Bagram, 2002: the triangle a deployed reservist reported, drawn by the FBI 24 years later

Bagram Air Base, roughly 30 miles north of Kabul, was the largest U.S. and coalition military installation in Afghanistan for most of the 2001-2021 war — a hub for thousands of personnel and, at any given time, a steady rotation of reservists and deployed units. It is against that backdrop that a former U.S. military pilot told the FBI, in a March 2024 interview memorialized on an FD-302 (the Bureau's standard interview-record form), about an object he says he saw passing overhead during his 2002 deployment: a triangle large enough to occlude a wide swath of the night sky, moving without the sound or lighting pattern he associated with conventional aircraft.

PURSUE Release 05 pairs that account with FBI-UAP-D025, a digital rendering the Bureau commissioned in 2026 directly from the witness's description: a solid black delta, seen from directly beneath, its edges cutting across a dense field of stars. The Department of War selected it as the iconic image of the release — the single picture used to represent all 41 files — and it is also the most literal illustration yet of a rendering practice PURSUE first showed publicly in Release 03, when the FBI produced ten digital images from the Western US Event's witness narratives.

FBI-UAP-D024, the underlying FD-302, is not only about 2002. The same witness used the March 2024 interview to describe additional incidents he says he experienced in 2023 and 2024, though Release 05 does not specify their location or content beyond what is visible in the rendering built around the Bagram account. Twenty-four years separate the reported sighting from its documentation — a gap consistent with a pattern across the PURSUE corpus, in which decades-old military encounters surface only once a formal reporting channel, created by the 2022 NDAA's AARO mandate, exists to receive them.

As with the rest of the FBI triangle corpus in this release, the Bagram account rests on a single witness's recollection, recorded more than two decades after the fact and translated into imagery rather than photographed or filmed at the time. The Department of War's PURSUE portal publishes it, like every other file in the program, as an unresolved case — a record of what was reported and how the government represented it, not a finding about what, if anything, was actually overhead.