Unknown

Two Triangles Over Colorado Springs, October 2023 (FBI FD-302s, PURSUE Release 05)

Colorado Springs, Colorado · October 2023 · Government file · United States

FBI-UAP-D031, the digital rendering the FBI released with the FD-302 catalogued as FBI-UAP-D030. THIS IS NOT A PHOTOGRAPH. It is artwork the Federal Bureau of Investigation produced in 2026, more than two years after the event, from a verbal description given by a single interviewee, and it was made as a visual aid for the PURSUE release rather than as evidence. It shows a large dark triangle carrying three red lights above a car park at night, which is what the witness described. (Federal Bureau of Investigation digital rendering, released by the U.S. Department of War in PURSUE Release 05 (public domain U.S. government work). Recovered from KRDO’s republication of the released image.)

Two people in Colorado Springs told the FBI they watched a silent triangle in October 2023. One saw a see-through craft the size of an SUV pass 300 feet over his back porch. The other saw a black triangle with a red light at each corner, as wide as the parking lot he was standing in. The Bureau interviewed them nine months apart and never said whether they saw the same thing.

What did witnesses see at Colorado Springs?

On an October night in 2023, at approximately 10:50 PM, a man and his wife were sitting on the back porch of their Colorado Springs home. The porch faced southwest and they had their backs to the house. He later told the FBI he did not remember seeing many stars that night even though the sky was clear. As he was looking up, he suddenly noticed that something had flown over his house from behind him, coming from the northeast and moving away to the southwest.

He registered the movement first, then the silhouette. The object looked "almost see-through" and carried "what appeared to be a haze or distortion around it", as if viewed through mist, and he said "there were ripples like you were looking at an object that is underwater". It was a perfect triangle, though his viewing angle left him unable to say whether it was isosceles or equilateral. The colour was dark gray or silver, a shade that would have blended into the night sky, and he thought the distortion may have been what made it look translucent. Its edges and corners seemed rounded, though he allowed the distortion could have softened them. He judged it possibly as low as 300 feet and roughly the size of a large SUV. At arm's length it covered about the span between his thumb and his forefinger, which he put at five inches.

The triangle travelled point forward. Along the flat trailing edge was "a band of silverish blue light", which he guessed might be connected to whatever propelled it. It held a straight path at constant elevation and covered a lot of ground very fast, and just before it went out of sight the left side banked up quickly to an almost vertical orientation without changing course or altitude. It was completely silent, and he felt no rumble, no static and no other effect as it passed overhead. The whole observation lasted four seconds, it ended sooner than he expected, and there was no time to get his phone out. He lived near an airport, watched private planes and helicopters cross his house routinely, and said he was very familiar with all USAF aircraft including the latest unmanned drones. What he and his wife saw "did not match anything he encountered before". It was, in his words, "only a triangle without any extra wings, fins, or any bubble for the engine housing".

The second account describes a different looking object earlier in the evening. Between 8:00 and 9:30 PM on an October night in 2023, a man who by his own description frequently watches military, commercial and civilian aircraft over Colorado Springs walked over to a co-worker and began looking up at the stars on a clear night. A very bright star caught his eye. He had watched it for five to ten seconds when he noticed movement in his left peripheral vision, looked up and to his left, and saw "a dark-gray colored cloud phasing into his sight". The cloud was stationary and looked very strange, "as if it was pixelated or distorted in some other manner".

As he watched, a steady diffuse red light appeared on the bottom front point of a solid black triangular object emerging from the cloud toward the south southeast. The body behind that point widened until he could see the whole equilateral triangle with a red light in each of its three corners. He estimated it was very large, possibly as wide as the parking lot he was standing in, and three to five stories thick. At arm's length each of the three lights was the size of a fingernail. It moved south and slightly east at a steady speed he compared to a helicopter, at what he put at 3,000 to 5,000 feet, the altitude of small civilian aircraft on training flights. Then it accelerated almost instantaneously to what he thought might be Mach 1 or 2 and turned, heading roughly south or south southwest. Waves surrounded the object and radiated from it, which he compared to the mirage effect you see looking down a hot road. There was no sound, no visible means of propulsion, and no smell.

