Expert says report illustrations add little substantive detail
The Trump administration released a new tranche of Pentagon files on Friday, including a report in which two anonymous senior military observers said they watched a black triangular object fly over a sensitive site in the western United States earlier this year.
The observers said the object showed none of the characteristics of a conventional military aircraft. They recalled that it resembled a delta-wing drone with a wingspan of 9 to 15 feet (2.75 to 4.5 meters) and calculated its speed at 1,800 mph.
The account came from sources with extensive operational experience working alongside government agencies, according to the released material. The document called the object an “unidentified anomalous phenomenon,” or UAP, a term used in military, governmental and scientific circles in place of UFO. The location was redacted, and the observers said the object vanished suddenly and silently within seconds, leaving no exhaust trail or other evidence of its existence.
The report included nine identical images of the same unidentified canyon, with tiny trilateral silhouettes crudely added to replicate the object’s movement. Many earlier accounts had been accompanied by real photographs or video footage of apparent sightings. Greg Eghigian, a Penn State University professor of history and bioethics and author of the 2024 book After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon, said, “This does indeed look like little more than a black triangle shape superimposed on a landscape background to illustrate the report.” Eghigian added that he did not think the images added anything substantive to the report itself.
The Pentagon has released hundreds of other reports since May as part of Donald Trump’s promise to bring transparency to decades of previously classified or secret documents relating to UFOs. Many details across the reports are vague, inconclusive or blacked out.
The release pace has also changed during the second Trump administration. After an early flurry, new tranches have become less frequent in recent months and noticeably thinner since Trump declared in February that he was ordering full disclosure about the government’s knowledge of UFOs and the search for alien life beyond the planet.
The disclosure push followed allegations aired in Congress in 2023 by a former intelligence official. The official alleged that successive administrations engaged in a cover-up and that the government had possession of crashed alien spacecraft.
Friday’s release contained fewer than 25 text documents and no videos or images, although the “black triangles” report included nine landscape illustrations. Within that file, the observers supplied numerical estimates for the claimed object’s wingspan and speed, while the location was redacted and the supporting graphics were illustrative rather than observational.