he had approached the U.S. Embassy on a number of occasions to discuss the situation for the purpose of requesting assistance, but received no response. "We have not been able to expect any help from the 1 1 wot 17 no response. "We have not been able to expect any help from the Americans in dealing with this problem” he says. The Uruguayan Air Force, which has been active in UFO investigations for decades, declassified its UFO files in 2009 and made them public, including records of forty cases that remain unexplained, some involving military pilots. "The UFO phenomenon exists and I must stress that the Air Force does not dismiss an extraterrestrial hypothesis based on our scientific analysis," said Colonel Ariel Sanchez at the time, an officer with thirty-three years of active service who presides over an Air Force commission studying the cases. [3] Chile set up an agency within its civil aviation department, the equivalent of our FAA, in 1997 to investigate UFO cases affecting aviation safety. The CEFAA [4] (the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena) was founded and directed by General Ricardo Bermudez and soon developed a relationship with the aviation branch of the Chilean Army, through the work of Captain Rodrigo Bravo. Since leaving the CEFAA in 2002, General Bermudez has prepared a graduate-level course in UAPfor the University of Science and Technology in Santiago, "designed to furnish the students with the necessary tools for distinguishing between what is real and what is fictional regarding UFOs” as he describes it. He constructed the course to include a wide range of ce am ad The which been UFO active in in students with the tools lectures by other professors in related fields, such as astronomy, space physics, and astronautics. In January 2010, General Bermudez was physics, and astronautics. In January 2010, General Bermudez was reinstated as chief of the CEFAA, in an elaborate ceremony chaired by the director general of civil aviation. Representatives of the armed forces, police (carabineros), and academic and research communities from all over Chile were in attendance, and the event was covered by the media. "It was a beautiful ceremony that had the fill support of the authorities," Bermudez wrote in an e-mail. [5] In the last days of March [6] and beginning of April 1997, various anomalous aerial phenomena were observed over the city of Arica, in the far north of Chile. For two consecutive days, lights were seen west of the city and the airport, alarming the people of the region. Lights were also visible over the sea, apparently moving in a 1. General Ricardo Bermudez Sanhueza