Flying "Doritos" Black and White Triangle Sightings, What Are We Seeing?

Flying "Doritos" Black and White Triangle Sightings, what are we seeing?

By Steve Douglass

I want to start with my own sighting, because it occurred while I was covering Exercise Roving Sands as a journalist. I was there in an observational role, documenting the event from outside the exercise itself.

During that time, I and my father-in-law Elwood Johnston observed a slow moving almost completely silent black triangular aircraft. What stood out immediately was that this wasn’t just a pattern of lights. In fact it had only one visible light, a red one at the center. It was a structured, dark, triangular object moving slowly and deliberately. It gave a clear impression of size and mass, and it did not behave like conventional aircraft traffic. The airspace was active due to the exercise, which made the presence of such an object notable rather than routine.

Another key event was the 2014 Amarillo sighting that Dean Musket and I experienced firsthand. We observed three triangular‑shaped aircraft at high altitude, moving in a controlled and deliberate manner. They were not large, low‑flying objects, and they did not resemble conventional aircraft traffic.

What followed was just as revealing as the sighting itself. In response, the U.S. Air Force flew B‑2 bombers over Amarillo in what appeared to be an attempt to reframe the earlier observation as a misidentification. The demonstration felt less like a clarification and more like a carefully staged comparison, as the B‑2 flights did not match what we observed in altitude, flight profile, or overall behavior.

If the intent was to resolve questions, it instead highlighted the gap between the sighting and the official narrative. The episode amounted to a very expensive dog‑and‑pony show, and it underscored how official responses often prioritize narrative closure over addressing the specific details reported by witnesses.

After my own experiences, I began comparing notes with other cases. One of the most compelling was Mark Farmer’s sighting in Alaska. Alaska is among the most closely monitored airspaces in the world, and Farmer described a large, silent triangular craft moving in a controlled and deliberate manner. The similarity in shape and behavior to what I observed was difficult to dismiss.

The Phoenix Lights are often explained away solely in terms of the military parachute flare drop, but that explanation does not account for the earlier reports. Multiple witnesses described a single, massive triangular or boomerang‑shaped object moving slowly across the sky and blocking out stars. That portion of the event closely matches other triangular craft sightings and does not align with flares or standard aircraft formations.

What stands out is that these sightings did not end in the 1990s. In Kansas in 2014, a wildlife photographer snapped a triangular aircraft using a telephoto lens, capturing an object with clear geometry rather than a diffuse light pattern. The image did not resolve cleanly into any publicly acknowledged aircraft type, and the fact that it came from a single observer using magnification reduces some of the perceptual distortions common in group night sightings.

More recently, the Uncanny Expeditions observation near Area 51 suggests that this type of aircraft is still active. Experienced observer, deliberately watching restricted airspace, reported a triangular craft maneuvering within a test environment, followed once again by the absence of any official explanation.

When these observations are placed alongside known aerospace history, the Navy A‑12 Avenger II becomes relevant. Although the program was officially canceled, it resulted in a prolonged and partially sealed lawsuit between the contractors and the U.S. government. That level of legal and procedural secrecy is unusual for a program that supposedly went nowhere and suggests that elements of the technology remained sensitive. 

Notably, triangular aircraft sightings appear to increase in number after the settlement of the A‑12 lawsuit, raising the possibility that platforms previously held back entered more active testing or operational phases.

Early stealth concepts such as THAP are useful for describing how advanced aerospace projects can be compartmentalized across different branches and funding streams. In that context, labels like TR‑3A and TR‑3B are best understood not as officially confirmed aircraft names, but as informal placeholders used to describe large triangular stealth platforms that do not appear in the public record.

That said, the TR‑3A designation was all but confirmed by researcher Phillip Patton, who, while digging through the NASA Dryden archives, found a folder labeled “TR‑3A” that contained no documents. The folder itself doesn’t provide technical detail, but its existence strongly suggests the designation was used internally at some point, adding a significant footnote to the TR‑3A/TR‑3B discussion.

From my perspective as a journalist, this is not about speculation for its own sake. It is about documenting a consistent pattern of observations involving a very specific aircraft geometry, reported across decades and locations, often near sensitive airspace, with explanations that never fully account for what was seen.

