The Seattle Triangle (1993)
In November 1993, near East Marginal Way South, beside Boeing Field (King County International Airport), Seattle, Washington, on a Sunday night in November 1993, at about 9:30 pm, Seattle writer and graphic artist Gary Val Tenuta was driving north on East Marginal Way South, the road that runs along the western edge of Boeing Field, when he noticed three red lights low in the sky ahead of him and to his right. This case file covers what witnesses reported, the official narrative, and a two-pass assessment with its evidence tier.
What did witnesses see at East Marginal Way South?
On a Sunday night in November 1993, at about 9:30 pm, Seattle writer and graphic artist Gary Val Tenuta was driving north on East Marginal Way South, the road that runs along the western edge of Boeing Field, when he noticed three red lights low in the sky ahead of him and to his right. In his own words, "I noticed three red lights low in the sky ahead of me and to my right. They were moving in unison, very slowly across my field of vision from east to west." His first thought was aircraft on approach, since Boeing Field handles steady traffic, then helicopters. Both guesses unsettled him for the same reason: "the lights weren't blinking. I thought that was odd." Aircraft and helicopters carry blinking position lights. These three did not blink, and they held a rigid formation as they crossed the sky.
As the lights drew closer they passed almost directly over the road, so Tenuta pulled his car onto the shoulder, rolled down the window, then got out entirely to see straight up. What he describes seeing is the heart of the case. The three red lights were not three separate objects. They were the three corners of a single solid shape. "A gigantic black triangle," he wrote, "a huge, black, triangle; not just 'sort of' triangular shaped. It was just one big, three-sided, cookie-cutter-straight-edged, black, geometric shape. A triangle with one large, round unblinking red light at each of its three corners." He estimated the object was "about the size of a football field," moving slowly enough that he called it "floating rather than flying," at a few miles per hour. At the time he judged it to be perhaps 150 feet overhead, low enough that something that large and that close should have produced obvious engine noise.
It did not. The silence is the detail Tenuta returns to. "The object didn't make a sound. Something that huge, that close, moving through the air at a snail's pace should be making some kind of a sound. But, no." The night sky helped him see it. Seattle's city lights were reflecting off a high, solid gray cloud ceiling, and the black triangle stood out against that faintly lit backdrop as "a huge, dense black silhouette." He watched it continue west, the same direction it had been heading the whole time, until it blended into the dark horizon beyond the airfield and he could no longer make it out. The entire encounter lasted on the order of a few minutes from first noticing the lights to losing the craft in the distance. Tenuta had no camera with him, and in his account he names no other witness standing with him on that stretch of road.
What is the official explanation?
There is no government incident report, no Project Blue Book file (Blue Book had closed in 1969), and no FAA or air traffic statement naming this sighting. Boeing Field is a busy King County airport sitting under controlled airspace, so a genuinely solid craft the size of a football field drifting low over the field would in principle have been a candidate for radar or tower attention, yet no such record has surfaced under Tenuta's name. The sighting was not logged contemporaneously with the National UFO Reporting Center, which is itself based in the Seattle area, nor is it tied to a published MUFON case number. As a contemporaneous event it left no official paper trail.
What did happen is unusual and is the closest thing to an official entanglement this case has. Tenuta's account did not stay a private story. He signed a sworn affidavit describing the sighting, and that affidavit became part of a Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) legal action brought by attorney Peter A. Gersten against the United States Department of Defense. This is documented in the witness's own later public appearances. The Barb Adams Live program for 4 June 2011 announced that "Gary's sighting of a 'black triangle UFO' and his affidavit attesting to the facts about the sighting became part of a legal suit filed against the U.S. Department of Defense by attorney Peter Gersten (a.k.a. The UFO Lawyer)."
Gersten's CAUS triangle litigation is a real and documented effort. In a recorded interview, Gersten described the action in his own words: CAUS "submitted to the judge 33 affidavits from people that actually saw the object, were willing to come forward, put it down on paper and then swear to the contents." He told the court "judge, look, this object exists, judge, it exists not only over the last 20 years but it was seen last month," arguing the government could not have conducted a reasonable records search and found nothing about an object so widely witnessed. Gersten characterized the craft in language that maps onto Tenuta's almost word for word: "an object the size of a football field that can hover, or what's described from witnesses as floating," "virtually noiseless," with "orbs around the sides that detach and attach." He noted this was "the first time" in roughly twenty years of CAUS litigation that a judge had been "receptive to my arguments, receptive to the point of directing a governmental agency to provide a UFO group with additional information." Tenuta's Seattle affidavit was one of the 33 sworn statements behind that filing.
