The Triangle That Isn’t in the File
Some FOIA requests come back with the thing you asked for. This one came back with five years of people discussing the thing you asked for, and no sign of the thing itself.
What Was Filed and When
The Black Vault filed FOIA case 21-F-0299 with the Department of Defense in December 2020. The reply landed on February 26, 2025, a five-year turnaround. The Black Vault’s own reference describes the release as 88 pages; the PDF file itself is labeled “91 Pages, 14MB.” Neither figure is corrected against the other in the released material, so the discrepancy stands as an open detail of the paperwork, nothing more.
The substance of the release is internal DoD email, dated December 3 and 4, 2020, discussing an article that had just run in The Debrief and how DoD spokesperson Susan Gough should handle press questions about it. Her name is redacted in the “to:” field of at least one message but appears, unredacted, in the body.
The Story the Emails Are About
The article in question, published December 2, 2020, by Tim McMillan and titled “Fast Movers,” described a photograph, not a video: an “extremely clear” image of a large triangular object with rounded edges and a white spherical light at each corner. According to McMillan’s sourcing, the photo was taken on a pilot’s personal cell phone from inside an F/A-18 cockpit, showing the object rising out of the ocean off the U.S. East Coast at a steep angle. The Debrief later corrected the year attached to the incident from 2018 to March 2019. None of this is drawn from the photo being published. It is drawn from officials who told McMillan they had seen it.
What the Email Actually Says
One message in the release, sent from someone in the office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, quotes then-UAP Task Force Director Jay Stratton directly: “Jay tells me the photo is part of the active investigation, so it would probably be withheld from release for that reason.” A separate email in the same batch asks, in essence, whether a cell-phone picture tied to a classified briefing would have to be released under FOIA if requested.
That is the entire evidentiary weight of the case. No photograph is attached to any email in the release. Across the full document set, nobody produces the image. People discuss whether it exists, whether it is classified, and whether a reporter should be told anything about it. That is all the record shows.
No Finding on Record
The released emails contain no investigative conclusion. There is no memo stating the photo was authenticated, that it was a misidentification of something conventional, or that it was fabricated. The internal discussion, as far as this FOIA batch goes, stops at “likely to be withheld.” A reader looking for a verdict inside the file will not find one. That is a fact about the release, not a hint about the photo.
Stratton, Five Years Later
In February 2025, Stratton told The Black Vault something that does not sit comfortably next to his 2020 comment: no photo of a triangle rising from the ocean was ever provided to the UAP Task Force by an F/A-18 pilot. He said that at the time of the 2020 email exchange he was handling multiple cases, and that other, unrelated photographs of triangular or pyramidal objects taken by Navy pilots existed in the task force’s files. His suggestion is that his own 2020 remark may have gotten crossed with one of those separate cases, a case of overlapping reports blurring together rather than a photo being hidden. He also said the December 2020 exchange took place on an unclassified system, and that there was no established process at the time for correcting public inaccuracies tied to potentially classified reporting, which is his explanation for why the record went uncorrected for five years.
Where the Explanation Runs Into Trouble
The conflation explanation has to account for one detail: the email is not a journalist’s paraphrase written after the fact. It is a contemporaneous internal document, written by a naval official in real time on December 3 or 4, 2020, summarizing a conversation with Stratton about this specific story, the one running in The Debrief. It does not describe a general category of triangular sightings. It describes “the photo,” tied explicitly to “the active investigation” the article was about. A 2020 record describing one specific photo and a 2025 denial that any such photo existed cannot both be accounts of the same offhand mix-up. One of them is describing something the other says never happened.
The Reporter Holds His Line
McMillan has not withdrawn the story. Asked by The Black Vault in February 2025, he said his reporting came from multiple sources with direct access to early UAP Task Force intelligence documents, none of them Luis Elizondo or Chris Mellon, the two names most commonly attached to UAP reporting from that period. He said the sourcing was robust enough that people with no prior interest in the subject were startled by what they had seen in official briefings, and that he remains confident in the accuracy of what he reported. That is a statement about who is standing behind the 2020 story now. It is not new evidence about what happened in 2019.
The Unedited Transcript
After a post on social media accused The Black Vault of quoting McMillan selectively, John Greenewald published McMillan’s full, unedited comments on February 27, 2025, at 5:51 a.m. Pacific. The longer version did not change the disagreement between McMillan and Stratton. It confirmed the disagreement was genuine, not an artifact of editing. That correction belongs to the record of how the story was presented, which is a separate thing from the record of what happened in 2019 and 2020.
What’s Still Missing
No version of the photograph described in “Fast Movers,” the one Stratton’s 2020 email called active and under investigation, has surfaced in any FOIA release before or since. Further requests on the same subject remain open with The Black Vault. What exists is a five-year paper trail of people discussing an image and never once producing it. Whether that is because it was withheld, because it never existed in the form described, or because two people are honestly describing two different files five years apart, the release does not say.