As it moved it abruptly banked ninety degrees onto its left side, three lights still visible, veering right, then banked back down to level flight. The form records his point that this was the opposite of the way a conventional aircraft banks into the direction it is turning. He lost sight of it to the south, looked back to where it had first appeared, and found the dark-gray cloud had gone. About sixty seconds later he called his wife, and she said his voice sounded robotic, as though there were electronic interference on the call.

More footage and images of this sighting

FBI-UAP-D026, FD-302, "Dark Translucent Triangle," 2023. Three page FBI interview form recording a January 2026 interview about the 10:50 PM sighting. Redacted throughout, with page three the heaviest. View source

FBI-UAP-D030, FD-302, "Large Triangle with Red Lights," 2023. Three page FBI interview form recording an October 2025 interview about the 8:00 to 9:30 PM sighting. Page three is blank apart from the form header. View source

FBI-UAP-D027, Digital Rendering, "Dark Translucent Triangle," 2023. FBI artist's rendering made in 2026, five pages showing a sequence: two silhouetted figures in a fenced suburban back yard, and a faint pale triangle high in the sky that on later frames is banked to near vertical. Not a photograph. View source

NUFORC report 178707, Colorado Springs 80917, occurred 5 October 2023 at 21:45, shape Triangle, summary "Spotted 3 red lights in the shape of triangle", filed 5 October 2023 and posted 28 October 2023. Read from the archived October 2023 index; the individual report page is unreachable. View source

What is the official explanation?

There is no official explanation of either sighting. What exists is the paperwork.

Both accounts are recorded on FBI form FD-302, the standard form the Bureau uses to memorialise an interview. The Department of War released them on 7 August 2026 in the fifth tranche of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, published at war.gov/UFO. That tranche carries 41 records dated 7 August 2026 in the Department's own machine-readable manifest, served at war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-data.csv with a release query parameter. The live file refuses every non-browser client, but the manifest is recoverable through the Wayback Machine and we read it directly for this case.

Four records make up the Colorado Springs material. FBI-UAP-D026 is the FD-302 titled "Dark Translucent Triangle," 2023, which the Department describes as recording "a January 2026 interview with a former employee of the Department of War". FBI-UAP-D027 is its paired digital rendering. FBI-UAP-D030 is the FD-302 titled "Large Triangle with Red Lights," 2023, recording "an October 2025 interview with a U.S. Person". FBI-UAP-D031 is its paired rendering. All four carry Incident Date 2023 and Incident Location "Colorado Springs, Colorado". Both FD-302s are flagged as redacted in the manifest. Both renderings are flagged Featured.

The renderings are not photographs and the Department says so. Its blurb for D031 states the image "is an artistic interpretation of a reported incident", that it "is based upon a first-hand description provided by a U.S. Person", and that "The Federal Bureau of Investigation prepared this digital rendering in 2026 as a visual aid in support of the PURSUE initiative". D027 carries the same framing. Nobody photographed either object. Everything visual in this file was drawn three years after the event from what a witness said.

A word on how this file was read, because it matters for what can be trusted here. The PDFs at war.gov return HTTP 403 to every non-browser client and none of the four Colorado Springs records has an individual Wayback capture. The whole release does: the Department also publishes a bundle of the tranche's documents, and the Wayback Machine holds a working capture of it. The two FD-302s and both renderings were recovered from that bundle and read directly, so the quotations in this file come from the documents themselves rather than from press summaries of them. The one thing that cannot be recovered is what the Bureau blacked out.

The forms show how much is missing. In D026 the interview date reads 01 followed by a redacted day, 2026, and the interviewing Special Agent and Supervisory Special Agent are blacked out. The event date reads "On October" followed by a black box, "2023". The street address is gone, the witness's name is gone, and the point over which he lost sight of the object is gone. Page three is the most heavily redacted, with several complete lines blacked out. In D030 the interview was conducted by a Supervisory Special Agent and a Task Force Agent in October 2025, day redacted. The event day, the co-worker's name, the place the object passed over and the witness's mobile provider are all redacted, and page three is blank apart from the form header.

One piece of the official record deserves attention because it is checkable. The manifest carries pairing columns showing which records the Department considers parts of the same event, and it uses them generously elsewhere: the Western United States event of October 2023 is cross-paired across nineteen identifiers, and the Gulf of Oman set is cross-paired across its own cluster. Here the Department paired D026 only to D027, and D030 only to D031. It did not link the two Colorado Springs interviews to each other. That is not proof of anything, but the government that holds both unredacted files declined to present them as one incident.