This litigation sits inside a long, verifiable CAUS record. Gersten and CAUS had been suing federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act since the late 1970s. Primary court documents survive: the affidavit of Eugene F. Yeates in Citizens Against Unidentified Flying Objects Secrecy v. National Security Agency, Civil Action No. 80-1562 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, is preserved as an NSA release. CIA reading-room press clippings from 1981 record Gersten arguing UFO FOIA cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals, telling the panel that if UFOs do not exist the government has nothing to hide, and that if they do exist "we may be in big trouble and we ought to know about it." The triangle suit that absorbed Tenuta's affidavit is the early-2000s continuation of that same campaign. The official posture, then, is not a debunk of the Seattle sighting. It is the more telling fact that the sighting was sworn before a federal court as part of an attempt to force the Department of Defense to disclose what it knows about football-field-sized triangular craft.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The single named witness is Gary Val Tenuta, a Seattle-area freelance writer, illustrator, and book cover designer. He is not an anonymous reporter; he attached his name to the account, published it under his byline, and later swore to it under penalty of perjury for a federal lawsuit. His articles on UFO and paranormal subjects appeared in Fate Magazine in the United States and Beyond Magazine in the United Kingdom, and he is also known as the author of the novel The Ezekiel Code. A skeptic will note that his broader interests run to numerology and esoterica, which is fair context, but it does not bear on whether he accurately reported a shape and a silence on a Seattle road in 1993, and he has told the story consistently across written and spoken versions.
Tenuta has never claimed the object was extraterrestrial in origin. What he insists on is the physical character of what passed over him: a single, enormous, geometrically perfect triangle, solid and black, with one steady red light at each corner, moving slowly and without any sound at all. In a later recorded interview he repeated the core details unprompted and from memory, placing the event in 1993 in Seattle, the craft cruising "right above me" going "extremely slowly," "maybe 5 to 10 miles an hour," from east to west, "about 9:30 at night," with "one large red light at each corner on the underside of the craft," visible against the city-lit gray cloud cover until it "sailed off into the west into the darkness." He has been candid that he could not be certain of the altitude, saying it may have been 150 feet or could have been 500 feet, which is the kind of hedge an honest witness offers rather than an embellisher.
The strongest corroboration is not a second person on the same road but the pattern Tenuta's craft fits. Western Washington has produced a dense run of black triangle reports over decades, many of them clustered around Boeing Field and the Puget Sound flight corridor, and many describing the same signature: a solid dark triangle, a dim light at each point, complete silence, slow flight. Attorney Peter Gersten assembled 33 such sworn accounts from across the country into one legal filing precisely because the descriptions converged so tightly, an object "the size of a football field" that floats noiselessly with lights at its corners. Tenuta's testimony is one node in that convergence, and it is the convergence, more than any one witness, that gives the Seattle Triangle its weight.
Is the Seattle Triangle (1993) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the ordinary explanations. Boeing Field is the obvious starting point, because conventional aircraft were the witness's own first two guesses. Three lights in a triangular arrangement can be the landing and navigation lights of a single large aircraft seen nearly head-on or from below, and the human eye readily "fills in" a dark body between bright points on a cloudy night, manufacturing a solid shape that is not there. A slow-moving aircraft on approach, an airship or blimp, or even a formation could in principle produce three lights crossing the sky. The trouble is that each ordinary candidate is contradicted by a specific reported detail. Aircraft and helicopter position lights blink and include green and white; these three lights were red, steady, and unblinking. A craft genuinely the size of a football field at 150 to 500 feet would be deafening; this one was silent, and silence over an active airfield, where the witness knew exactly what normal traffic sounds like, is the hardest detail to dismiss. A blimp is slow and quiet but is a rounded envelope, not a hard-edged triangle with corner lights, and Seattle had no resident airship traffic of that scale. The most deflating mundane reading is simply misperception: a real but ordinary aircraft, a dark sky, and a witness whose pattern-seeking brain assembled a triangle. That reading cannot be ruled out, because there is no photograph, no radar trace, and no second named witness on the road that night to anchor the size and the solidity. It rests entirely on one person's testimony.
Pass two, if the report is accurate. If a single solid object the size of a football field really did drift low over East Marginal Way at a few miles per hour in total silence, then nothing in the 1993 civilian or commercial inventory accounts for it, and the case joins the large black triangle phenomenon that surged through the 1980s and 1990s from Belgium to the Hudson Valley to the Pacific Northwest. The two leading interpretations within that phenomenon are, first, a classified terrestrial aircraft, the rumored lighter-than-air or low-observable platform sometimes labeled TR-3B in folklore, which would make the Seattle Triangle a secret-program sighting rather than an extraterrestrial one; and second, a genuine unknown. The classified-craft reading has its own problem, that no acknowledged program has ever produced a silent, hovering, football-field triangle, and the witness's affidavit was gathered precisely to argue that the Department of Defense holds records it will not release. That legal effort is itself evidence the object was real enough to be worth swearing about before a federal judge, and a judge in that CAUS action, by Gersten's account, was persuaded enough to direct a government agency to provide more information, the first such result in twenty years of CAUS litigation.
The case is set to Unknown. There is no official narrative to dispute and no method-shown debunk to weigh, so it does not qualify as Disputed, and the absence of any authenticated photograph, radar return, or independent second witness means it cannot reach Verified Unexplained. It stands or falls on the testimony of one named, consistent, on-the-record witness who put his account in writing and then under oath. That is a real and unusually committed piece of testimony, but it is testimony alone, and the honest tier for a sole-witness sighting with no physical evidence is Unknown.
Sources
- rense.com/general57/blactri.htm
- www.ufoinsight.com/ufos/waves/black-triangle-washington-state
- barbadamslive.com/?p=2248
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JwRwkJFQu8
- media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/13/2002761337/-1/-1/0/AFFADAVIT_YEATES.PDF
- www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-00806r000100200075-6
- www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-00806r000100200029-7
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