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The reports came from England.

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This was not just a UFO sighting.

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It was essentially a security incident.

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Also from the United States and Belgium.

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They were violating airspace rules.

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The Belgian Air Force had to do something about it.

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Massive triangular shaped craft hovering in the sky.

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Many around the world claim to have seen them during the Cold War.

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But what were they?

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The government takes them very seriously.

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Not because they necessarily believe they're extraterrestrial,

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but they are concerned about the Soviet Union and the threat it poses.

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At the height of international turbulence,

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something caused even more distress.

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A black triangle frenzy.

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We don't know what it is. It doesn't mean extraterrestrial.

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It doesn't mean government cover-up.

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It doesn't mean your pet theory is right.

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It just means I don't know.

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March 1990.

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An air force base in Belgium scrambles two F-16s

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to investigate a possible violation of Belgian airspace.

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Eid Mielbergs is one of the pilots ordered to address the threat.

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The operation center told us something was going on with the UFO over Belgium.

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Captain Mielbergs has been briefed

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for the description of the object given by an eyewitness on the ground.

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It was a kind of object of triangular shape,

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with lights on the edge, kind of dormant top,

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moving really slowly without noise,

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and sometimes accelerating very fast beyond supersonic speeds.

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The order was to intercept and eventually identify those objects.

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The Belgian Air Force report presents an exact timeline of the evening.

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12.30 a.m. Mielbergs makes radar contact

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20 nautical miles from Bovachine Air Force Base.

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It appears to be moving at 740 knots.

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So we picked up the target the first time, about 20 miles.

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We had a radar contact, so we could see on the radar a blip.

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This is the actual radar recording from Captain Mielbergs F-16.

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The square at the top is the target.

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Which was, in fact, the confirmation that there was something in the air at that moment.

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And it was the same contact as the ground station observed as well.

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But just as the two F-16 pilots think they are closing in, the target vanishes.

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If it was an intrusion by a foreign military, it escaped before being seen.

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If it was a false radar reading, there was nothing there in the first place.

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But some believed in another possibility.

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In the months leading up to this incident,

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hundreds of Belgians had reported seeing triangular aircraft.

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It all started in the small town of Uben, just six miles from the German border.

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Two police officers on patrol reported something unusual in the sky.

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They noticed very bright lights hovering over an open field.

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And these bright lights were fixed to some type of triangular platform as they described it.

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Author and UFO researcher David Marlar investigated this incident.

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The object encompassed the field that was near their vehicle. It was silent.

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They claimed the object then began to move slowly toward the town.

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They were gobsmacked as far as what they were looking at.

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They had no frame of reference for this.

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The initial two police officers who saw it light up the field, they followed it for a while.

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Author and investigative journalist Leslie Cain has interviewed many who claimed to have seen something that night.

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And it ended up over Lake Jalepe.

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They watched the thing for over an hour sitting above Lake Jalepe.

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And what they saw was something extraordinary.

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The craft was very strong.

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They were shooting out horizontally along the surface of the lake and then it was pulling it back in.

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Then the two officers say they saw a second triangular UFO rising up over a row of trees by the edge of the lake.

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Then hovering silently alongside the first UFO.

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They contacted the dispatcher in Yupon and he left the scene.

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They contacted the dispatcher in Yupon and he laughed and said it might be Santa Claus coming in to land.

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And they stated that we're not joking. This is something very serious.

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During this period there were many reported sightings of unidentified triangular craft all over the Belgian countryside.

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But no photos, video or other hard evidence to confirm their existence.

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Instead many of the witnesses sketched what they claim to have seen.

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The drawings are strikingly similar.

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Ever since the sightings in Belgium there have been thousands of similar reports all over Europe and North America.

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Black delta shaped flying objects that became known as black triangles.

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Could these sightings be explained by some natural phenomena?

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Could they be a case of mass dilution or do they defy explanation?

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In the 90s black triangles usurped saucers for a while.

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Michael Schurmer is a science author and publisher of Skeptic Magazine.

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People say well I saw these weird lights in the sky.

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It was 6 p.m. it was just getting dark and sort of triangular shaped and then zoomed off.

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So that makes a big story.

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After the first sightings over Upen in November of 1989 Belgian UFOs became the media topic of the day.

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Reporters asked if alien spacecraft were hovering over the country.

