A clean triangle in the sky is supposed to be the easy part to hide. Yet a sharply “Dorito-shaped” aircraft silhouette captured on thermal video near Nevada’s Groom Lake test range has revived a question that never fully went away after an earlier daylight photo over Wichita, Kansas: what keeps showing up as a tailless, razor-edged planform when no known inventory matches it?
The most recent one is by Anders Otteson, the photographer of Uncanny Expeditions, who has established a reputation of protracted, gear-intensive nights in the boundaries of viewable areas surrounding secretive ranges. When Otteson, camping on the Groom Lake Road, used a thermal imager to scan the night sky, he detected an aircraft with an unmistakably triangular shape flying within the restricted airspace of Area 51 but independent of, and visibly distinct, a B-2 Spirit spotted at the same time.
Otteson described hearing multiple aircraft in the valley with no visible lights before his thermal scan landed on the unusual shape. “I was camping near Groom Lake Rd, the road leading to the front gate to Area 51,” he said. “I heard what sounded like multiple aircraft in the valley. There were no visible lights so I began scanning around the sky for a while with a thermal imager… The trailing edge immediately looked different than the B-2, in which the distinctive jagged trailing edge was visible.” The sensor involved was an AGM TM50-640 thermographic camera, and the recording distance leaves room for distortion, but the basic planform still reads as a flat, sharp triangle rather than the B-2’s more complex trailing edge geometry.
That profile is important since it resembles one of the more enduring images of the past ten years of the “black aircraft”: the 2014 Wichita photo of the giant, dark triangular-shaped aircraft through a long lens. In that previous case, analysis quoted by USNI characterized an aircraft that generates contrails at a high altitude as flying S-turns over the city and the photographer recollected, “Right over the city, clear as a bell.” The same USNI report has also stated that contrails tend to be at altitudes above 26,000 ft, and that the apparent trail was a sign of a multi-engine design- helpful requirements even when the silhouette remains intact.
Another parallel thread of the time is that in March 2014 of photos of three high-altitude, boomerang-shaped planes in formation, taken over Amarillo, Texas. One of the observers made this description at USNI: It was weaving in and out of the contrail of the lead aircraft, sort of sportively. The connection between the Texas formation and the Wichita triangle was never publicly established but the coincidental viewing of the two formations provided a prototype that continues to serve as a template of modern range behavior: a layer of overt activity (contrails, formation flying, recognizable support aircraft) and a second layer far more electronically silent and austere in appearance.
The texture around the Groom Lake thermal capture is what makes it especially sticky. Securing a livestream overview of audio recordings of the scanner on the night of the incident, Dreamland Resort’s Joerg Arnu and Otteson pointed to the heavy traffic with nonspecific codewords, such as “Corona, Pretzel, Garlic, Mustard, Michelob”, but without the triangular plane itself being discussed on open communication lines. Such isolation is consistent with the rules of sensitive test asset management: the visible participants make their arrangements using available channels, and the most secure platform is supported by resilient connections and makes minimal noise to the outside world.
The exotic planforms have also been suggested, in form of public image, to be not a single rumor cycle. In 2022, new delta-wing-shaped aircrafts were seen on an apron at Area 51 in commercial satellite imagery, and analysts estimated the size to be about 65 feet long by 50 feet wide. That delta was said to be tailless and flowing including not an unadulterated “Dorito” triangle, but rather with a larger reality: several unorthodox low-observable geometries may be operational in the same ecosystem over years, sometimes decades, before even names or missions ever emerge.
In that regard, the thermal frame of Otteson is not so much concerned with proving such a program but continuity. A daytime shot taken over one of the aircraft-building capitals of the U.S. in 2014 and a nocturnal shot taken in a widely recognized test range of the country in 2026 both point to a long-lived design motif–one that, nonetheless, has never been officially associated with a previously existing aircraft.
