Atacama Sky Cube
Atacama Sky Cube
UNCLASSIFIED – cleared for open publishing Dec 27, 2026
Title: “ATACAMA SKY CUBE” – (USDOD-AARO-UAP #072825)
All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office
U.S. Department of Defense
Case: “Atacama Sky Cube”
Case Resolution | Sep 17, 2026
Location: Atacama Salt Flat (Salar de Atacama), Chile
Date: October 15, 2025
Object Altitude (reported): “Super close to [position of witnesses]”
Object Altitude (assessed): 120-130 feet from witnesses
Object Speed (reported): “Very still and then it sped off super fast”
Object Speed (assessed): Stationary and then accelerating to 500-600 mph
Object Shape (reported): “Cubelike”
Object Shape (assessed): Cubical
Object Size (reported): “the height/length of a football field”
Object Size (assessed): 50-150 yards long, 50-150 yards tall
Reporter: “NA” and “VH”
Data Type: Visual
Reported Behavior: An object hovering over the Atacama Salt Flat
Assessed Behavior: The object demonstrated anomalous behavior by hovering in place for ninety seconds and deliquescing from view.
Confidence: High confidence that the object is anomalous.
Witness testimony: (received 01/15/26 from VH)
VH: People can disappear. I don’t mean in a milk carton sort of way (runaway teens, senior citizens who go missing in urban parks or shopping malls, criminals who mosey into the county courthouse with a crisp zillion dollar bill and walk out as “Jose Reyes” or “Peter Weaver”) or a in a Guadalajara sort of way (surreptitiously offed or nabbed by real bad humans) but comprehensively disappear—as if they were never there.
“Have you seen Nina,” one might ask.
“Which Nina?”
You tell them which Nina and they look at you like you’ve got a conger eel for a nose.
“Sorry, bub, don’t know that Nina. Maybe you dreamt that Nina, eh?”
Maybe, maybe…
Comprehensive disappearance. It’s the stuff of bad physics, man. Not even the most intrepid scientist will go within pootin’ distance of it, as if it were a big black bug, trundling its way across the kitchen floor.
My girlfriend, Nina Abbondanza, as you might expect, did this precise kind of disappearing act on me, right at the caboose of a contemptuously sedate stretch in our three month relationship…
…but I digress, you did not ask me about disappearing girlfriends, you asked me for an official report on the UFO we saw.
Let me start by saying I am a field investigator for MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) and have completed over 150 cases involving UFOs. In short, the thing we saw in Atacama was not Venus or Jupiter or Mars, nor was it an airplane, weather balloon, mylar balloon, Starlink satellites, a Chinese flying lantern, bugs, birds, a drone, swamp gas, ball lightning, or anything damn else—it was giant cube that behaved intelligently.
Nina saw it first. She didn’t say anything, but her eyes widened, looking beyond me, who was looking at her. We were in the southwest ring of the Atacama Salt Flat, engaged in a lofty conversation (argument) about Swiss cinema and having a good ol’ fashioned picnic (an impossibly long baguette, some stinky cheese, green grapes, and a tragically non-sweet bar of dark chocolate) on the “shoreline” of an inch-thin lagoon of rainwater that had collected in the salt flat. I instinctively swiveled around to see what had hijacked her attention…
What I saw evaded description by all billion x billion of my brain cells. It took five long seconds for a cadre of brave adjectives to volunteer themselves for service: weird, strange, impossible, cubelike, boxy, fast, slow, strange, spooky, followed by a convoy of brand new expletives: holyfugginshit, nofugginway, whatthafuggisthat…
We stood up, side by side, hands cupped over our eyes, glaring in the penumbra of the western sun (speaking of comprehensive disappearance, both of our pairs of sunglasses had gone full-blown Jimmy Hoffa at this time capsule of a hotel back in Antofagasta)… The cube approached, seemed to acknowledge us (this is speculation, a hunch) and then zipped off like it had more important places to be than hovering above two nonplussed-lookin’ fifty-year-olds standing like scarecrows in the middle of a ten square miles of salt (it probably did).
After this, we nibbled a bit more—the Swiss cinema was out the door, promptly replaced by the high strangeness that had just played peek-a-boo with us—and then we drove back to Antofagasta. The stereo in our rental did not work, so my brain squelched the silence with a steadfast standard of mine: Breathless - 2nd Reprise, composed by American jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi—it’s the nervy little leitmotif that accompanies Snoopy in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown when he’s pretending he’s sneaking around behind enemy lines after being shot down by the Red Baron. I should note here that my brain plays this number on repeat when something is off—not necessarily wrong or bad, but just off.