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Amid the increasing publicity Belgians made over 500 claims of UFO sightings.

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Authorities found themselves in a UFO wave.

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Some call it a frenzy a phenomenon that some say has more to do with psychology than reality.

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UFO sightings are by definition unidentified so we don't know what they are.

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Dr. Roger Launius is an associate director at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

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One of the things that tends to happen with many people is that when they believe certain things are out there.

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Any piece of evidence that they can come up with that might confirm that they latch upon.

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Psychologists call this confirmation bias.

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The tendency to seek out only information that confirms one's beliefs.

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Confirmation bias is the tendency to find confirmatory evidence for what you already believe and discount or rationalize disconfirming evidence.

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That is we remember the hits we forget the misses.

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But whether the black triangles were real or imagined the reports kept coming.

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Even with no hard evidence officials took notice.

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Which is perhaps why the Belgian Air Force scrambled two F-16s to investigate a report at the height of the UFO wave.

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It was an attempt to pin down some hard evidence and confront what could have been a tangible threat.

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The Belgian Air Force was concerned about this and had to take some action because there was something invading their airspace.

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The night's events began to unfold before 11 p.m.

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An off-duty police officer reported seeing three strange lights over the town of Jean Bleu.

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He said the lights form a triangle.

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The Belgian wave really came to a head on the night of March 30th, 1990.

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This involved sightings being reported by the citizenry and several municipalities.

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The Belgian Air Force reports states that at 11 p.m. the Glans Control Reporting Center received a phone call from the policeman reporting the strange lights in the sky.

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Fifteen minutes later their military radar picked up an unidentified object moving very slowly at 25 knots towards the west.

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Then another Air Force radar station center confirmed the target in the same position.

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Glans Control gave the order to scramble jets.

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Pilot Yves Milbergs picks up the target on his radar about seven nautical miles away. He still can't see it.

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It was dark with no lights at the object and we couldn't see anything.

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Relying only on their instruments, the two F-16 pilots moved to engage the target.

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If it's a breach of Belgian airspace by a foreign military, what Milbergs does next could spark an international incident.

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Over an hour after an off-duty police officer reports a strange object in the sky, two F-16s are closing in on their target.

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Captain Milbergs has a radar lock on. He's just about to intercept when the target suddenly appears to take evasive action.

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The target was rapidly reacting, changing heading and altitude and speeds.

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The target starts to move radically around the pilot's radar screen.

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The performance of that object is really outstanding.

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We had speeds going from very low speed until supersonic speed, so it was quite difficult to intercept that target.

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The Air Force report says the pilots managed to lock onto the target three times, but each time it evaded them.

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The report states the object appeared to accelerate from 150 to 970 knots or almost 1200 miles per hour in just a few seconds.

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We could manage to close in and the closest distance we could achieve was 5 nautical miles.

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The pilots made nine attempts to intercept the object, but they never actually saw it with their own eyes. It existed only on radar.

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That's basically an identified object. What is that object? Because so far we still don't know.

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But Belgian officials still needed an explanation for the numerous eyewitness reports.

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They turned to Air Force Chief of Operations Colonel Wilfred de Brouwer, who proposes a theory.

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The only thing you could think about was that it could be some kind of stealth technology from America.

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It's conceivable that some of them might be testing programs for exotic types of flying vehicles that has happened in the past.

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There were sightings, for instance, in the 1970s and early 80s before the programs were revealed of stealth technology that was being tested.

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This Department of Defense Intelligence report reveals that Colonel de Brouwer contacted officials in the United States about two top-secret stealth planes.

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The F-117 Nighthawk and the B-2 Stealth Bomber, they're both black and have an unusual triangular shape.

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Is it possible that one of these aircraft was behind the eyewitness reports of that night?

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He was informed very clearly that it was not, and this is written up in an official American document that the Americans informed him that it was not one of theirs.

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Either it was a straight denial or the Pentagon was hiding the test of a secret aircraft.

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It's always a remote possibility that something that people see in the sky could be a classified program under test.

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Bill Sweetman is an aviation writer and expert in top-secret military projects.

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The late 80s were a time when the black project world was expanding very fast.

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Could the Americans have been secretly testing new aircraft in that area?

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The triangles could conceivably be aircraft. There have been aircraft designs studied that looked like that.

