Pentagon UAP files, release 7: the silent black triangle
The Department of War released its seventh batch of declassified UAP files on October 23. It is the latest drop under PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, which has put out a new batch roughly every month or so since May. Release 07 holds 28 PDFs, some with images, and they are posted at war.gov/ufo. The headline case is new, but most of the batch is decades old.
The silent black triangle
The record getting the most attention describes a sighting this year in the western United States. EarthSky reports it took place in June. Two federal special agents were interviewed, and a third official at a separate observation post backed up their account. Both the FBI and AARO, the Pentagon's UAP office, looked into it.
According to the AARO write-up, a matte black triangular object climbed about 200 to 300 feet above a ridge line, hovered for about 20 seconds, then sped off into a canyon within two to three seconds. Witnesses reported "no visible engines, rotors, exhaust or other conventional aircraft features," and no sound. The object was estimated at roughly 13 to 15 feet wide. The agents used handheld thermal gear and saw an even heat signature rather than hot spots. A ground survey the next morning found no debris, scarring or vegetation damage.
AARO did not identify the object. It said the case warrants further investigation and noted that it resembles other reports from the western U.S.
Read the details carefully
- The two accounts don't match. As Fox News pointed out, the FBI record puts the sighting at about three seconds, while the AARO record describes a much longer event.
- Speeds are estimates. No instrument measured how fast it went. The figures come from what the witnesses saw.
- Size suggests a small craft. The FBI record describes it as resembling a drone. A dark, quiet, triangle-shaped object about 15 feet across is within reach of current drone designs, though nothing in the file says that is what it was.
- No location. The released records don't name the site, which makes independent checking hard.
What else is in the batch
- Older Air Force reports, including cylinder- or ellipse-shaped objects over Sweden in December 1953 and a five-to-seven-minute radar contact involving a B-52 near Saudi Arabia in January 1957.
- A 1952 report from three Boy Scouts on Santa Catalina Island who saw a silent silver object, and a 1955 sighting near Avalon that the Air Force filed as a "probable meteor."
- Space-era recovery guidance from 1962 to 1964 on retrieving crashed U.S. and Soviet hardware, with a category for objects that couldn't be identified.
- BAASS reports from 2008 to 2010. Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies ran the Pentagon-funded AAWSAP program for the Defense Intelligence Agency. One 60-page report covers a Utah ranch and its claims of strange creatures and lights. Lab tests on hair samples came back as domestic dog and raccoon.
How to read it
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said more files will follow on a rolling basis. Advocates see a government sighting by trained federal agents as exactly the kind of case that deserves full follow-up. Skeptics note that the record is short on hard data and that small, quiet drones are now common. Both can agree on one point: none of the seven releases so far contains proof of non-human technology. If you want to see where this batch fits, our UAP timeline tracks the releases. If you see something odd yourself, run it through the sighting checker and note the time, direction and duration.