No candidate identification is offered anywhere in the release, and no radar correlation has been published for either report, which is worth stating plainly given where this happened. The commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command "maintains his headquarters at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado", and the NORAD and U.S. Northern Command Command Center there is described by NORAD as "a central collection and coordination facility for a worldwide system of sensors". NORAD places the Cheyenne Mountain Complex "a short distance from NORAD and USNORTHCOM headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado". U.S. Space Command's own fact sheet puts its headquarters at Peterson with additional functions at Schriever, and the U.S. Air Force Academy sits at the north end of the same city. If any sensor in that architecture caught either object, the public record does not say so.

What did the witnesses think it was?

Neither man claimed to know what he had seen. Both anchored their accounts in ordinary aviation experience and then said the object fell outside it.

The D026 witness built his case on familiarity. He lived near an airport, watched aircraft and helicopters cross his house routinely, and said he knew how a normal aircraft should look and sound overhead. He also said he was very familiar with all USAF aircraft including the latest unmanned drones. His conclusion was negative rather than exotic: the object matched nothing he had encountered, and it was only a triangle, with no wings, no fins, and no bubble for an engine housing. He offered one speculation, that the band of silver blue light along the trailing edge might relate to propulsion, and flagged it as a guess.

His wife is the second witness on that account, and the way the FD-302 records what they did next is the most methodologically interesting line in either document. It says that immediately following the event both of them went inside to separate rooms, and then the text is redacted. What survives is that his wife remembered seeing "a dark seem running around the edge of the UAP", a detail he did not report himself. Separating two witnesses before they compare notes is the standard way of testing whether an account is shared observation or shared narrative, and the form indicates it happened within minutes, in 2023, years before any federal interest. The rest of what she said is blacked out.

The D030 witness had a companion too, a co-worker he had walked over to, though the form records no statement from that person. His own framing was that of a habitual observer of local traffic, which is why the acceleration and the ninety degree bank mattered to him: he described the bank as running counter to the way a conventional aircraft rolls into a turn. He mentioned the call to his wife sixty seconds later and her remark that he sounded robotic, and he was asked for his mobile provider, which the FBI redacted.

There is one genuinely independent civilian trace, and it did not come from the government. The National UFO Reporting Center holds report 178707, filed on 5 October 2023 for an event the same day at 21:45, listed under "Colorado Springs 80917", shape Triangle, with the summary line "Spotted 3 red lights in the shape of triangle". It was posted to the public database on 28 October 2023, weeks before the FBI interviewed anyone about any of this and nearly three years before the Department published the FD-302s. That is a contemporaneous, non-federal report of the D030 morphology in the right city in the right month.

The limits on that finding matter as much as the finding. NUFORC refuses non-browser clients, the individual report page has no archived copy, and only the first page of the October 2023 index survives in the Wayback Machine, covering 1 to 9 October and 100 rows. The rest of the month is unchecked, and what we have is the index row and its one line summary rather than the witness's full narrative. The listed time of 21:45 also sits about fifteen minutes outside the 8:00 to 9:30 PM window the FD-302 describes, and the FD-302's day is redacted, so the two cannot be matched to a night. The same index page shows the only other Colorado entries in that stretch were an orb over Denver on 7 October and a cylinder over Parker on 5 October, neither resembling either FBI account.

Is the Two Triangles Over Colorado Springs, October 2023 (FBI FD-302s, PURSUE Release 05) real? The two-pass assessment

Pass one. How could this be entirely ordinary?

Start with the perceptual answer, because it is the strongest and the witnesses cannot rule it out. Human vision is poor at resolving an unlit object at night and worse at judging its range, size and speed, and it readily closes three separate lights into one solid body. The classic triangle reports rest on that mechanism. The first phase of the Phoenix Lights in 1997 involved a formation of separate aircraft that many observers described as a single craft, and the Illinois sightings of January 2000 and the Belgian wave of 1989 to 1990 turn on the same argument. UAP Globe carries all three. The D030 report is textbook material for it: three red lights at the corners of a triangle, over a city with heavy night air traffic, is precisely what a three-ship formation with anticollision beacons looks like from underneath. Fill in the dark body between them and you have the reported object without a single unknown.