The TR‑3B occupies a distinct place in the history of triangular aircraft sightings. The designation has never been officially acknowledged, but it emerged in the 1990s alongside a rise in reports of large triangular craft, often described as operating quietly at low altitude with three lights and, in some cases, a central glow.

Over time, the label accumulated increasingly speculative claims, many of which lack supporting evidence. As official silence persisted, the TR‑3B was gradually woven into the broader UFO narrative, where unacknowledged aerospace programs and extraterrestrial speculation began to overlap. Stripped of its more extreme assertions, the TR‑3B mythos appears less like a single exotic vehicle and more like a catch‑all term for a class of unacknowledged triangular platforms, reflecting the gap between persistent observations and public acknowledgment.


The White Triangle August 30, 2011: The strangest one yet. 

From where I was standing, it almost didn’t behave like a conventional object in the sky at all. There was a moment — more than a moment, really — where it felt like a projection. Not in a sci‑fi, hologram way, but in the sense that it looked placed there rather than flown there. Like the sky was being used as a surface. It wasn't moving, just there. 

At the same time, the altitude was so extreme that another possibility kept intruding: low Earth orbit? That sounds outrageous until you really sit with the geometry of what we were seeing. The lack of speed, the scale, the way it maintained its triangular form without any visible means of propulsion — it was consistent with something much higher than normal air traffic. It wasn't  a pure triangle either, it had a curious notch on the trailing edge. 

What really locked that in for me was how it caught the sunlight.

It didn’t reflect like aluminum or paint. The light slid across it in an unusual way, almost as if the surface wasn’t uniform. The reflection shifted, but the triangle stayed coherent. No tumbling. No loss of shape. Just that strange, clean interaction with sunlight that made it pop against the sky and then — just as cleanly — lose visibility.

And then it was gone.

Not flying away. Not accelerating. Not fading like a plane turning. It simply stopped presenting itself to us. One second it was a defined, reflective triangular form; the next, the sky was empty.

That’s the part that pushes it outside normal categories for me. Aircraft leave traces — contrails, motion, sound, continuity. This didn’t. It behaved more like a transient presence than a vehicle in transit.

Whether it was some kind of projection, a platform at orbital altitude, or something else entirely, I can’t say. But I can say this: whatever it was, it interacted with light and visibility in a way that felt intentional, not incidental.

And standing there with five other people who all watched it happen the same way, I never had the luxury of dismissing it as a trick of perception. We weren’t guessing. We were observing. My guess is because it didn't fit the popular narrative of black flying triangles and because if it's unique strangeness, it was largely ignored by the aviation press. 

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Triangular‑shaped aircraft continue to be reported across multiple decades and geographic regions, often exhibiting flight characteristics inconsistent with known conventional aircraft. These sightings include both low‑ and high‑altitude observations and have been described in both black and white forms. The persistence of the triangular configuration suggests a recurring aerospace design rather than a series of unrelated misidentifications.

One prevailing hypothesis associates these sightings with legacy black‑program development, potentially extending from the technological lineage of the A‑12 and related Cold War reconnaissance platforms. History has shown that revolutionary aircraft can remain classified for decades, operating beyond public awareness while appearing anomalous to civilian observers.

Some reports have been attributed to rumored classified platforms such as the so‑called TR‑3A, a designation frequently cited in open‑source and anecdotal accounts of black‑program aerospace activity. 

That designation in itself could reflect confusion with acknowledged but limited‑disclosure programs, including Tier III–class high‑altitude reconnaissance aircraft, whose operational profiles and secrecy could plausibly contribute to misidentification under certain conditions.

However, many reported performance characteristics—particularly extreme endurance, unconventional maneuverability, and high‑altitude or near‑orbital behavior—exceed reasonable extrapolations of known or acknowledged systems, including Tier III platforms. This raises the possibility that at least some triangular sightings represent newer, still‑covert aerospace designs incorporating advanced materials, propulsion concepts, or mission profiles that remain undisclosed.

The central question is therefore not whether classified aircraft programs exist, but whether triangular sightings reflect the continuation of legacy development, the emergence of a new generation of covert systems, or a combination of both. Until declassification or authoritative disclosure occurs, triangular aircraft remain a compelling indicator that advanced aerospace capabilities may be operating beyond current public knowledge.

-Steve Douglass