FD-302, Unidentified Aerial Object Observation Report, 2026

This FD-302 is the FBI’s record of the sighting that AARO wrote up in DOW-UAP-D176. It is not a question-and-answer interview: it notes that the Bureau received a written statement co-signed by two special agents and reproduces it word for word, titled “Unidentified Aerial Object Observation Report.” Their names, the location and the day are redacted, and the release puts the event in June 2026 in the western United States. Like every 302, it carries the standard line that it contains “neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI.”

The agents’ statement

At about 1923 hours, someone at a post the statement calls Observation Post 6 called out a “thermally elevated aerial object” to the west, on a bearing of about 251 degrees. The two agents ran from the east side of their post to the west side and almost at once saw “a substantial, nonreflective, dark black triangular object most resembling a delta wing drone.” They estimated it at nine to fifteen feet across, six to nine feet deep and one to two feet thick. One agent watched it through a handheld thermal device and found it warmer than its surroundings, evenly so across the whole airframe, with no visible exhaust; the other followed it by eye throughout.

They describe it rising vertically over a ridge about 3.2 miles west, climbing to about 200 feet above it, then switching to fast horizontal flight toward them before descending to the southeast along a feature whose name is redacted. They lost sight of it at an estimated 1.5 miles. They heard nothing, and the statement ends by calling the object “the unmanned aerial system.”

Pictures and differences

Pages 3 to 11 are uncaptioned color images of the same dusk view of hills and a valley, with a small black triangle at a different spot in each. They appear to be one photograph with the shape placed along the reported path — a reconstruction, not imagery of the event — but the file does not say who made them.

Set beside AARO’s memo, the numbers do not all match: 1923 here against 2023 there, a wingspan of 9–15 feet against 13–15, and a “total duration” of about three seconds where AARO’s phases add up to more than half a minute. The 302 makes no mention of a hover. Neither document explains these gaps, and neither identifies the object.