United States.The translucent triangle over Colorado Springs

The witness and his wife were sitting with their backs to the house, on the back porch of their residence in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on a night in October 2023, around 10:50 PM. The porch faces southwest; the sky was clear, though the witness recalled seeing few stars. As he looked up, he noticed something had flown over the house from behind, coming from the northeast and moving away to the southwest. He perceived the motion before he could make out the silhouette. The object flew low — possibly as low as 300 feet — and, based on that altitude estimate, the witness judged it roughly the size of a large SUV; at arm's length, it occupied the space between his thumb and index finger, about 5 inches.

What stood out most was its appearance: nearly see-through, with a haze or distortion around it, 'like looking at it through mist,' with ripples similar to viewing something underwater. It looked like a perfect triangle, though his viewing angle didn't let him tell whether it was isosceles or equilateral; the color —dark gray or silver— blended into the night sky, and the surrounding distortion may have heightened the sense of translucency. The edges and corners appeared rounded, though again the distortion may have softened the true outline. The object traveled with a point facing forward, and along its flat trailing edge carried a band of silvery-blue light, which the witness speculated might be tied to its propulsion.

The triangle moved in a straight line at a constant altitude, covering a large distance in very little time. Just before he lost sight of it, the left side banked sharply to a near-vertical orientation, without changing course or altitude. It was completely silent: the witness felt no vibration, static, or any other effect as it passed overhead. He lived near an airport and was used to seeing and hearing private planes and helicopters fly over his house regularly; he also said he was well acquainted with USAF aircraft, including the newest unmanned drones, and that the object matched nothing he'd encountered before. The entire observation lasted about four seconds, from when he first noticed it to when it vanished to the southwest — sooner than he expected — with no time to pull out his phone to record it. His wife additionally recalled a dark seam running along the object's edge. Both went inside immediately, into separate rooms, before comparing what they had seen. The FBI took the witness's statement in January 2026, more than two years after the event.

Colorado Springs is familiar ground for the corpus — it already documents a 2022 case with five soldiers at Fort Carson observing an object over Cheyenne Mountain, home to NORAD's hardened command complex — and this 2023 file adds a second incident, distinct in witnesses, phenomenology, and context, in the same city. That geographic overlap proves nothing on its own, but it is a data point worth tracking: two apparently unrelated episodes, a year and a half apart, in a city with an extremely high density of military and space-intelligence installations.

The case fits pattern `8l` (large silent triangles), the same family as Hudson Valley, the Belgian wave, Phoenix Lights, and Yukon: a large, soundless triangle with edge lighting, flying low and at sustained speed. What sets this one apart is the described translucency — an almost optical quality, with 'underwater'-like ripples — which opens a concrete mundane reading: it could be an atmospheric distortion effect or a low-observability coating scattering ambient light unusually, rather than genuine invisibility.

The witness's credibility is high by the corpus's standard — declared familiarity with USAF aircraft and drones, active ruling-out of conventional explanations, two independent witnesses in the same household — but the observation's extreme brevity (four seconds) and the total absence of any photographic or instrumental record limit what can be confidently claimed. The posterior reflects that tension: a considerable mass on `mundano_natural` (0.45) for the possibility of a drone or low-observability aircraft the witness didn't recognize, with a non-trivial `indet` tail acknowledging that four seconds of perception, however well-trained, isn't enough to close the case in either direction.