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The former head of the Pentagon’s UFO investigation office is pouring cold water on a mysterious black triangular object reportedly spotted by FBI personnel, telling Fox News Digital that the newly released account lacks the evidence needed to determine what the witnesses actually saw.
Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said strange sightings detailed in recently declassified government records should be viewed through an evidence-based lens rather than as proof of something extraterrestrial.
The records include a 2026 sighting involving FBI personnel who reported seeing a dark, nonreflective triangular object with no visible engines, exhaust or conventional propulsion system rise above a mountain ridge before rapidly disappearing into a canyon.
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A separate AARO report described a matte-black triangular object that climbed about 200 to 300 feet above the ridgeline, hovered for roughly 20 seconds and then appeared to accelerate almost instantly.
Kirkpatrick, who spent nearly 30 years in the Department of Defense and intelligence community, said the witnesses’ FBI backgrounds alone are not enough to validate what they reported seeing.
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“There’s a lot of people that like to point to folks as being credible witnesses and therefore their testimony must be taken at face value,” Kirkpatrick told Fox News Digital. “And that is a classic case of authority bias.”
Kirkpatrick said the lack of photographs or other supporting evidence makes it difficult to determine what, if anything, the witnesses encountered.
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“Some of this is just, ‘hey, I saw something, I don’t know what it is,’” Kirkpatrick said. “People sometimes have a tendency to fill that gap with very extreme beliefs that have time and again proven to be inaccurate and fallible.”
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 the technology became widely known.
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AARO approached UAP reports by examining three broad possibilities, Kirkpatrick said: advanced technology used by a foreign adversary, ordinary objects or sensor effects that are misunderstood, or an extraterrestrial explanation.
“You’ve got 3 very distinct buckets,” Kirkpatrick said.
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Each possibility has specific signatures that investigators can compare against data collected from a sighting, he explained.
“When you get data from an observation, actual data, not just a story, you compare that data to those signatures,” Kirkpatrick said.
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“None of the data that we saw and reviewed and analyzed matches an alien hypothesis theory,” he added.
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 for further investigation.
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But the word “unresolved,” which appears in government UAP records, does not necessarily mean investigators encountered something inexplicable, Kirkpatrick cautioned.
“When we say a case is unresolved, it generally means there is no data or there is insufficient data to actually analyze it,” Kirkpatrick said. “And so you can’t conclude one way or the other.”
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Investigators may have an idea of what an object likely was based on similar cases, he said, but without sufficient raw data, they cannot reach a definitive conclusion.
Kirkpatrick said some cases released publicly as unresolved had previously been resolved by AARO.
“Many of these cases, we did resolve, and I even briefed several of them to Congress with the answers and what they were and what they were likely to be,” Kirkpatrick said.
He said Pentagon leadership directed AARO to remove language explaining what investigators had determined before some cases were released publicly as unresolved.
“Pentagon leadership had told AARO to remove all of the resolution language and put these cases out as unresolved,” Kirkpatrick said. “Letting, and I quote, ‘the people make up their own mind,’ which is the absolute worst thing that you could do because all you’ve done is continue to just feed the flames of conspiracy with a whole bunch of nonsense.”
Kirkpatrick did not specify when the directive was issued or which Pentagon leaders were involved.
The War Department separately told Fox News Digital that it is not providing assessments of the newly released files, allowing the public to reach its own conclusions.
“We are not providing any comment or assessment on the files overall or on any specific file, so that the American people can make up their own minds regarding the files,” a War Department official said on background.
The department also confirmed that images accompanying the FBI triangular-object report were illustrations rather than photographs of the object itself.
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Kirkpatrick said “unidentified” carries a different meaning than “unresolved,” though the terms are sometimes used interchangeably.
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“Unidentified generally means we can see and characterize an object and we have data to support that characterization, but we don’t know what it is,” he said.
He pointed to objects shot down over North America following the discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon in 2023 as examples of objects that were initially unidentified before investigators determined they were balloons.
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Other records released by the government stretch back decades, including reports of strange objects near California’s Santa Catalina Island in the 1950s.
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Kirkpatrick said historical sightings must also be considered alongside the technology that existed at the time, pointing to early high-altitude balloon programs as a possible explanation for some reports of bright objects in the sky.
Read the Catalina Island report here:
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“There are thousands of these reports,” Kirkpatrick said. “And so even if there were alien visitations to Earth, there are not thousands of them.”
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The possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe should not be confused with evidence that extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth, Kirkpatrick said.
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“It’s statistically invalid to believe that’s not going to be the case, but the probability of them being here is just as statistically unrealistic,” he said.
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Looking broadly at the latest records, Kirkpatrick said he saw little that changed his assessment.
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“I mean, there’s nothing new,” Kirkpatrick said.
Fox News Digital reached out to the FBI for comment.