Nina and I spoke very little on the drive: a few forced-sounding remarks on the landscape and a conversation about where we would stay in Antofagasta, ultimately deciding to stay at the same hotel that had gobbled up our sunglasses. The Hotel Verdure, it was mysteriously called, as it was a misnomer deluxe: Verdure, I knew meant greenery or foliage in French, and Antofagasta possessed about as much greenery and foliage as the belly button of Antarctica. Just an endless glade of salt and sand and unkempt rocks and forgettable buildings, all propped up to house the miners and contactors who come to this rather barren beta city to boost their bucks and try not to get mugged by the natives (a listless bunch, all perched like city birds about the city, watching, waiting)…
Nina and I got in late, checked in, said hola to the owner (an ambiguously blind Quebecer, older than time itself, always behind his little front desk there, listening to Vivaldi on a muscular-lookin’ boom box) and went upstairs and did precisely what you’d probably expect a boy and a girl to do after finally getting some time to themselves indoors (doomed relationship or not, we were still two warm-blooded mammals), showered (water just warm enough to not be considered torture), and then fell asleep watching a film about a bunch of German werewolves who had besieged one of those ICE trains…
This is where it gets kooky. And remember, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about any of this or you want me to clarify anything, et cetera, et cetera… So, yeah, Nina and I doze off, blah, blah, and I wake up 7 hours later, blaringly alone. No Nina. Initial thoughts, she’s in the bathroom. But the door is open and I can clearly see she is not in the bathroom. Nina, I call out. No reply. I repeat this routine until I feel this nascent coldness begin to tug on me with tiny hands. Something’s wrong, I thought. No, she’s just getting coffee downstairs. Mmmm, coffee for both of us. And hopefully a big bottle of non-bubbly water…
Five or so barren minutes go by. Yeah, something is not right. I go downstairs, the owner is there, with his hardcover book (Ponzi Scheme-adjacent basura) and his Vivaldi… Have you seen Nina? I ask him… I might as well have asked the Coke machine. His reply is akin to a spritzed cat or a someone in the trembles of a softcore seizure. Mosey on, bub, nothing to extract from this scenario...
I walk outside, it’s neither cold nor warm, tyrannical wind… It’s a weekday, but there is no buzz about… I walk around the neighborhood, around the city, around the city’s gnawed-on outskirts. Nada, nada, nada… I do this until my feet hurt more than my brain. I buy some kind of mystery meat sub sandwich from a street vendor lady with neither of us exchanging a single word. I go back to the Hotel Verdure at 3 in the afternoon. There’s a loosely connected squadron of far-out dressed teenagers—I can’t tell if they are cosplayers or if it’s just how they dress. (With my Eastern Bloc mariner/’70s mafioso/dust bowl beatnik get-up, I suspect some people often wonder the same about me.)
Still no Nina. The room is unchanged since I left. (There is sometimes/sometimes not a haggard cleaning lady about, grimacing her way through the ill-lit hallways, mired in memories from some regrettable yesteryear.) I wrangle with my clothes, shedding everything until I’m in just my boxer briefs. I chug water that I surely shouldn’t and I look out the window, viewing the view that is no view. I turn around and address the defiantly empty room… Nina, I say stupidly to the little safe that does not lock, and again to the broken microwave, and again the large flatscreen TV that’s one Chilean tremor away from cannonballin’ into the shag carpet.
The front door opens and in walks Nina—every cell in my body simultaneously exclaims the same thing: this is Nina, but this is not Nina.
My brain cranks up the nervy little Snoopy leitmotif. “Nina” smiles, and obvious impostor in association with the event that the real Nina and I observed in the Atacama Salt Flat yesterday… “Nina” begins to pinball her way through a bunch of apologies, explanations, she sees my perplexment, hugs me, kisses me, I pick out phrases like “went to get coffee” and “lost my fucking phone on the fucking boardwalk” and “got real lost” and “I love you, I’m so sorry, baby”… The whole charade almost convinces me that this agent from elsewhere is my actual girlfriend, alas I know better. You are most welcome, I say to posterity for saluting me for my shrewd eye and my big strong hands.
Months keep going by, rolling like empty freight train cars, from nowhere to nowhere. Planet Earth is essentially a ball of mud smothered in an insane proliferation of information, and yet I have no new news. As much as I’d like to blame the Sky Cube (as I have come to call it) for puncturing the camel’s aorta and putting our relationship out of its misery, for making Nina split out on me, and inserting this ersatz “Nina”— now a fossil-to-be beneath Ruta B-400 right where it machetes the Tropic of Capricorn—I know I can only blame myself. If Nina happens to happen upon this AARO report (and I’m hoping you don’t excise this bit because I believe her witness account could be useful to AARO as much as mine, if not more so), I just wanted to suggest an armistice…
(Addressing Nina here now): It's clear we're past the point of no return, in terms of a romantic relationship, however it'd be grand to salvage a little friendship out of all this. I have to say, scrolling through my phone and encountering the myriad of pics and videos from you zaps me with a brawny melancholy, and it's nothing less than mind-bendingly painful to go from relishing life with your possible (probable) soulmate/life partner to having zero communication with them. I wonder if you feel anything like this as well. I'm in a better headspace than I was back then, having processed all this and coming to terms with what it now is, alas I still think our undoing could have been avoided. All those terrible words with the prefix “Mis” jumped us like a pack of rats in the night and tore us into pieces. Misunderstandings, mistakes, miscues, mistiming… We’ve probably both moved on now (these things happen), but, again, (recoils at Lionel Richie song lyrics creeping into my noodle), I wonder where you are and what you’re doing, and I hope we both possess the mettle and resolve to swamp olive branches and find peace with all this. We had a real special thing, short but sweet, but special as special gets, and I was honest and sincere about one hundred percent of it, and I suspect you were as well. You were wrong about one thing though: I indeed loved you, not the idea of you. And sure, I spazzed like a sprayed roach at the end of it there, that last week or so of our Chile trip, my array of already bug-eyed emotions and legendary paranoia amplified tenfold by the introduction of threadbare sleep, a damn washbasin of Chilean Syrah (stains on my white turtleneck to prove it!) and that you-know-what we oinked up, hence wayward communication and basically a mass unleashing of the usual ghouls that exist solely to doom perfectly decent relationships. In short, I went through the motions of oncoming heartbreak (excruciating)... You probably did something like this as well, eh?
Again, I’m only hoping to make peace, so I can stop mentally roaming the galaxy like a hungry ghost, repeating your name like a user-friendly mantra. I hope you are well, and your well-being will always be stratospheric for me.
END OF REPORT
All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office
