FD-302, “Airborne Lights and Triangle,” 2002, 2023-2024

This FD-302 records an FBI interview from March 2024 with a pilot, formerly in the U.S. military, who was still flying. Most of it concerns lights that he, and by his account many other pilots, had been seeing at night since October 2023. The last part goes back to a single night in Afghanistan in 2002, which the FBI later turned into a rendering, FBI-UAP-D025.

Lights seen from the cockpit

His first sighting, he said, came in October 2023 on a flight from Boston to Dublin: white lights toward Gander, Canada, apparently higher than his own 37,000 feet, which grew brighter and then faded in cycles lasting from ten seconds to a minute. He ruled out landing lights, Starlink, satellites and meteors. He counted about ten sightings since, lasting 45 minutes to two hours, usually between midnight and 3 a.m., in every direction but south, and seemingly hundreds of miles away. In February 2024, about 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis, he filmed white lights to the north on his phone from a darkened cockpit; the interview walks through timestamps in that video, and he said he never felt unsafe.

Bagram, 2002

As a reservist activated to Afghanistan in June 2002, he was looking at the stars with another pilot at about 4:30 a.m. when stars began to be blotted out over Bagram. He described a silent equilateral triangle with no lights, perhaps 500 feet across, crossing west to east at a steady speed he put near 150 knots, though he could not see its whole outline. The other pilot saw it too. He said he never found anything in the data to explain it. All of this is his recollection; the FBI records it without assessment.