Black triangle UFOs
Published 19 October 2026 · All guides
In short: since the 1980s, "black triangle" has been one of the most reported UFO shapes: a large, dark, silent triangle with a light at each corner. The best-known waves of sightings each have documented ordinary explanations, from aircraft in formation to illumination flares to a confessed hoax photograph. The US government's own 2024 review found no evidence of anything extraterrestrial. Some individual reports remain unexplained.
What people describe
The reports are remarkably consistent: a dark triangular shape, often described as huge, with a white light at each corner and sometimes a red or amber one in the middle. It is said to move slowly or hover, to make little or no sound, and sometimes to accelerate away suddenly. Most sightings are at night, when an observer can see the lights but not whatever carries them.
That last point is the key to most explanations. At night the brain joins three or four lights into a solid shape and fills the space between them with a dark hull that may not be there.
Rendlesham Forest, England, December 1980
Over several nights from 26 December 1980, US Air Force personnel at RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk reported lights in the forest beside the base. One airman, Jim Penniston, later described touching a small triangular craft. The deputy base commander, Lt Col Charles Halt, wrote a memo about the events in January 1981, released in 1983. The writer and astronomer Ian Ridpath has argued that the most persistent light was the Orford Ness lighthouse, visible through the trees from the forest. Witnesses have disputed that, and Rendlesham is still called "Britain's Roswell".
Hudson Valley, New York, 1983–1986
Many hundreds of people north of New York City, by some counts thousands, reported a huge boomerang or triangle of lights. The sightings were documented in the 1987 book Night Siege by J. Allen Hynek, Philip Imbrogno and Bob Pratt. Investigators traced many of them to a group of pilots flying small aircraft in tight formation at night with their lights arranged to look like one object.
The Belgian wave, 1989–1990
From 29 November 1989, around the town of Eupen, Belgians reported triangles with lights at the corners, and sightings ran on until April 1990. The Belgian UFO society SOBEPS reportedly collected some 2,600 reports.
On the night of 30–31 March 1990, after ground observers and radar reported unusual contacts, the Belgian Air Force scrambled two F-16s. Over about an hour they made several interception attempts and got a few brief radar locks, but the pilots never saw anything. Later analyses attributed the radar returns to atmospheric effects and the jets detecting each other.
The wave's most famous image is a photograph taken at Petit-Rechain in April 1990, showing a black triangle with lights at its corners. For years it was held up as the best photograph of a UFO ever taken. In July 2011 its photographer admitted on Belgian television that it was a hoax: a polystyrene triangle painted black, with a lamp at each corner, hung on a thread.
The Phoenix Lights, Arizona, 13 March 1997
Thousands of people across Arizona saw two separate things that evening.
- Around 8 p.m. a V-shaped formation of lights crossed the state, which many described as a single giant triangle. It has been traced to a formation of A-10 aircraft on a training exercise, flying with steady rather than blinking lights.
- Around 10 p.m. a row of bright lights seemed to hang over the city. The US Air Force said these were slow-falling illumination flares dropped by A-10s of the Maryland Air National Guard over a nearby range. The flares' heat makes their parachutes drift down slowly, so they appear to hover.
Arizona's governor, Fife Symington, mocked the sightings at a press conference that year. In 2007 he said he had seen the object himself and could not explain it.
The stealth aircraft theory
It is natural to suspect secret aircraft, and the timing is suggestive. The US acknowledged the F-117 stealth fighter, which had been flying in secret since the early 1980s, in November 1988, the same month the B-2 bomber was rolled out. Both are dark, angular and quiet compared with ordinary jets. But neither hovers, and the US said no stealth aircraft were flying over Belgium during the wave. A rumoured triangular craft called the TR-3B appears often online; there is no documentary evidence it exists.
The official position
In March 2024 the US Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) published a review of US government records going back to 1945. It found no evidence that any government investigation had confirmed a sighting as extraterrestrial technology, and no evidence for claims that the government had recovered or reverse-engineered any. It concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects misidentified, while acknowledging that many reports remain unresolved for lack of good data.
Where Celestrike comes in
In Celestrike some of the contacts your cameras catch are triangles with a light at each corner, and the game never says what they are. Later you can build a black triangle of your own, the TRB-01, from what recovery teams bring back. Celestrike is a free spy-satellite strategy game for iPhone and Android, played on real orbits — on the App Store and Google Play.