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Click HERE to see the entire frame of the negative.
(image credit: National Geographic Institute of Coast Rica)
Report by Antonio Huneeus
When I saw in the last few days a web media story about a recent video and other UFO sightings around Lake Arenal in northern Costa Rica, it brought back memories about a research trip I did in that same area back in 1996. I had attended an International UFO Conference in San José (speakers included retired NASA scientist Dr. Richard Haines, famous TV Mexican journalist Jaime Maussan and Spanish bestselling author Javier Sierra) and on the day after some of us went to Cote Lake in the Arenal region. It was here where Costa Rica’s most famous case occurred in 1971, producing one of the most scientifically interesting UFO images ever taken. Dr. Haines, who had already analyzed the photo with Dr. Jacques Vallee, was really looking forward to the expedition since he had never been in the ground location. Our hosts were the brothers Ricardo and Carlos Vilchez, who are Costa Rica’s best known ufologists, and Edgar Picado, who runs the UFO blog ovnicr.com. What we discovered is that there were many more recent UFO sightings around the Cote and Arenal lakes and this phenomena is still ongoing.
I wrote a complete report on my trip, which I titled “Costa Rica UFO Dossier,” for the popular Japanese newsstand magazine Borderland, where I was writing a monthly column back in the mid-90s. The original text—obviously written in English and then translated to Japanese—has never been published in English, so I am presenting it here as a two-part series with additional images and some minor adjustments. The cases are not new but they are highly interesting and little known (with the exception of the Cote Lake photo which was even used for the cover of the French COMETA Report) outside of Costa Rica. Here then is the first part of my 1996 Borderland Costa Rica UFO Dossier.
On the morning of September 4, 1971, an aircraft of the Costa Rican Geographic Institute was photographing the Arenal region for making maps. The crew of four didn’t recall anything unusual, but then the camera was set to take pictures automatically every 20 seconds or so. It was a special R-M-K 15/23 camera with b/w film ASA 80, with an 8×8 negative printed on Kodak Safety aerial film, type 3665.
One shot taken at 10,000 feet altitude, frame 300, showed mountains around Cote Lake in Guanacaste Province, 25 miles south of Nicaragua. A disc-like object appeared clearly on the lower half of the lake. The photo is considered unique and of great scientific value. Drs. Richard Haines and Jacques Vallee listed a number of reasons why in their first study of Cote, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1989:
Source
PART 2
