United States.Western U.S. · federal agents see a black triangle

In 2026, at a sensitive federal site in the western United States whose location is redacted, federal law enforcement agents were conducting observation from several posts: the primary one was on a hilltop, and the FBI statement places one of them "several miles to the west" of the other, although the redactions leave unclear which. The day and month are redacted in both released documents. The AARO memorandum gives the time as 2023 local; the signed statement the FBI attached to its FD-302 form says "approximately 1923 hours". According to AARO, the sky was clear, the sun had already set and the afterglow silhouetted the western ridgelines while the valley floors fell into shadow. The primary post's tripod-mounted optical and thermal systems were pointed east.

A third agent, at a secondary post scanning west with long-range thermal equipment, detected an object rising over the ridgeline and called it out by radio. The FBI statement speaks of a "thermally elevated aerial object" at an estimated bearing of 251 degrees from his position, and calls that post "Observation Post 6". The two agents at the primary post crossed the peak to get a line of sight to the west; the terrain did not allow the tripod-mounted thermal system to be moved in time, so they took binoculars and a handheld thermal monocular. According to AARO, one of them acquired the object with the naked eye against the afterglow, tracked it with the binoculars, passed them to his partner and switched on the monocular; according to the FBI, the partner tracked it unaided for the duration of the sighting.

The signed statement describes "a substantial, nonreflective, dark black triangular object most resembling a delta wing drone", with a wingspan of nine to fifteen feet, a depth of six to nine and a thickness of one to two. Through the monocular it "appeared hotter than ambient temperature", with a consistent thermal signature across the whole airframe and no visible exhaust gases. It climbed vertically over a ridgeline about 3.2 miles to the west, on a heading of about 268 degrees, to roughly 200 feet above it, transitioned to horizontal flight "at a very significant velocity" approaching the agents, and descended southeast along a redacted stretch. They lost sight of it at about 1.5 miles. The statement puts the total duration at about three seconds and ends by saying that neither of them detected "any auditory output from the unmanned aerial system".

The AARO memorandum, written after debriefing the two primary agents with the third as an additional witness, splits the event into three phases: a slow vertical climb of about ten seconds with no wobble, a hover of about twenty seconds at 200 to 300 feet above the ridge, and a transition to horizontal flight with a banking turn and a terrain-hugging descent into a canyon, in two to three seconds. It gives a wingspan of thirteen to fifteen feet, describes the thermal signature as "spatially uniform", with no hot spots or exhaust, and bounds the range between 1.4 and 3.2 miles by terrain cross-reference. The witnesses compared its speed with a fighter jet's, but the memorandum states that "No instrumented speed measurement was obtained". It describes a continuous surface with no intakes, control surfaces or cockpit, which did not oscillate or drift in the wind, left no vapor trail or heat shimmer and went from hover to fast flight with no observable acceleration. The monocular lost the object because the sudden acceleration took it out of the narrow field of view, and a survey of the canyon the next morning found no wreckage, ground scarring or vegetation damage. The two primary witnesses reported no physiological effects, and no electromagnetic interference or anomalous readings were recorded on personal or agency equipment.

The memorandum opens with a caveat: "This report reflects the reporter's interpretation at the time of the event", and should not be read as evidence of the object's features or performance. A collector's note adds that the two agents have long experience working with government agencies and academic studies that use unmanned aerial systems, that they regularly see conventional aircraft around the site and that, on that hilltop, even a small Group 1 drone, a quadcopter or a helicopter at 1.4 miles would have been clearly audible; they estimated its size by comparing the silhouette with the trees on the ridge. Pages 3 to 11 of the FD-302 repeat one landscape photograph with a triangle drawn at different points: they illustrate the path and are not images of the object. Neither document mentions a recording from the thermal equipment, and the release includes none.

The two documents tell the same event and disagree on details that matter. The signed statement the FBI received gives about three seconds in total, and the AARO memorandum adds up to about thirty across the climb, hover and exit; the twenty-second hover, the "instantaneous" stop and the fighter-jet comparison appear only in the memorandum. The time differs by exactly one hour, the minimum wingspan goes from nine to thirteen feet and, where the memorandum speaks of a canyon, the statement has the place of the descent redacted. Neither paper carries a visible date, so it cannot be known which was written first. The memorandum itself warns that it records the reporter's interpretation, not a measurement.

The ordinary reading comes from the statement itself: the agents describe the object as most resembling a delta wing drone and, at the end, call it an "unmanned aerial system". A delta-shaped drone, which would have to be a vertical-takeoff type to climb straight up and hold still, seen at dusk against the afterglow for three seconds in one account and about thirty in the other, with the range bounded only between 1.4 and 3.2 miles, leaves wide room for error in size, range and speed; the scale taken from the ridgeline trees assumes the object was at that ridge. Against it is what the memorandum attributes to the witnesses: experience with drones and the conviction that on that hilltop a small one would be heard at 1.4 miles. That is the witnesses' judgment rather than an acoustic measurement, but it comes from people who know those aircraft.

If it was a drone, no document says whose. The site is sensitive, the agents were there to watch it and nothing in the file says whether there were authorized flights that evening; a civilian or commercial aircraft, an unannounced friendly one and a foreign one overflying a federal installation are the possibilities the material leaves open. The FBI form notes in its footer that it contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the Bureau, and the AARO memorandum proposes no identification.

The kind of setting recurs in other FBI files: agents at observation posts with thermal equipment at a sensitive site in the western United States, as in ↗, ↗ and ↗. The documents do not say it is the same place, so the resemblance to those cases is one of site type and does not allow them to be joined. The official war.gov description of the memorandum adds, however, that AARO considers the case to warrant further investigation because of the "close alignment" of its shape and kinematics with other incidents in the western U.S., which it does not name, and that the memorandum records a second observation the following evening, which is not in the three released pages. What would resolve the case is concrete: the recording from the secondary post's thermal equipment, if one exists, and the flight records for the area that evening.