February 9, 2005 — Owings Mills, Maryland. Lockheed Martin engineer Frank Griffin watches a silent, lightless, 100+ foot black triangle glide overhead at 400 feet. Having seen the F-117 and B-2 up close, he confirmed it was not a known platform. CE-I. Unexplained.
THINK ABOUTIT UFO|UAP SIGHTING REPORT
2005: Owings Mills, Maryland — A Lockheed Martin Engineer Watches a Silent Black Triangle Glide Overhead
On the evening of February 9, 2005, Frank Griffin — a software engineer at Lockheed Martin — was lying on the trampoline in his backyard in Owings Mills, Maryland, stargazing, when he noticed stars disappearing directly above him and realized something enormous, flat, and perfectly black was sliding silently overhead at no more than 400 feet, moving so slowly that he had a sustained, detailed look at a craft he estimated at over 100 feet from tip to tail. Griffin, who had personally seen both the F-117 Nighthawk and the B-2 Spirit up close on the ground and in low-altitude flybys, confirmed that the object resembled a stealth fighter from directly below but carried no lights of any kind, produced no sound whatsoever, and left no visible exhaust trail — characteristics that, in his professional engineering judgment, eliminated every known aircraft from consideration.
This case is notable for the witness’s professional credentials: a Lockheed Martin software engineer with direct firsthand experience observing stealth aircraft both on the ground and in flight. His assessment that the object was not a known military platform carries more technical weight than a typical civilian observation. The sighting was featured by WUSA 9 News in Washington, D.C.
Completed Template
Date: February 9, 2005
Sighting Time: 6:45 p.m.
Day/Night: Night
Location: Owings Mills, Maryland (21 Old Tollgate Road, hillside overlooking Reisterstown Road valley)
Urban or Rural: Suburban / Rural — single-family house on hillside
No. of Entity(‘s): None observed
Entity Type: Not Applicable
Entity Description: Not Applicable
Hynek Classification: CE-I (Close Encounter I) — Observation of an object in close proximity to the witness (within 500 feet)
Duration: 4 to 5 minutes
No. of Object(s): 1
Description of the Object(s): Nearly equilateral triangular craft, perfectly black, with a very faint gray V-shape along the bottom. No lights, no collision strobes, no exhaust. Resembled a stealth fighter from directly below but without the serrated rear edge. Extremely solid.
Shape of Object(s): Triangle (nearly equilateral)
Size of Object(s): Approximately 100+ feet from tip to tail; slightly wider across the base
Color of Object(s): Black — so dark it was extremely hard to see even at close range
Distance to Object(s): Approximately 400 feet or less when first noticed; below 1,000-foot cloud layer
Height & Speed: Below 1,000-foot cloud ceiling; moving very slowly south to north; maintained altitude and heading
Number of Witnesses: 1
Special Features/Characteristics: Complete silence — no engine noise, no exhaust, no heat trail; no lights of any kind — no navigation lights, no collision strobes, no point sources; extremely slow speed for a fixed-wing platform; witness is a Lockheed Martin software engineer with direct experience observing stealth aircraft; object appeared to disappear at distance due to extreme flatness and blackness; below a very slight cloud layer at approximately 1,000 feet; a faint gray V-shape visible on the underside; sighting featured on WUSA 9 News (Washington, D.C.)
Case Status: Unexplained
Source: UFOEvidence.org; WUSA 9 News (Washington, D.C.), article: “UFO Over Maryland?”
Summary/Description: A Lockheed Martin software engineer with direct stealth aircraft experience observed a completely silent, lightless, nearly equilateral black triangle at approximately 400 feet altitude, moving slowly from south to north over his backyard in Owings Mills, Maryland. The 100+ foot craft was below a 1,000-foot cloud ceiling and visible for 4-5 minutes. The witness confirmed the object resembled known stealth aircraft but carried no required lighting and produced no sound or exhaust.
Related Cases: 1978 Patapsco State Park Triangle | 1981 Bethesda UFO | 1981 Harford County Obsidian Diamond
Detailed Report
Frank Griffin, a software engineer at Lockheed Martin, lived in a single-family home on a hillside at 21 Old Tollgate Road in Owings Mills, Maryland, overlooking the valley where Reisterstown Road runs east to west. On the evening of February 9, 2005, he was lying on the family trampoline in the backyard, looking up at the stars.
