FBI black triangle UFO report: is Sean Kirkpatrick right?

One of the biggest stories in the latest tranche of UAP files released by the Pentagon, the seventh one I believe, was an FBI report about a black triangle sighting. Now Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), has told Fox News Digital that the account lacks the evidence needed to say what the witnesses actually saw. I'm in a strange place with this one. Whenever I listen to him speak I don't believe anything he says, but many of the things he's saying here are fair questions.

The sighting came from various sources. There was no filmed evidence and there were no pictures, only reports and sketches of what people say they saw. When someone says there's no evidence to support it and we probably shouldn't take it that seriously, that doesn't sound unreasonable. Then you find out who's saying it.

Why Sean Kirkpatrick dismissing UAP claims is no surprise to me

Kirkpatrick pushing back on anything potentially happening with UAPs or UFOs is part of his routine at this point. What makes it interesting this time is that the material comes from files the Pentagon itself released.

It doesn't surprise me, because from my point of view his job whenever he's asked is to wave everything away. The way I see it, it's like this: someone says they have a recording of him talking to the people from Skinwalker Ranch, and the response is that he never met them. Then a recording shows up of him sitting next to one of them, and the story shifts to it being someone else, or maybe they walked in and he didn't pay attention. That's the kind of pattern I've seen from him, and it's why I struggle to take what he says at face value.

What the FBI black triangle report describes

According to Fox News Digital, the records include a sighting involving FBI personnel who reportedly saw a dark, nonreflective triangular object with no visible engines, exhaust or conventional propulsion system. It reportedly rose above a mountain ridge before rapidly disappearing into a canyon.

A separate AARO report described a matte black triangular object that climbed about 200 to 300 feet above the ridge line, hovered for around 20 seconds and appeared to accelerate almost instantly. Officials also confirmed to Fox News Digital that the images accompanying the FBI triangular object report are illustrations, not photographs of the object itself.

Kirkpatrick says relying on FBI witnesses is "authority bias"

Kirkpatrick, who spent nearly 30 years in the Department of Defense and the intelligence community, said the witnesses' FBI backgrounds alone are not enough to validate what they reported. "There's a lot of people that like to point to folks as being credible witnesses and therefore their testimony must be taken as at face value," he told Fox News Digital, adding "that is a classic case of authority bias."

He said the lack of photographs or other supporting evidence makes it difficult to determine what, if anything, the witnesses encountered. In his view, some of this is simply people saying they saw something they can't identify, and he said people sometimes fill that gap with extreme beliefs that have repeatedly proven inaccurate. He pointed to advanced aerospace technology as one possible explanation for some triangular sightings, comparing them to reports involving the F-117 stealth aircraft before that technology became widely known.

AARO's three buckets and what unresolved really means

Kirkpatrick said AARO approached UAP reports by examining three broad possibilities: advanced technology used by a foreign adversary, ordinary objects or sensor effects that are misunderstood, or an extraterrestrial explanation. "You got three very distinct buckets," he said. Each possibility has specific signatures, he explained, and investigators compare actual data from a sighting, not just a story, against them. "None of that data that we saw and reviewed and analyzed matches any alien hypothesis theory," he said.

According to Kirkpatrick, most of the cases his office examined involved ordinary objects or phenomena that sensors were not designed to recognize. A small number showed signs of possible foreign adversary involvement and were referred to national security officials. He cautioned that the word unresolved in government UAP records does not necessarily mean something inexplicable. He said it generally means there's no data, or insufficient data, to analyze, so you can't conclude one way or the other. Investigators may have an idea of what an object likely was based on similar cases, but without enough raw data they can't reach a definitive conclusion.

Kirkpatrick says Pentagon leadership told AARO to remove its answers

Kirkpatrick also said that some cases released publicly as unresolved had previously been resolved by AARO. He said many were resolved and that he even briefed several of them to Congress with answers on what they were or were likely to be. According to him, Pentagon leadership directed AARO to remove all of the resolution language and put the cases out as unresolved, letting the people make up their own minds.

He called that the worst thing you can do, saying it continues to "feed the flames of conspiracy with a whole bunch of nonsense." Fox News Digital notes that Kirkpatrick did not specify when the directive was issued or which Pentagon leaders were involved. Separately, a War Department official told the outlet on background that the department is not providing any comment or assessment on the files overall or on specific files, and that the American people can make up their own minds.

Unidentified versus unresolved, balloons and alien visitation

Kirkpatrick said unidentified carries a different meaning from unresolved, though the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. As an example, he pointed to the objects shot down over North America after the discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon in 2023, which were initially unidentified before investigators determined they were balloons. He also said historical sightings must be weighed against the technology that existed at the time, citing early high altitude balloon programs as a possible explanation for some reports of bright objects in the sky.

On the bigger question, he said there are thousands of reports, but if there were alien visitations to Earth, there are not thousands of them. He said the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe should not be confused with evidence that extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth. It's statistically invalid to believe there's no life out there, in his view, but the probability of it being here is just as statistically unrealistic. Looking broadly at the latest records, he said he saw little that changed his assessment.

Why I think Kirkpatrick is right about the government's silence

I'm torn on this. If it were somebody I found credible, somebody I believed wanted answers and was being upfront with the public, I would take many of these answers at face value. It's hard to say something is 100 percent one thing based only on what people said they saw. As I said when I first covered this release, they might have actual imagery or actual pictures, but that's not what we were shown.

On the idea of telling people to make up their own minds, I agree with him. If the government is putting these things out, it should address them. It shouldn't just ask the public what they think. He's right that this leads people to decide it must be one thing or another, when officials might have the answers or might not. They should offer what it is or what they think it is, a hypothesis, and try to figure it out together. Instead it's take a look at this, have fun, and off to the midterms. That's essentially what happened.

I also think it makes sense that you can't say for certain it's an alien ship. It very well could be other technology from somewhere else, or tests other governments were working on. It could be. We don't know. I wish there had been real imagery instead of a rendering, because without it, it gives merit to people like Kirkpatrick and Mick West, since there's nothing there.

Why I still don't trust Sean Kirkpatrick

None of that takes away from the fact that Kirkpatrick ran AARO, and from my perspective he was doing what J. Allen Hynek was supposed to do at Project Blue Book: shut everything down, don't take anybody seriously, and if you do, don't do it publicly. Hold it close to the vest, deny, and go after and discredit the people saying things. That's what I see throughout his career, from the LinkedIn post about David Grusch to the way he keeps going after people.

It would go a long way with me if he said something like: in my time there, I had conversations that made me think maybe this could be some other kind of technology, or NHI technology, and I couldn't find anything I can show as valid proof yet, but there were some strange claims and I understood them. Instead, he shoots everybody down and tries to make them look small. This case isn't necessarily an example of that, but it is another example of him shutting things down. I think he knows the answers, if there was anything. And when it comes to him sitting down with Brandon Fugal and those guys and then saying he didn't, I simply don't believe him.

With this particular release, that's one of the reasons I don't think it did much: it's a rendering of people saying they saw something. I don't discredit the witnesses. I happen to think it probably was something else, because it lines up with other accounts of the black triangle people have reported before. Grusch made the point on Joe Rogan's show that if you keep releasing material like this, it goes nowhere. And not addressing it while letting the public come up with their own theories is, to me, the most foolish approach there is.