Fifth Pentagon Dump in a Year: Pilot Described a Triangle
New batch of 41 declassified files reveals testimonies from military pilots, unsettling videos, and decades-old analyses of unexplained phenomena.
New batch of 41 declassified files reveals testimonies from military pilots, unsettling videos, and decades-old analyses of unexplained phenomena.
On August 7, 2026, the Pentagon released its fifth batch of documents, photographs, and videos this year concerning Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), and among the 41 new files, one military pilot's account stands out: a massive triangular object that, in 2002 over Afghanistan, literally blotted out the stars. UAP is the term the U.S. government has adopted instead of the traditional UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) to encompass a broader spectrum of unexplained occurrences in the air, water, and space.
The release is part of an executive order by President Donald Trump, and the latest package includes more than seven decades of data gathered from multiple agencies, the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, State Department, and the Executive Office of the President. According to USA Today, the package includes over a dozen videos, three artist renderings based on eyewitness accounts, and numerous documents.
A military pilot's account from 2002 provides one of the most striking details: over Afghanistan, he spotted an unusual triangle so massive that it completely erased the stars in the night sky. The Pentagon accompanied the testimony with an artist's rendering reconstructing the encounter.
Beyond the Afghan triangle, the new batch presents a series of unexplained incidents around the world. One of the most notable videos, captured by a U.S. military sensor in 2025, shows, according to the BBC, a round object flying in a straight line over what appears to be a residential area in the Middle East; the Pentagon has officially classified it as a UAP.
There's also the "cold orb" over the Gulf of Oman, filmed in 2021. The dark object, estimated to be about four feet (1.2 meters) in diameter, moved in irregular patterns, and analysts confirmed it was a UAP, ruling out the possibility of an insect near the camera, as initially suspected.
A 2019 recording over the Pacific Ocean offers an even more bizarre sight: a black spherical object briefly disappears from the frame, then reappears and continues moving. The Pentagon notes that the footage was taken with a handheld device from a military sensor screen, which could explain some of the flickering, but the brief disappearance continues to intrigue researchers.
Among the documents is an FBI report with a statement from a former military pilot who, starting in October 2023, saw unexplained white lights at least ten times while flying the Boston-Dublin route. The lights would appear dim, brighten, and then vanish, some stationary, others in straight-line flight with occasional changes in direction. The pilot added that colleagues had reported similar sightings, most often between midnight and 3 a.m.
The oldest document in the series is a 1953 memorandum from the U.S. Navy's Photographic Interpretation Center, analyzing footage taken in Montana and Utah in 1950 and 1952. Investigators concluded that the objects exhibited characteristics "inconsistent with those of natural phenomena," noting that they appeared larger as their luminosity increased.
The documents cover sighting locations in the United States, Brazil, Sweden, Afghanistan, the Pacific Ocean, and the Middle East. While these documents do not confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life, they represent a significant step in the administration's efforts to increase transparency, and the Pentagon has announced that additional documents will continue to be released on an ongoing basis.
