A Space Force Technician’s Account of a Black Triangle at Hurlburt Field

In late 2017, around 12:01 a.m., Kyle Knopp says he saw a silent black triangle hovering at treetop height over Hurlburt Field, Florida. The field sits on the Eglin Air Force Base complex and is home to Air Force Special Operations Command.

He describes three dim, evenly spaced lights at the corners, a center darker than the night sky, no engine noise, and an odd floating motion, like an air-hockey puck after the table air is turned on. When he glanced back at the road and looked up again, the object was gone.

At the time, Knopp was a Lockheed Martin contractor on that same base. Before that he spent eight years in the Air Force there as a communications and navigation mechanic. He now works for Space Force as a civilian electronics technician and still holds a Secret clearance.

From 2008 to 2016 he was an active-duty Air Force aircraft mechanic at Hurlburt Field. His specialty was communications and navigation: antennas, radar, and related systems. He reached staff sergeant, E-5, with a seven-level qualification. He worked the MC-130H, the special-operations transport whose large nose holds terrain-following and terrain-avoidance radar.

The account comes from a May 2026 conversation on the UAP Files Podcast, season four, episode eighteen. It was Knopp’s first long interview about the sighting. He was nervous on the recording, said as much, and treated the talk as a gray area because he still holds a clearance and still works inside the system.

After leaving active duty he stayed on the same base for about a year as a Lockheed Martin technician on aircraft simulators. He later moved into a Space Force civilian job. He still has a government CAC card and a chain of command. He says he now works at a major phased-array radar site.

His claim is not that he saw lights in the sky. His claim is that he spent years on that flight line, he knows what belongs there, and that object did not. The night was unusually dark and quiet. He left home, drove onto base, and realized he was one minute late for work. That is how he pins the time at 12:01 a.m.

Near a roundabout at the end of the runway, close to the 15th Aircraft Maintenance Unit, the shop he had worked in for eight years, he first thought he was looking at a burnt-out streetlight. Then he saw three dim glows, perfectly spaced. Between them the sky was not visible. The center was blacker than the night.

The three lights turned together, as if fixed to one object. The object sat at about treetop height. He estimates it at two to three times the size of his Chevy Traverse. Because he was underneath it, he only saw the bottom: a triangle, not a confirmed pyramid shape above.

The corner lights had a purplish-orange glow he later called plasma. He saw no antennas and no conventional radar gear. He rolled the window down on purpose. There was no engine, no rotor, no insects, no birds, only gravel under his tires. He wondered if the air around the object was sound-dampened.

It seemed to rotate slowly and scan the flight line. He looked back at the road to stay in his lane. When he looked up, it was gone at once.

He went to work late and said nothing. He emailed the details to himself on his Lockheed Martin account so he would have a dated record. He no longer has access to that inbox. The only calendar hook he still has is that the Las Vegas shooting of 1 October 2017 was in the news around the same period.

He also describes a sudden flick in his head, a command to look up, that some UAP researchers call a psychic ping. He says he was not looking for triangles and did not know triangle craft was a known category until after that night.

TR-3B is not an official public U.S. aircraft name. It is a nickname used in UFO literature for a rumored classified triangular craft that supposedly uses field or plasma propulsion instead of jet engines. The Pentagon has never confirmed a program by that name.

What is documented is a long pattern of black-triangle reports: large, quiet, low-flying objects with three corner lights. Well-known clusters include the Belgian wave of the late 1980s.

Knopp uses the TR-3B label because the object matched that description.

After years of staying quiet, he says he feared for his job and at one point his safety, Knopp filed a report with AARO, the Pentagon office set up to collect UAP reports. He included his DoD ID number and listed Lue Elizondo as a point of contact so the file would be harder to ignore.

He says AARO called back in two days. He spoke for 45 minutes with Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, then AARO’s director. The call was set up as a secure dial-in. They then simply phoned him. According to Knopp, Kirkpatrick asked what he knew and asked why he thought the object was called a TR-3B, but did not confirm any such program.

Knopp mentioned patents linked to Dr. Salvatore Pais. He says that thread was not taken up. After the call, AARO emailed asking for GPS coordinates, even though he had already described the exact bend in the road next to the 15th AMU. There was no further official follow-up. He says they encouraged him to share the story and look for other witnesses.

Knopp later invited people from To The Stars Academy to a 50th-anniversary event at the radar site where he worked. Public affairs limited the visit. Elizondo sent a thank-you letter and a coin. Knopp says one side of the coin shows a triangular craft. He had not told Elizondo about the 2017 sighting. That coincidence still bothers him.

After the interview, and in videos of his own, Knopp talks about how such a craft might work. He stresses he is assembling this from public patents, emails with Pais, and questions put to a government AI tool, not from a classified briefing.

His working picture includes plasma or field effects at the three corners, which could blur or hide the center of the craft. It includes reduced effective gravity or inertia, the air-hockey-puck motion. It includes possible consciousness or brain-wave control, including talk of skin-contact sensors. It also includes a broader idea that some so-called UFO craft may be human copies of older or recovered technology.

He is also skeptical of political amnesty language around UAP disclosure. He worries it could be used to bury decades of intelligence-community abuses, he names MKUltra and Project Artichoke, under an extraterrestrial label.

What the account does have is a named, still-cleared technician with years on that specific flight line. It has a precise location next to the 15th AMU and a time pinned to being one minute late. It has a description that matches a long-running class of black-triangle reports. It has a claimed contemporaneous email to himself, later lost with the Lockheed inbox. It has a later official AARO report and a claimed 45-minute call with the then-director.

Hurlburt Field is not the only place these silent triangles keep turning up. Off Southern California, Santa Catalina Island has the same reputation. The Tongva called the island Pimu. For years people have reported large black triangles over the water and the island itself, often as quiet as the one Knopp described in Florida. That stretch of coast sits in a busy corridor. The 2004 Nimitz encounters happened about 70 to 100 miles away. Farther south, Guadalupe Island off Baja California gets pulled into the same conversation, including claims of objects coming out of the ocean. Later infrared stills circulated under the Immaculate Constellation label brought the Catalina cases back into view. Black triangles have been reported on both coasts, over military bases and over open water, for a long time.

Congress has heard the same shape described under oath, or at least been told it would. Ahead of the 13 November 2024 House Oversight hearing, one expected account was a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier describing a black triangle he met on the ground.

The closest large-scale match to what Knopp described is still the Belgian wave of 1989 and 1990. It began on 29 November 1989, when two police officers in Eupen saw a large silent triangle with bright lights moving across the night sky. Hundreds of similar reports followed for months. Witnesses, including police, military, and aviation people, kept describing the same craft: triangular, bigger than ordinary aircraft, lights at the corners, little or no sound, and motion that did not look like a plane or helicopter. Belgian authorities investigated. On 30 March 1990 the wave hit its peak when radar at a Belgian airbase tracked an unidentified object and F-16s were sent up. The pilots could not hold it. The object appeared to accelerate and change direction faster than the jets. A later picture from Petit-Rechain became the image everyone remembers, a dark triangle with a light at each corner.