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Belgium's location near the eastern front of the Cold War could have made it an enticing test site.

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There might be a few reasons why you'd test a secret aircraft outside the U.S.

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You might want to test it against different defensive systems.

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You might want to fly close to the former Soviet Union and just see if any of them would pick it up.

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If the sightings were of top-secret American aircraft, the U.S. might officially deny their existence, even to their allies.

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With the public demanding answers, Colonel de Brouwer made an unprecedented move and called a press conference.

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He qualified his statement with many ifs, as he could not rule out a radar error.

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The Belgians released the radar recording from a cockpit of Captain Milberg's F-16

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and invited expert interpretation of what can be a fickle technology.

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Radar is generally reliable, but like any other technology, there's going to be a residue of anomalies of stuff that happens we can't explain.

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And so like with everything else in science, what do you do with those that residue of anomalies? Nothing.

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We just can't explain everything. So a radar operator sees a blip, a blip is there, a blip is gone, what was it?

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Better know.

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So what caused the blip on the radar that night?

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So what we're seeing here is the radar data collected from the F-16 radar.

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Dr. Ravi Raj Advi is an engineering professor who specializes in radar signal processing.

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His first question is if the target was an artifact of weather.

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I don't believe so because this is not consistent with the profile of something that would be natural.

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Dr. Advi consults a graph of the radar data.

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We see that the target falls down to about 6000 feet, but then it rapidly gains height and then starts falling at an extremely rapid rate to the point where it almost crashes into the ground.

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At the same time, it's making incredible changes in speed.

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The speed jumps from about 175 knots to about 600 knots in less than a second.

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That is an insane acceleration that just doesn't seem physically possible.

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It then does another jump right at the end. It's moving at a thousand knots toward the ground.

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We haven't recovered any debris from any crashes, but it should have crashed.

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The extreme acceleration captured on the F-16's radar is beyond the performance of any known aircraft.

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But Dr. Advi may provide an answer to what Captain Mielberg's pursued that night.

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His examination suggests not an alien spacecraft, but a military hoax.

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It is my feeling that this is a fake target created by an electronic countermeasure system to spoof this radar.

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It's a technique known as radar jamming.

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This kind of technology is used by military defense applications.

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They are used to create false targets so that an enemy radar believes that there are many aircraft out there while there are really none.

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It's a fascinating theory and could explain this particular incident, especially since the flight crew never actually saw an object.

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We still don't know exactly what happened that day. That's for sure.

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We know what didn't happen. That's for sure. It was not a meteorological phenomena.

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It was not a helicopter. It was not a prototype and stuff like that.

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But it's still an unidentified object so far.

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After the Air Force incident ended with nothing but odd radar readings and unanswered questions, black triangle sightings decreased.

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The frenzy in Belgium died down.

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But three years later, there was another mysterious incident, this time in Britain.

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I think within hours it was clear that we really did have a staggeringly significant event on our hands.

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140 miles northeast of London, exactly three years after the sightings in Belgium, two Royal Air Force policemen are on patrol outside the RAF airbase in Cosford.

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According to their report, the patrol of Air Force police stopped their car, got out and looked directly overhead.

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They saw two bright white lights, but they weren't able to ascertain whether or not they were separate objects or lights on the underside of a much bigger craft.

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The two corpals return immediately to base and file this report. It is the earliest account of the strange events of the night, events that became known as the Cosford Incident.

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This is RAF Cosford where the UFO sighting actually took place.

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In 1993, Nick Pope worked for the British Ministry of Defence investigating unidentified flying objects.

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My job was to research and investigate all sightings reported to the Ministry of Defence to see if there was evidence of any potential threat to the United Kingdom.

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This is Pope's official Ministry of Defence report. It documents the most prolific wave of UFO sightings in British history.

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This sighting at Cosford really kickstarted an investigation which was to bring in dozens and dozens of other reports including sightings of large triangular shaped craft.

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It wasn't just military personnel who filed reports. Ten minutes after the sightings at RAF Cosford, there are more reported sightings 18 miles northeast of the base.

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One family saw the UFO in a town called Rougeley. They got into their car as I recall and actually tried to chase this thing.

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One of the witnesses described this vast craft passing directly overhead. They heard a humming sound coming from it and they thought that this thing was so low that it had actually landed in a field in a place called Hazelside.

