'Black triangle' UFO flying at 1,800mph spotted over sensitive US site: Latest Trump admin UFO file dump

Two senior military observers say they watched a mysterious black triangular object flying at extraordinarily high speed over a sensitive site in the western US earlier this year, in the latest tranche of reported UFO sightings released on Friday (Oct 23) by the Trump administration.

The unidentified object, as per the latest UFO file dump, showed none of the characteristics of a conventional military aircraft. As per the military observers' report to the defence department, it vanished suddenly and silently within seconds, leaving no exhaust trail or other evidence of its existence.

UFO sighting and the object: All we know

The claimed sighting, by anonymous sources with "extensive operational experience working alongside government agencies," occurred at a location redacted in the file made public Friday.

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The "unidentified anomalous phenomenon" (UAP), a term that is used to refer to UFOs in military, governmental and scientific circles, resembled a delta-wing drone with a wingspan between nine and 15ft (2.75 to 4.5m), the observers recalled. They calculated its speed at 1,800mph.

“We both observed the object ascend vertically over a ridge line situated approximately 3.2 miles west of our location on a heading of about 268 degrees. The object climbed to approximately 200 feet above the ridge line, then transitioned from vertical to horizontal flight at a significant velocity, approaching our position, then descending southeast into the [redacted] along [redacted]. We then lost visual contact while the object was flying along this [redacted] at an estimated range of about 1.5 miles from our position. The total duration of the sighting was approximately three seconds. Throughout the observation, neither [redacted] nor I detected any auditory output from the unmanned aerial system,” they claimed, as per a FBI release on the UAP. Read the Pentagon report here.

Scepticism over the images

Similar to hundreds of other reports released by the Pentagon since May as part of Trump's promise to bring transparency to decades of classified or secret documents, many details are vague, inconclusive or blacked out.

While many previous accounts came with real photographs or video footage, the "black triangles" report features nine identical images of the same unidentified canyon with tiny, trilateral silhouettes crudely added to replicate the object's movement.

"This does indeed look like little more than a black triangle shape superimposed on a landscape background to illustrate the report. I don't think it really adds anything substantive to the report itself," Greg Eghigian, professor of history and bioethics at Penn State University and author of the 2024 book "After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon" told The Guardian.

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Thinning releases: When will the rest of Pentagon's secret UFO files be released?

After an early flurry, the Pentagon's releases in the second Trump administration have become less frequent in recent months, and noticeably thinner since Trump declared in February that he was ordering full disclosure about the government's knowledge of UFOs and the search for alien life.

The move followed allegations aired in Congress in 2023 by a former intelligence official that successive administrations engaged in a cover-up, and that the government had possession of crashed alien spacecraft. Notably, Friday's release contained fewer than 25 text documents, and no videos or images.