Colorado Springs makes that candidate live rather than theoretical. Colorado Springs Airport shares its airfield with Peterson Space Force Base, so military and civil traffic run over the same city, and both witnesses said as much themselves: one lived under an approach path and one watched military, commercial and civilian aircraft as a habit. Large multi-engine aircraft at night are routinely misread, particularly when an unfamiliar lighting arrangement hides the planform. A B-2 Spirit is worth naming because a dark flying wing at night is the canonical triangle misidentification, although the fit is poor here, since the D026 object was described as roughly SUV sized at possibly 300 feet, an order of magnitude smaller than a 172 foot wingspan, and neither witness reported engine noise, which a bomber at low level does not spare you. Airships are quiet and large and would suit the slow opening phase of D030, but not the acceleration and not a fast low pass. Drones in 2023 could be mistaken for many things, but nothing then in common use was parking lot sized.

The distortion reports also have prosaic readings. A dark object seen against a light polluted urban sky, at a low elevation angle through a long column of air, genuinely can look hazy and rippled, and mirage is a description many observers reach for without it implying anything unusual. The dark-gray cloud that appeared and later vanished may simply have been thin cloud lit by city glow, whatever the witness's impression of a clear sky. The robotic voice on the phone call deserves no weight at all: mobile codecs degrade constantly, and one degraded call a minute after an exciting event is not an electromagnetic effect, it is a phone call. And the D026 observation lasted four seconds, which is not much to build a shape, an altitude, a size and a surface texture on.

Now the two witness question, which has to be answered before anything is claimed here, because independent corroboration is the most valuable thing an archive can report and therefore the thing most worth doubting.

The case for one event is thin and rests almost entirely on coincidence of place and month: same city, same October, both triangles, both silent, both surrounded by visual distortion. The case for two separate events is much better supported. The times do not overlap, because 10:50 PM cannot sit inside a window that closes at 9:30 PM. The objects do not match. One was roughly SUV sized at possibly 300 feet, translucent, dark gray or silver, with a single band of silver blue light along its trailing edge. The other was as wide as a parking lot at 3,000 to 5,000 feet, solid black, with a red light at each of three corners. They travelled in different directions. The Department describes the witnesses differently, one a former Department of War employee and one a U.S. Person, and the FBI interviewed them nine months apart, in October 2025 and January 2026. The Bureau gave the objects different descriptive names. And the Department, which holds both unredacted files, paired each FD-302 only to its own rendering and never to the other case, in a manifest where it cross-pairs freely when it does treat records as one event.

So the reasoned position is that these are two separate observations, probably on different nights, that happen to share a city and a month. Whether the two men saw the same class of object is a further question the released record cannot settle, and it will not settle it, because the days and the specific locations are redacted in both files. Anyone presenting this as two witnesses to one craft is going beyond the documents.

Pass two. If either report is real, what is it?

What resists the ordinary readings is behaviour rather than appearance. In D026 the left side of the triangle rolled to near vertical with no change in heading or altitude, which is not how a banking aircraft behaves and not how a formation looks. In D030 the object banked ninety degrees with all three lights holding fixed positions relative to one another, which is the specific observation a three-ship formation reading has to explain away, and then it accelerated almost instantaneously with no reported sonic boom. Both objects were silent. Both were reported by people who watch aircraft habitually and whose default explanation should have been aircraft.

The procedural details count too. On the D026 account the couple separated into different rooms immediately, in 2023, and the wife independently recalled a dark seam around the edge that her husband did not mention. The FBI committed supervisory agents and a task force agent to two interviews and paid for two digital renderings in 2026. The Department published the pair in a tranche it characterises as unresolved. And the NUFORC report filed on 5 October 2023 puts a triangle of three red lights over Colorado Springs, in public, weeks before any federal interview and years before the release, which is the one piece of this file no part of the government produced.

Set against that, there is no photograph, no video and no radar. The only imagery is FBI artwork drawn in 2026 from words. The most heavily monitored airspace in North America sits under and around these reports and nothing sensor derived has been published for either. The days are redacted, so neither account can be checked against flight activity or against the NUFORC filing. That is not evidence of a cover-up, and it is not evidence of anything anomalous either. It is a case that rests on two people's testimony, recorded on a federal form, and left open.

No official explanation has been offered, and none of the ordinary candidates closes either report on the evidence published. The tier is Unknown.