The Pentagon released its seventh tranche of UFO files Friday, revealing that senior military observers watched black triangular objects hit 1,800 mph over sensitive U.S. military sites — but the documents were so heavily redacted and thin they raise more questions about what the government is still hiding than what it's revealing.

President Trump ordered full disclosure on UFOs in February. Since then, the releases have gotten less frequent and noticeably thinner. Friday's dump contained fewer than 25 text documents, no videos, and images so crude a Penn State historian called them "little more than a black triangle shape superimposed on a landscape background." After decades of the government gaslighting Americans who reported unexplained aerial phenomena, the Pentagon's idea of "transparency" still looks a lot like controlled narrative management.

Here is what the files do confirm: On at least three separate occasions over the past year, observers with "extensive operational experience working alongside government agencies" witnessed delta-wing-shaped craft, nine to 15 feet in wingspan, moving at 1.5 miles every three seconds — roughly 1,800 mph. The objects made no sound, left no exhaust, and when scanned with thermal devices gave off a consistent heat signature across the entire surface, unlike any conventional aircraft or drone, which runs hotter at the engine. A Department of War memo described the exterior as a "continuous (seamless), featureless surface lacking any discernible structural discontinuities, propulsive apertures, intake structures, aerodynamic control effectors, or cockpit features."

Government officials ruled out the objects being American technology, according to the New York Post, and expressed skepticism that any known foreign power possesses such capabilities. The exact locations and dates? Redacted. The observers' identities? Redacted. The FBI report on the matter? Redacted.

The Guardian noted that the "black triangles" report features nine identical images of the same canyon with tiny triangular silhouettes "crudely added to replicate the movement of the object" — not actual photographs. Greg Eghigian, a Penn State historian and author of a 2024 book on the UFO phenomenon, told the Guardian the images don't "add anything substantive to the report itself." No real photos or video accompanied Friday's release at all.

The files also included oddities: the government collected hair samples from Skinwalker Ranch in Utah in 2010 after a rancher reported a "skinwalker" sighting and his dogs chased it through a barbed-wire fence. Your tax dollars at work.

This all follows 2023 congressional testimony from a former intelligence official who alleged successive administrations engaged in a cover-up and possessed crashed alien spacecraft. The Pentagon's response has been to dribble out redacted documents with cartoon-quality illustrations and call it disclosure.

The New York Post framed the story around national security concerns — foreign adversaries, advanced technology over secret sites. Fair enough. The Guardian emphasized the inadequacy of the releases and the crude quality of the evidence provided. Also fair. What neither framing captures is the central problem: the referee is the story. The same national security apparatus that spent decades denying these phenomena exist is now the sole arbiter of what the public gets to see, when, and in what form. The locations are classified. The witnesses are classified. The raw sensor data is classified. The government rules out its own technology — then offers no explanation for what the objects are or who operates them.

That is not transparency. That is a drip-feed designed to manage the narrative while keeping the public in the dark about what their own government knows — and what it has spent their money on for decades.