Congressional UFO hearings have increasingly provided space for military witnesses to share their experiences with unidentified objects while performing their duties. Among these reports, veterans such as Lieutenant Ryan Graves and Captain David Fravor stand out, whose statements have drawn significant attention from both the media and the UFO research community. Graves detailed encounters with objects that defied known laws of physics during aerial patrol operations, while Fravor is famous for the iconic “Tic Tac” sighting in 2004, an object that performed abrupt maneuvers and accelerated at incredible speeds right in front of his aircraft. Both cases exemplify the seriousness and consistency of military reports regarding phenomena that remain unexplained.
This even inspired the creation of the nonprofit organization Americans for Safe Aerospace, focused on the safety and investigation of UAPs. Founded by military pilots such as Ryan Graves, Alex Dietrich, and David Fravor, the organization now has 27,000 members worldwide.
But for many military personnel who didn’t have the new luxury of acceptance and destigmatization, simply reporting such phenomena wasn’t even an option. One of those who experienced this stigma was former Navy servicemember Angelo Accetta. In 2021, he reached out to UFO author and researcher Ryan Sprague and shared details of five separate sightings of a triangular UFO over a Naval Air Station in California between 2011 and 2012.
Accetta joined the U.S. Navy in 2009 as an Aviation Maintenance Administrator, working on the logistics of F-18 Super Hornet fighter jets. He was stationed for ground duty at Naval Air Station Lemoore in California.
During a watch shift on November 15, 2011, around 11:30 p.m., something caught his attention. “I noticed an object in the night sky,” Accetta recalled in an email. “It was moving too slowly to be an F-18 Super Hornet. I know those aircraft well because of my work.”
What impressed Accetta most was both the shape of the object and the light it emitted. “It was triangular. There were lights shining from each corner of the triangle. They were extremely bright and emitted a white glow.”
He couldn’t make out many other details, as the object was about 450 meters away. Still, Accetta believed it was quite large and at approximately 1,200 meters in altitude. “Its speed was moderate, and it moved so smoothly, almost as if it were gliding over water.”
Accetta remembered standing there, frozen in place. “I was mesmerized by what I was seeing.” After about three minutes of watching the triangle travel west, it suddenly shot off at an incomprehensible speed and disappeared from view. Later that morning, Accetta reported what he had witnessed to a superior.
“My superior immediately laughed and jokingly asked if I had been drinking on duty.” That response was all he needed to stay quiet. “I was a rookie at my first command and didn’t want my higher-ranking officers or fellow sailors to look at me differently. News travels fast on military bases, and I didn’t want to be labeled as weird or crazy.”
Although a UFO event would pique anyone’s curiosity, Accetta encountered the mysterious triangle on four more separate occasions between February and October 2012. Each time, the black triangle hovered around specific areas of the air station, surprisingly over locations where Accetta knew squadrons regularly conducted nighttime training operations. “I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a single F-18 in the sky while this object was in our airspace,” he recalled.
On one occasion, during a smoke break, Accetta witnessed the triangle with another servicemember. According to him, he and his companion were walking toward the barracks when the companion noticed the black triangle above them, moving very slowly across the night sky. It was approximately 2,000 feet in altitude—too low to be any aircraft they were accustomed to seeing at the station.
“I was hoping he would say something, but it was as if he had memorized it. I was thrilled to have someone else here to witness this with me,” Accetta recalled. As they watched, the black triangle made a sudden move to the right and instantly vanished from view. Accetta hoped that, with another witness present, they could both report what had occurred.
Disheartened both by the ambiguous nature of this black triangle and the fact that no one else seemed to report it, these sightings left Accetta perplexed and concerned that something truly mysterious was happening at Naval Air Station Lemoore.
Accetta’s reports align with numerous other accounts from military personnel who have witnessed the activity of such aircraft over military bases. While it’s often suspected that some of these craft are, in fact, terrestrial—funded and produced by secret government and private enterprise programs—David Marler offers a comprehensive analysis in his 2013 book, Triangular UFOs: An Estimate of the Situation. Marler, a researcher and author specializing in UFOs, has lectured across the United States and served as a consultant for various UFO-related television programs. In his book, he presents numerous reports of triangular UFO sightings and has personally reviewed over 17,000 case files involving these craft.
While some of the triangular sightings can be attributed to classified tests of stealth bombers like the B-2 Spirit and the F-117 Nighthawk during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Marler’s research indicates that many reports predate these aircraft’s development. His findings span continents and decades, with triangular UFOs reported in various U.S. states during the 1960s, including Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Puerto Rico.
These data suggest that while some of these craft may be of human origin, others exhibit more exotic characteristics, possibly indicating non-terrestrial origins.
