Digital Rendering, “Airborne Triangle,” 2002

This image is the FBI’s 2026 visual reconstruction of one memory from the pilot interview in FBI-UAP-D024. Most of that interview concerns lights the pilot says he saw from the cockpit far more recently; this picture illustrates the older story, from his time as a reservist called up for duty in Afghanistan.

The account behind the picture

As he told the FBI, he was outside before dawn, at about half past four local time, looking at the stars with another pilot when stars began to disappear over Bagram, as if something enormous were passing overhead from west to east. He described an equilateral triangle, silent and showing no lights, moving at a steady speed and altitude, perhaps around a hundred and fifty knots. He estimated it at about five hundred feet across, though he could not make out its whole outline. The other pilot saw it too and asked whether he had. He said he never discussed it with anyone else, and never found anything that would explain it.

What a rendering can and cannot do

The FBI prepared a set of these images as visual aids for the PURSUE release. Because the object was seen only as a dark shape against the stars, any picture of it has to fill in what the witness could not see. It illustrates a recollection more than two decades old, not a recorded observation, and the interview offers no explanation.