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And when they got to the area, there was nothing to be seen. There were also no impressions on the ground to indicate that anything had landed.

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The RAF police determined that no military or civil aircraft activity had taken place that night that might explain these sightings.

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This was not just a UFO sighting, it was essentially a security incident.

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As military police at RAF Cosford secured the base, just 20 miles away at a second military base, the meteorological officer on duty reported seeing a similar unidentified flying object.

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He described it to me as a vast, triangular or delta shaped craft. He saw a pencil thin beam of light shoot down from this craft and track backwards and forwards.

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He said almost as if it was looking for something. Then he said after a few minutes, the UFO accelerated away to the horizon many times faster than a military jet.

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And he said, well look, I see fast jets on an almost daily basis. This was orders of magnitude above and beyond that speed.

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While stories like this sound persuasive, eyewitness testimony is often unreliable.

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Eyewitnesses misperceive things, they distort things, they retell things and not just people that see UFOs, people that see anything.

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We know from research that, you know, right now, these counts are not reliable, mine's not any better than yours.

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So we have to actually have physical evidence or else we don't really have a case.

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But eyewitness accounts were all there was to go on, 200 of them, over eight hours from all over southern England.

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Hope and his colleagues were left to sort through the stories, trying to find explanations that would account for this spade of reports.

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One by one, we eliminated all the usual things that people misidentify, bright stars and planets, satellites, meteors, aircraft lights, weather balloon launches.

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And the more of these explanations we crossed off, the more mysterious and exciting this seemed to be.

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And the sense from my colleagues and myself, who normally came at this from a very skeptical viewpoint, was, my goodness, there is something really bizarre going on here.

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After a month-long investigation, Hope's team concluded that people saw some sort of real object.

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Despite this conclusion, they had no hard evidence to prove it, much less any idea of the origin or nature of such a craft.

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One of our theories, of course, was secret prototype aircraft or drone.

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Just as the Belgians had done, the British asked the United States government if it was one of theirs, a large triangular craft capable of hovering.

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And they got the same answer.

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Now the Americans told us we have no such aircraft and no such test flights have been conducted over the United Kingdom.

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Still suspicious, Hope used a back channel to inquire if the CIA or other defense agencies might have been involved.

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The American Defense Secretary was apparently incandescent with rage.

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If we say it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist.

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And we had to act very quickly to stop this flaring up into a full diplomatic row with our greatest ally.

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With his investigation at a dead end, Nick Pope can only wonder what really happened that night.

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I have no realistic assessment of what this could be.

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If it wasn't some secret prototype aircraft decades ahead of anything that's public knowledge, then I'm stumped. I have no idea.

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Officials in Belgium and England were not able to come up with a feasible explanation for this rash of sightings.

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With only eyewitness reports to go on, there were limited scientific avenues to pursue.

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But soon it would be America's turn to deal with mystery triumphs.

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I've got that object inside also. It's huge.

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In St. Clair County, Illinois, Officer Ed Barton is on overnight patrol when he receives a call from Central Police dispatch.

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Well, this is a secret call from Highland TV.

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As he gets the call, Officer Barton is driving south on the main road into the small city of Lebanon.

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This is the actual police recording from that night.

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The truck driver just stopped in and said there was a flying object in the area of Lebanon.

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This recording presents a minute-by-minute account of the strange events that unfolded in Illinois.

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It's very rare that we have official documentation that chronicles the wave of sightings as it was taking place.

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Journalist David Marlar is a member of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, which investigates UFO sightings.

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In 2000, Marlar looked into this case.

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The overall tone of the recordings at first were somewhat light-hearted and jovial.

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It was like a two-story house, and it had white lights and red, blinking lights.

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Officer, could you check the area?

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If I see it, I'm not saying a word.

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Officer Ed Barton, he was ready just to simply write it off.

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But then he noticed lights moving toward the east part of town.

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Upon closer approach, he realized that the lights were fixed to a large, triangular object that was low altitude.

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For the authorities, there's a very bright, white light east of town.

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Also, there's a famous haircare, doesn't look like an haircare, though.

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In my personal investigation of the case, I spoke with Officer Ed Barton from Lebanon, Illinois.

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This is the statement Officer Barton gave to David Marlar ten days after the event.

