Pentagon Declassifies New Batch of UFO Documents: Black Triangles and Mysterious Lights

The US Department of Defense has released a new batch of 41 documents related to sightings of unidentified flying objects. They include testimonies from military and civilian pilots, photographs, video footage and archival cables spanning the period from 1950 to the present day.

"These documents were kept secret for decades, which understandably fuelled speculation. It's time for Americans to see them for themselves," said US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, commenting on the release.

A Triangle Over Bagram and Lights in the Sky

According to the materials — attributed to the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and the White House — one of the most striking episodes dates back to 2002. A military pilot reported observing over the former US airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan an unlit, equilateral triangular object roughly 150 metres on each side, flying silently at about 280 km/h. A colleague reportedly saw the object too, but the sighting wasn't reported at the time — the pilot only came forward to authorities more than twenty years later, while describing other strange lights he had repeatedly observed as a commercial airline pilot.

He said he first noticed similar lights during a flight from Boston to Dublin at an altitude of about 11,500 metres — the objects were presumably at least 3,900 metres above the aircraft. The lights brightened and dimmed in cycles lasting from 10 seconds to a minute; some stayed still while others moved in straight lines or abruptly changed direction. In his assessment, the phenomenon resembled neither aircraft, meteors, nor satellites, including Starlink satellites. He claims to have witnessed this around ten times, and in February 2024 he filmed more than ten such lights near Sioux Falls — a sighting, he says, that other pilots also witnessed.

Black Triangle Over Colorado Springs

Another witness described spotting a large, dark, triangular object over Colorado Springs in October 2023. He and a colleague noticed a strange dark, "pixelated"-looking cloud, out of which a red light emerged, followed by a dim triangular object with red lights at each of its three corners, roughly as thick as a three- to five-storey building. The object first moved at helicopter speed, then instantly accelerated to supersonic speed while remaining completely silent, before abruptly flipping 90 degrees and simultaneously changing direction — the opposite of how aircraft normally bank. When the object vanished, the cloud it had emerged from disappeared as well. A former service member described a similar triangular object with glowing corners that he observed in 2011 at an unspecified location.

From UFO to the Term UAP

Among the declassified materials are also older documents — for instance, a 1963 diplomatic cable from the US embassy in Brazil concerning local press reports that a mysterious spherical metal object had crashed in Rio de Janeiro, allegedly containing a human body in a spacesuit and bearing undeciphered inscriptions. The cable itself treats the story with scepticism, noting that a weather balloon happened to be in the area at the time, though nothing is known about any crash involving it.

The release also includes a new analysis of film footage of unidentified objects over Utah and Montana from the early 1950s. According to analysts' calculations, the disc-shaped objects over Utah may have been travelling at speeds of up to 3,955 km/h and accelerating at up to 965 times the force of gravity — parameters that, in their view, cannot be explained by known natural phenomena or ordinary man-made objects. The authors, however, note that the calculations are based on an assumed rather than confirmed distance between the objects and the camera.

Although the term UFO (unidentified flying object) remains the most widely recognised, US agencies now officially use the broader term UAP — "unidentified anomalous phenomena." This is partly because, in popular culture, the word "UFO" has become almost inseparable from the idea of extraterrestrials.

The Trump administration's decision to release these materials has already drawn criticism: some observers, including Forbes, have suggested the publication may be a way to divert attention from the scandal surrounding the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and other contentious issues.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz