THE DOCUMENTS
FBI-UAP-D024, “FD-302, Airborne Lights and Triangle, 2002, 2023-2024”, and FBI-UAP-D028, “FD-302, Dark Triangle with Lights, 2011”, two Federal Bureau of Investigation records from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 05, published at war.gov/ufo, cleared 7 August 2026. Each is a three-page FD-302 (Rev. 5-8-10) witness interview form with FD-302a continuation sheets, released as a scan carrying an OCR text layer. Each is paired with one digital rendering: FBI-UAP-D025, “Digital Rendering, Airborne Triangle, 2002”, and FBI-UAP-D029, “Digital Rendering, Dark Triangle with Lights, 2011”, both JPGs. The two interviews and the two renderings are the whole of the record here; nothing else in the release refers to either case.
Why this one is worth your time
Release 05 carries four FBI interviews about black triangles. Two of them name their location, both at Colorado Springs in October 2023, and those are Release 05 Briefing 10. These are the other two, and in both the place has been taken out. On each form the interview location reduces to the two words “United States”, and in the 2011 case the driveway the witness was leaving and the street he was turning onto are black bars as well.
What survives the redaction is description, and the two files divide it between them. D024 is one interviewee carrying three observations across twenty-two years: lights he and other airline pilots began seeing from the cockpit in October 2023, a phone video he shot in February 2024, and a night in June 2002 when the stars went out over Bagram. D028 is the only one of the four triangle interviews in which the FBI took two witnesses at the same table, and the only one in which the object made a sound.
Each file arrives with one image. Neither image says who made it.
What the documents say
The forms. Both are FD-302 witness interview forms, Rev. 5-8-10, three pages each: a form sheet and two FD-302a continuation sheets. Both carry the FBI OFFICIAL RECORD stamp, which states that document participants have digitally signed and that all signatures have been verified by a certified FBI information system, and the standard footer that the document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI. Every redaction in both is a plain black bar; checked at 300 dpi there is no (b)(6), no (b)(7)(C), no exemption legend and no FOIA processing stamp in either. File numbers, field offices and interview locations are withheld throughout, and the day digit of every date is blacked out.
D024, the interview. Conducted March [day withheld] 2024, drafted the same month, entered into the record in April. The interviewee’s name, telephone number and residence go out in the first line, and nine lines of solid black follow where his background would sit. He is never labelled in cleartext; the account identifies him, in that he is a commercial airline pilot who was also a military reservist activated to Afghanistan in 2002. He was referred to the FBI by a party whose name is a bar, and was interviewed by a Supervisory Special Agent, a Special Agent and a second Special Agent, with further attendees withheld.
D024, the lights. From October 2023, he says, a lot of pilots have been seeing lights in the sky, typically between midnight and 3 AM. His own first sighting was on a Boston to Dublin flight, the lights to the north-east towards Gander, Canada; he was at 37,000 feet and judged them higher, probably 50,000 feet or more. They were white, started dim, brightened, then faded, the full cycle running from 10 seconds to one minute. They looked like aircraft landing lights, and he rules out aircraft, Starlink, Starlink flares, satellites and meteors. He has seen them about ten times since, one to four at a time, some static and some moving in straight lines and changing direction, for 45 minutes up to two hours, in every direction except south, at a guessed 200 to 500 miles and never below the horizon. In February 2024 he filmed them on a Samsung Galaxy S22 from a darkened cockpit about 150 miles north-west of Minneapolis, around 4:36 AM Eastern Standard Time on a clear night, ten or more at once; he annotates his own footage with what he cannot resolve, and at the 5:22 mark the flight panel shows approximately .80 Mach with the aircraft 40 to 50 miles north-east of Sioux Falls. He never felt unsafe.
D024, the triangle. The third event is June 2002, in Afghanistan. One night he was outside looking at the stars with another pilot. At approximately 4:30 AM local time he noticed the stars were being blacked out over Bagram. Something huge went overhead, west to east, an equilateral triangle, moving silently at a consistent speed and altitude, possibly 150 knots, with no lights visible. He estimated it at 500 feet in size while saying he could not fully see the shape. The other pilot saw it too and said, as it passed over, “did you see that?” He never discussed it further with anyone and never heard anyone else discuss it. After a block of redaction the form records that he looked through the data and never found information that could explain what he saw in Afghanistan in 2002. He closes on the present: little open discussion, less stigma than there was, but people just not used to talking about it.
D028, the interview. Conducted April [day withheld] 2025, drafted the same month, entered into the record in May, the only one of the Release 05 triangle files where entry falls in a later month than the interview. Two witnesses were interviewed jointly, both names redacted; this is the only joint interview of the four. Their occupations are legible on the page and dropped by the OCR: one served six and a half years in the U.S. Army, the other served 24 years. The interviewers were a Supervisory Special Agent, a Special Agent and a Task Force Officer. Two other people were in the vehicle in 2011, the driver and a front-seat passenger; both are named and then blacked out, and neither was interviewed.
D028, the first account. On an evening in June or July 2011, dark outside, at about 8 or 9 PM, the first witness was leaving his driveway, at an address that is withheld, in a vehicle driven by another person. About fifty feet out, preparing to make a left turn onto a street whose name is withheld, he saw three lights in the sky. He got out of the vehicle, looked up, and saw a massive black isosceles triangle-shaped object flying north, carrying a car-sized white light in each of its three corners, each emitting a diffuse glow and recessed back a bit from the corners. It was low to the ground and creating a low humming noise that made a pulsing sound. Someone told him to take a video; by the time he got his phone out it had flown over the tree line behind the houses and out of sight. He had it in view for approximately 10 to 15 seconds. There were no contrails. He felt dumbfounded and awestruck.
D028, the second account. The second witness was overwhelmed by the size of the object and how low it was. He put it at 800 feet above the ground and, from the dimensions of their surroundings, estimated it at 200 feet long and 100 feet wide. He thought it more equilateral, though the form notes that on his own calculated dimensions it could have been isosceles. It was moving slowly and steadily, and he also heard the pulsing. He saw the three corner lights, and also remembered something in the middle of the triangle that was greyish or graphite coloured, a detail the first witness does not give.
D028, what neither could describe. Neither man had a clear memory of the object’s thickness or vertical profile. They reasoned that they had been underneath it and never saw its side, and were then distracted by the failed attempt to get a phone out, at the moment when they would likely have had the better view of the back profile. The second witness believed a couple of people in the neighbourhood also saw it; the lines that follow are redacted. Both said they would try to see whether a withheld party and their neighbours who witnessed it would write a statement or speak to the FBI. Page 3 is two lines of black bar and nothing else.
The renderings. D025 is a single very dark illustration, 4666 by 2625 pixels: a dense star field with an enormous matte-black triangle centred in it, apex pointing down towards the viewer, flat edge along the top, uniform charcoal with a slightly lighter grey band at that edge, no lights and no markings, the star field visibly occluded where the shape crosses it. There is no ground, no horizon, no aircraft and no witness figure. D029 is 1852 by 1042 pixels, the smallest and crudest image in the release, hard-edged cut-outs and posterised colour: a night suburban street, a pickup truck at left, a male figure beside it in silhouette looking up, trees and rooflines at right under a deep blue star field, and above centre a flat grey triangle, apex down, top edge horizontal with a thin lighter rim, one large glowing white oval at each corner sitting slightly inboard of the vertices. No colour on the lights, no beam, no exhaust, no marking.
What the documents do not say
Neither file identifies anything. There is no assessment, no hypothesis, no attribution and no follow-up in either one, and the printed footer says as much. Nor does any redaction carry a reason: no exemption code, no legend, no processing stamp, so the record does not say on what authority any of it was withheld, or by whom.
Neither file says where it was taken. The location line on both forms runs out at “United States”, and in D028 the sighting location goes with it: the driveway address, the street they turned onto and the neighbourhood are all bars. D024 names Bagram, Boston, Dublin, Gander, Minneapolis, Sioux Falls and North Dakota inside the narrative while withholding the room the interview happened in.
The witnesses are not named, and in D024 not described either. Nine lines of his background are solid black, and the words “commercial airline pilot” appear nowhere in cleartext; the occupation is an inference from what he says he was doing. In D028 the two men’s service records are on the page but not in the extracted text.
The second observers are not on the record. The pilot who stood beside him at Bagram and asked “did you see that?” was not interviewed and is not identified. Neither were the driver and the front-seat passenger in 2011. Both files note that other people saw the object; neither contains their accounts.
Nothing was photographed. D024’s February 2024 video is of the lights, not the triangle, and it is not among the released records. In D028 the phone came out too late by the witnesses’ own account, and that failure is the reason both men give for not being able to describe the object’s rear. Neither case is dated precisely: every day digit on both forms is blacked out, and the 2011 sighting has no firm date beyond June or July, roughly fourteen years before the interview.
Neither file cross-references the other, or the Colorado Springs pair, or any earlier FBI report, and nothing records what the Bureau did with either account afterwards. No statement from the D028 neighbours appears, no analysis, no closing entry.
The renderings are unattributed. They carry no caption, credit, date or attribution of any kind, and nothing in the release states whether they were produced by a witness, an FBI artist or a contractor, or whether any witness reviewed them. They should not be read as witness sketches. The rendering files carry a 23 July 2026 timestamp while the FD-302 PDFs carry 5 August 2026.
From the record
stated that starting in October 2023, a lot of pilots have been
FBI-UAP-D024, page 1, the first substantive line of the interview; the sentence continues: seeing the same event occurring, namely seeing lights in the sky
blacked out over Bagram. It appeared as if something huge went overhead,
FBI-UAP-D024, page 3, the June 2002 sighting; the sentence begins: at approximately 4:30 AM local time he noticed that the stars were getting, and continues: from west to east, and was an equilateral triangle shape
also observed the triangle, and when it passed over stated, “did you see
FBI-UAP-D024, page 3, the only direct speech in either file; the quotation closes on the next line, that?
of the vehicle, and when he looked up, he saw a massive black isosceles
FBI-UAP-D028, the last line of page 1; the sentence resumes at the top of page 2 with the word triangle
back a bit from the corners. The object was low to the ground, and creating
FBI-UAP-D028, page 2, the only sound recorded in any of the four triangle interviews; the sentence begins: the object had a car-sized white light in each of its three corners that emitted a diffuse glow and were recessed
a low humming noise that made a pulsing sound.
something in the middle of the triangle that was grayish or graphite
FBI-UAP-D028, page 2, the second witness on a detail the first does not give; the sentence closes on the next line, colored
Where the case connects
These two sit inside the FBI’s second PURSUE block. Release 03 covered the first, FBI-UAP-D001 to D013, which carried the Colorado Springs 2022 and Northeastern US cases; Release 05 picks the series up at D024. The four triangle interviews in this tranche split two and two: Release 05 Briefing 10 has the pair that names Colorado Springs, both October 2023, both with an optical distortion field around the object. These two name no location at all.
Release 05 Briefing 12 is the closest structural relative, also FBI and also two witnesses to one object. The difference is procedural. There the two men were interviewed separately and their accounts are two documents, FBI-UAP-D037 and D040, which do not agree on times or object counts. Here they were interviewed together and their accounts are one document, and the differences between them, the greyish middle, the equilateral impression against the calculated isosceles, sit side by side on the same page.
Three things are true of both files as a set, and are facts about the record rather than an argument about it. Both witnesses in D028 and the witness in D024 have military or aviation backgrounds. In both cases a second witness was present at the sighting and was not separately interviewed on the record. And no photograph or video exists of either triangle, in both cases because the witness failed to get a phone out in time.
What the files leave open, they leave open the same way. The neighbours in D028 were to be asked and there is no sign they were. The data the D024 witness searched is not described, and neither is what he was searching it for. If a later tranche releases the D028 statements, the missing FBI-UAP-D034 to D036 records, or anything the Bureau wrote after either interview, it lands in this series when it does. Release 05 Briefing 13 sets out what this tranche references and does not contain.
Read it yourself
FBI-UAP-D024, “FD-302, Airborne Lights and Triangle, 2002, 2023-2024”, and FBI-UAP-D028, “FD-302, Dark Triangle with Lights, 2011”, are hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 05, with their renderings FBI-UAP-D025 and FBI-UAP-D029. Each interview is three pages. The 2002 triangle is on page 3 of D024; the 2011 triangle begins on the last line of page 1 of D028 and runs through page 2.
Read the files. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below give background on the programme and publisher behind this briefing, and on the subjects it touches.
References and further reading
- FBI-UAP-D024, “FD-302, Airborne Lights and Triangle, 2002, 2023-2024”, PURSUE Release 05, Federal Bureau of Investigation, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- FBI-UAP-D025, “Digital Rendering, Airborne Triangle, 2002”, PURSUE Release 05, Federal Bureau of Investigation, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- FBI-UAP-D028, “FD-302, Dark Triangle with Lights, 2011”, PURSUE Release 05, Federal Bureau of Investigation, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- FBI-UAP-D029, “Digital Rendering, Dark Triangle with Lights, 2011”, PURSUE Release 05, Federal Bureau of Investigation, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- AARO UAP Records, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, aaro.mil/UAP-Records
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 05 Briefing 10, on the two Colorado Springs triangles, where the locations are named
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 05 Briefing 12, on the 2026 red-lights case and its two witnesses
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 03, on the FBI’s first PURSUE block