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In it, he says that the object hovered at about 1,000 feet, almost directly overhead.

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Officer Barton stated, as this object was hovering above me,

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every aircraft that I've ever seen or know of makes some type of noise.

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This aircraft made no noise.

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After several minutes, he claims the object pivoted and sped toward the southwest at high speed.

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He wonders if it's some kind of experimental military craft.

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Would you contact Scott Air Force Base to see if there are any disquieting in this area, please?

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Scott Air Force Base is only three miles away.

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Officer Barton thinks it could be one of theirs.

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This is heading west down now.

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It should be really close to Scott now.

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Matter of fact, if a shallow object is hovering here and by now.

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The village of Shiloh is right next to Scott Air Force Base.

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At 4.24 am, Shiloh police officer David Martin responds to Barton's call.

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What if I ask if you ask these things and I don't know what they're doing.

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But just as he thinks he catches a glimpse of the object,

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it appears to suddenly shoot away at high speed into the distance.

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Fifteen minutes later, outside the town of Milstadt, Officer Craig Steven says he spots it.

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I think I'm 6.04.

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Go ahead.

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I've got that object in sight also.

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Are you serious?

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It's huge.

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6.04 doesn't look like a... what is it like to you?

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It's kind of B shaped.

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Officer Stevens tries to take a photo of what he's seeing.

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But due to the freezing conditions, the Polaroid doesn't turn out.

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There appears to be lights on the image, but there's no way to tell if it's a real physical object.

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Days later, Stevens makes these sketches for David Marver's report.

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He draws an object that is distinctly triangular.

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On the same night, in the town of Dupont, a fourth officer reports seeing something.

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Plotting the four sightings on a map, one can imagine a flight path traveling 38 miles over a one hour period.

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However, all they have is eyewitness testimony.

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There's no tangible evidence to examine.

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But the media doesn't need hard evidence to publish a story.

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The so-called Highland UFO made headlines.

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Newspaper accounts may have been fueled by the British and Belgian sightings a decade or so.

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Triangle-shaped UFOs were now part of pop culture and skeptics believe the accounts color popular perception.

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UFO frenzies usually begin with either a single sighting or a sighting that was witnessed by multiple people.

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And then it gets reported and if it gets picked up in the media, then that can start to drive the number of column inches.

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Then what becomes the story is not the UFO sighting, it's the event surrounding it.

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And that's the beginning of a myth. That's how myths are created.

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The biggest problem with UFO investigators is that they almost all believe they're not objective enough.

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They're too driven by what they would like to be true.

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They do have a preconceived belief that UFOs are out there, that they are extraterrestrial in origin.

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And they are searching for evidence of that.

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And they are spring-loaded to find that evidence.

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Since I personally do not believe we are being visited by extraterrestrials, I'm spring-loaded in the other direction and I'm willing to admit that.

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David Marlar investigates UFO sightings from MUFON, an organization that believes UFOs may have alien origins.

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Marlar's research, like the Belgians and Nick Pope before him, began by trying to rule out the military.

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I was mainly interested in seeing if the military was testing any type of experimental aircraft that might have been in the area.

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The fact that it was seen near a major military installation warranted that question.

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The estimated flight path of the alleged UFO shows it would have flown within two miles of Scott Air Force Base.

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The police and military declined to comment.

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Then David Marlar took the investigation a step further.

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I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with Scott Air Force Base and I have the official documentation as a result.

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In a letter dated two weeks after the event, the commander of Scott Air Force Base responded to Marlar's questions.

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They came back and stated negative that they had no military aircraft in the area.

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They weren't testing or supporting the test of any vehicle in the area at that time.

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Marlar then requested the radar data, hoping to get at least some hard evidence from that night.

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They stated that at the time of the UFO sighting, their radar systems were down. They were not operating.

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Military answers are often elusive with regards to questions that could be prying into top secret programs.

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So, with compelling eyewitness reports but limited evidence to go on, Marlar tries to connect the dots.

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Initially, I thought it was military in origin. It seemed to be the most practical explanation.

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But when we look at the eyewitness testimony, when we look at the description of this large triangular UFO,

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it bears striking similarities to Belgium, to Cosford.

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And at this point, we have to look at this information and come away with the fact that these witnesses are essentially describing the same type of object, if not the same object.

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Bill Sweetman also sees a link between the objects.

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There are conceivable aircraft that would account for some of the phenomena that people have described as black triangles,

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would account for some of the things seen at Cosford, some of the things seen in Belgium.

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But most of what has gone on in the black world, we really don't know anything about.

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Most top secret projects tested in the 1980s and 90s have not been declassified.

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I would think that there have been tens of programs over the years that have at least reached the flight test stage.

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We know of perhaps two or three that have been declassified.

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So perhaps 10% of what has happened, we know about.

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Could the reported black triangles turn out to be ultra top secret projects, not yet disclosed to the public?

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Marlar turns to the past to explain the present, digging into the historical record to shed light on the mystery.

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When we look at the history of the reports of triangular UFOs, I knew that the reports went back several decades.

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I had no idea how far back they in fact went.

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One of Marlar's sources for UFO research is the U.S. military itself.

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From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force investigated thousands of UFO sightings out of genuine concern for national security.

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The United States Air Force is constantly on the alert 24 hours a day.

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We're interested in anything that flies in our atmosphere.

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It began with Project Sine, continued with Project Grudge, and officially became known as Project Blue Book in 1952.

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The three projects comprised the largest government investigation of UFOs ever undertaken.

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This was an extensive collection of over 12,000 reports that the United States Air Force investigated, collated and analyzed.

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The effort was spurred by a glut of sightings during the Cold War, when a cloak of paranoia influenced everyday America.

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With international tension tripwire tight, the military took any reported anomaly as a possible threat.

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As the Cold War is heating up in the latter part of the 1940s, we see a lot of these reports.

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And the government takes them very seriously, not because they necessarily believe they're extraterrestrial,

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but they are concerned about the Soviet Union and the threat it poses.

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Project Blue Book's objectives were to scientifically analyze UFO data and determine whether UFOs posed a threat to national security.

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Of the more than 12,000 Project Blue Book UFO sightings, the vast majority were explained as birds, planes, stars or clouds.

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6% had no conventional explanation, and the Air Force classified them as unidentified.

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One file is known as Incident 398, a triangular UFO sighting in Baltimore in 1949.

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The primary witness was an art student. He was also a former United States Air Force tech sergeant and World War II veteran, so he was familiar with aircraft.

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At 6.30pm, the witness reports something moving through the clouds. He thinks it may be an aircraft, but not like anything he saw in the war.

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He noticed not one, not two, not three, but numerous triangular UFOs during daylight hours.

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Project Blue Book states that the eyewitness reported seeing approximately 15-20 V-shaped objects flying in circular formation.

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He remarked that they did not look like any conventional aircraft he knew of. They were black, very maneuverable and capable of great speed.

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These triangular UFOs exhibited unusual flight characteristics in the sense that they were darting about, moving in and out of the clouds, but when visible, they could clearly discern a triangular shape.

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Being an art student, the witness sketched what he saw. He drew the shape of the unidentified objects as triangular. The witness contacted the Air Force to report the unusual sighting.

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Investigators arrived for an interview, and he presented his sketch. The distance of the objects makes it difficult to interpret, but at first glance, it appears to be birds. The eyewitness insisted they were not.

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Air Force investigators later determined that the objects were not detected by radar, nor were they seen by any pilots flying in the vicinity.

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Their final report could not confirm or deny the student's account, but years later, a new theory would come to light.

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In 1949, multiple witnesses on a Baltimore Street reported seeing triangular UFOs in the distance. The Air Force report at the time was inconclusive.

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Now, UFO investigator David Marlar is combing through history looking for answers.

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When we look at 1949, we can look back now with a fair degree of certainty and know what was the cutting-edge technology of the time, since everything at that time has been declassified.

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It turns out there was a top-secret program at the time that might fit the Baltimore case.

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The Northrop YB-49, or Flying Wing.

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In 1949, Northrop had been testing the Flying Wing aircraft in various forms for a couple of years, and that was an extraordinary-looking aircraft of the era. It still is, really.

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However, Bill Sweetman doesn't believe the Northrop Flying Wing could have been what those neighbors saw that day.

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The Flying Wing was not a very maneuverable aircraft. Any hard maneuvering would cause the aircraft to fall out of the sky. It's an aircraft you had to fly very carefully, even then.

