Trump's UFO Drop: Federal Agents Watched a Silent Black Triangle Hover, Then Vanish at Fighter-Jet Speed

Two federal agents on a hilltop in the western United States watched a matte black triangle rise silently over a ridge this June, hang perfectly still for about 20 seconds, then dive into a canyon "as fast as a fighter jet," according to government files the Trump administration declassified Friday. A ground search the next morning found nothing.

The account leads the seventh batch of records under PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, which the Department of War posted at war.gov/UFO on Oct. 23. "NEW UFO DROP," the White House announced on X, linking to the site. The post has passed 1.4 million views.

What the agents saw

The incident is laid out in two records released together: a memorandum for record from the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which debriefed the witnesses, and an FBI FD-302 holding a signed statement from two Federal Special Agents. The exact date and site are redacted. War.gov's records database lists the incident as June 2026 at a sensitive national security site in the western United States.

At 8:23 p.m. local time, a third official at a second observation post, scanning west with long-range thermal equipment, radioed that an object was rising over the ridge line, the AARO memo says. The two agents ran across the peak with binoculars and a handheld thermal monocular. "We initiated a visual survey of the western horizon and almost immediately observed a substantial, nonreflective, dark black triangular object most resembling a delta wing drone," they wrote in the FBI statement. They put its wingspan at nine to 15 feet and its thickness at one to two feet.

According to the AARO memo, the object climbed straight up for about 10 seconds to 200 to 300 feet above the ridge "without tilting, swaying, or wobbling," then "instantaneously arrested all vertical motion" and hovered for about 20 seconds. Then it went from a dead stop into high-speed flight, banked and followed a canyon down out of sight in two to three seconds. The agents estimated it was between 1.4 and 3.2 miles away.

"The ascent occurred in absolute acoustic silence," the memo says. Through the thermal monocular the craft showed one even heat signature across the whole airframe, with no hot spots or exhaust. The agents saw no windows, seams, intakes or control surfaces. The memo notes both men have "extensive operational experience" with unmanned aircraft and said even a small quadcopter would have been clearly audible at that distance. They reported no sickness, no electronic interference and no odd readings on their gear.

The FBI file also includes nine images of a desert ridge with a small black triangle placed at different points along its path. They are illustrations, not photos of the object: CBS News described them as "illustrations showing the scene and a representation of the craft," and The Guardian quoted Penn State historian Greg Eghigian calling them a triangle shape "superimposed on a landscape background."

Not the first triangle out West

AARO isn't treating this as a one-off. The office says the case "warrant[s] further investigation" because the object's shape and flight profile closely match "other reported incidents in the western United States region," according to the file's official summary. Earlier PURSUE batches included a 2023 report from federal agents who saw orange orbs release smaller red orbs over two days, and an August release in which an agent filmed two "black-hot" objects on infrared, CBS noted.

No official in the files says what the triangle was. The war.gov summary of AARO's memo states plainly that it "does not present a conclusive finding regarding the nature or origin" of the object, and the records draw no conclusion on whether these objects are a national security threat, Axios noted.

What else is in Release 07

The Department of War database lists 28 new documents in this batch and no new videos or images.

The Skinwalker files. Nine of the 28 files come from the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), a 2008-2012 DIA program run through contractor Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). Its Project Management Plan promised to study "craft" BAASS believed showed novel behavior. A 60-page April 2010 report on a Utah ranch logs interviews with more than 25 local residents, police officers and ranchers who described "dog-like" creatures running on two legs, "little people," orbs of light and "a maggot which measured about 8-feet long." The investigators planned "games, puzzles, and other strategies" to try to communicate with whatever was behind it. Their DNA test on one hair sample came back as a raccoon.

Cold War sightings. There are Air Force reports from a B-52 crew over Saudi Arabia in 1957 who tracked an unknown return on their gunnery scope, three Boy Scouts on Catalina Island who reported silver "flying saucers" in 1952, and a Swedish airline captain who in 1953 saw a "shining metal spherical elliptical object" pass his DC-3 at roughly the speed of sound.

Space-debris secrecy. A 1963 White House space council memo and two years of interagency correspondence show officials drafting public statements naming NASA as the holder of recovered foreign space fragments while privately planning to exploit them for technical intelligence. No final policy was ever settled.

The Project Sign officer. The batch also includes the personnel record of Col. Howard M. McCoy, the Air Materiel Command intelligence chief at Wright-Patterson when the Air Force launched Project Sign and Project Grudge.

The White House video

The 20-second clip on the White House post is set to Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me." It flashes pages from the new files, including the BAASS Utah ranch report's cover, a hand-drawn Guam map and the Catalina Island sighting forms. It also shows footage of a flat, dark triangle hovering over a mountain valley and a dark triangle over treetops at dusk. The clip doesn't say where that footage comes from, and the war.gov database lists no videos in this release.

How we got here

For decades, the government's line on UFOs ran through leaks and denials. The Pentagon only formally released the three famous Navy videos in April 2020, years after they leaked. In July 2023, former intelligence officer David Grusch told a House panel the U.S. had recovered "non-human" biologics from crash sites. In September 2025, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna's declassification task force aired video of a Hellfire missile striking an "orb" off Yemen.

Republicans in Congress kept pushing. "It's going to take the president of the United States to step up," Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told NewsNation in April. On Feb. 19, Trump did, ordering the Secretary of War and other agencies to begin "identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life" and UFOs, according to the statement posted on war.gov.

The first batch came May 8, with more than 160 records including Apollo-era photos, NPR reported. Critics, including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, called it a distraction, Reuters reported. Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) answered that: "If it is a distraction, I'll take it, because we've been fighting for some kind of disclosure or release for decades," he told The Hill. He also called that first wave "low-hanging fruit" and said the government will have to "dig very hard and deep."

Seven releases in, the site holds 478 files, according to the war.gov database. This was the smallest batch yet, and some UFO watchers online say they are tired of Cold War paperwork and want harder evidence, Mashable reported. But this one made public a detailed AARO and FBI account of an encounter from just four months ago.

What's next

"These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation," Secretary of War Pete Hegseth says in the statement on the PURSUE site, adding that it's time "the American people see it for themselves." The department says the work means reviewing "tens of millions of records, many existing only on paper," with new batches "every few weeks."

"The Department of War and our agency partners are actively working on the next release of UAP files," chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Friday. The department also says it welcomes "private-sector analysis" of the unresolved cases. All 28 new files are free to download at war.gov/UFO.