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And if you've got people claiming that they're seeing multiple flying wings at any given time in the 40s or 50s, it just didn't happen. There weren't that many aircraft.

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Marlar's own investigation ends just as the Air Force's had in the 1940s, inconclusive and unsolved.

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When we look at the official investigation by military authorities, there is still no plausible explanation for these sightings.

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Then and now, finding a solid explanation for such an enigmatic sighting is beyond reach.

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With no photographs, no radar detection, and only a handful of eyewitnesses confined to a single Baltimore Street, it is one of the more questionable and difficult to solve cases found in Blue Book.

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There's now declassified reports from the CIA in which there are science and technology panels that were looking at these incidents.

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We'd always come back to, we may not be able to exactly explain what was taking place here, but there's no evidence to indicate that this is a national security threat.

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The Baltimore case was one of several Air Force investigations into black triangles during the 1940s and 50s.

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Another report in Project Blue Book documents a sighting within the Air Force itself, January 28, 1953, at Turner Air Force Base in Albany, Georgia, and signed by the commanding officer.

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At 9.35pm, an Air Force pilot was flying a T-33 jet just outside of Albany. The pilot was a seasoned officer with 11 years experience and 3100 hours of flying time.

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On a routine night flight, he reported something strange in front of him.

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He thought, I'll increase in altitude, if it gets larger in my windscreen, then obviously it's something that's in the atmosphere and I should be able to identify it.

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If it doesn't get larger, then it must be a star or a planet. Before he knew it, the light which was above him was now below him, which immediately ruled out satellite, star, or planet.

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In the Project Blue Book file, the pilot states that the object constantly changed color, from white to orange and back.

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As if that wasn't strange enough, the object in his own words changed into an equilateral triangle. He then witnessed the triangle divide into two equilateral triangles, which shot off in different directions.

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Aviation expert Bill Sweetman thinks this could be a simple case of unfamiliar surroundings.

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When we talk about people flying jets in Georgia in the 1950s, it's a pretty new environment for people to be flying in, in terms of speed, in terms of being single-seater at night, in terms of working with very, very crude radar.

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So it's very easy to see that somebody could become confused. Very, very difficult environment.

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Complicating the investigation was evidence that the Albany Airport had radar contact with something it could not identify. But the Air Force reached a conclusion that still surprises David Marlar.

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The Albany, Georgia case was concluded to be the planet Venus, a visual sighting of the planet Venus, which really stretches the imagination when you look at the fact that the pilot was able to see Venus below him.

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This is another event that may never have a solid scientific explanation, but Marlar proposes his own theory.

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It really makes me lean towards the fact that some, underline that three times, some of these triangular UFOs may be of nonterrestrial origin.

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Without definitive evidence, all that remains are theories.

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The absence of facts, what people do is they fill in the blanks with their imagination. In science, what we're supposed to do is just lead the blanks blank. You just keep working on it, and you just, you don't fill it in with your imagination.

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Skeptics argue that it's a matter of critical thinking. They say that the black triangle wave is not evidence of aliens, but evidence of how a series of unconnected events can become a self-perpetuating legend. Such is the power of a good UFO mystery.

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The universe is massive. You can't even begin to understand how massive. And clearly, that would suggest that there are other planets that could support life, and probably do.

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But there's a world of difference between that belief, which I think most of us share, myself included, and believing that some entity or some several entities from out there are visiting us. There's just no good reason to reach that conclusion.

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Bill Sweetman believes that the mystery exists only in the realm of human perception.

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I think the most likely explanation for most unidentified flying object sightings is that people saw something that wasn't really there. People not being delusional, people not being crazy, people just being bad eyewitnesses.

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Finally, consider the long shadow of secret government programs. Only recently, in 2014, did the CIA suggest that many UFO sightings in the 1950s were indeed their own experimental aircraft. As they recently tweeted, it was us.

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This information was so secret, it was even kept from the Air Force investigators of Project Blue Book. The thousands of incidents documented in Project Blue Book have long been declassified, so people can read every line, and often in between them, to formulate their own opinions.

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Without definitive evidence, black triangles may forever be debated, and forever remain unidentified.

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An unsolved UFO case is rather like an unsolved crime. I'm skeptical that we'll ever get a definitive explanation of this, but of course, I hope that some new information does come to light, and we finally solve the mystery.