He noticed that stars were disappearing almost directly above him. There was a very faint V-shape moving slowly from south to north. As he looked more carefully and the object began to move over the valley, it passed below a very slight cloud layer — at most 1,000 feet — which was reflecting some light from the valley below. When the craft came between the cloud layer and Griffin’s position, its form was clearly visible: a nearly equilateral triangle, perfectly black, with the exception of a very faint gray V-shape along the underside.
There were no lights of any kind on the craft. Nothing at the triangle’s vertices, no collision strobes, nothing. Griffin noted that from directly below it looked similar to a stealth fighter — he had seen both the F-117 Nighthawk and the B-2 Spirit up close on the ground and during daylight flybys at 300 to 600 feet — but he could not identify the serrated trailing edge characteristic of stealth aircraft. He estimated the object at over 100 feet from tip to tail, slightly wider across the base of the triangle.
The craft produced no sound whatsoever. There was no masking ambient noise in the area, and the object appeared to be no more than 400 feet away when Griffin first noticed it. There was no exhaust, no apparent heat trail, nothing. The object moved very slowly, and despite its low altitude, Griffin had a sustained look at it over four to five minutes. It maintained constant altitude and heading, moving straight north.
Griffin repositioned himself off the trampoline so that a pine tree in the backyard would not block his view, and was able to observe the craft from a low rear angle. When the object reached a certain point, perhaps half a mile away, it seemed to simply disappear — though Griffin acknowledged that its extreme flatness and blackness would make it nearly impossible to see at even moderate angles.
The object was definitely solid, and so black that it was extremely difficult to see even at close range. Griffin noted that he would never have detected it had he not been looking directly at the stars it occluded as it passed. He expressed concern that hundreds of such objects could overfly the neighborhood on any given night and no one would ever notice them.
The sighting was subsequently picked up by a reporter from WUSA 9 News in Washington, D.C., who discovered the UFOEvidence.org posting, and featured in a news segment titled “UFO Over Maryland?”
Researcher’s Notes
The Owings Mills Triangle — Maryland 2005 and the Credentialed Witness Problem
Classification Correction — NL to CE-I: The original page classifies this case as NL (Nocturnal Light). This is incorrect on two counts. First, the object produced no light — it was detected by star occlusion, not by luminosity. Second, the witness estimated the object at approximately 400 feet distance, well within the 500-foot CE threshold, and was able to resolve structural details including the triangular planform, the faint gray V-shape on the underside, and the absence of the serrated trailing edge characteristic of stealth aircraft. This is unambiguously a CE-I: a close encounter with a structured object at short range. The classification has been corrected.
Witness Credentials — Lockheed Martin Engineer: Frank Griffin’s professional background is the most analytically significant element of this case. As a Lockheed Martin software engineer, he worked within the defense aerospace industry and had direct firsthand experience observing stealth aircraft — both the F-117 and B-2 — on the ground and in low-altitude flight. His observation that the object resembled a stealth fighter but lacked the serrated trailing edge, carried no required lighting, and produced no sound is not a casual civilian impression but a comparison made by someone with direct professional access to the most relevant conventional candidates. His conclusion that the object was not a known military platform carries substantial technical weight.
The Maryland Black Triangle Pattern: This 2005 CE-I is part of a broader pattern of black triangle sightings in Maryland spanning three decades. The 1978 Patapsco State Park triangle (four witnesses, APRO investigated) was observed at 200-250 feet with visible windows and possible occupant silhouettes. The 1981 Harford County obsidian diamond (near Aberdeen Proving Ground) displayed a polished black surface and power-infrastructure association. The Owings Mills triangle shares the core signature: large, black, silent, slow, and operating at very low altitude over suburban Maryland. Whether these represent a single platform type observed across decades, an evolving technology, or unrelated phenomena remains an open question, but the geographic clustering in central Maryland is notable.
Detectability Problem — Invisible in Plain Sight: Griffin’s observation that the craft was so dark he would never have noticed it had he not been looking directly at the stars it occluded has profound implications for any statistical estimate of UAP frequency. A completely dark, silent object at 400 feet is functionally invisible to anyone not already engaged in sky-watching with dark-adapted vision. Griffin noted that hundreds of such objects could overfly his neighborhood undetected. This raises the possibility that the observed frequency of black triangle reports represents a small fraction of actual transits — only those detected by coincidental sky-watchers under optimal conditions.
The Owings Mills triangle is a CE-I reported by a defense industry engineer with direct stealth aircraft experience, featured on Washington D.C. television news, and part of a multi-decade Maryland black triangle pattern. It remains Unexplained.
Wrap-Up
A Lockheed Martin engineer who had personally seen the F-117 and B-2 up close lay on a trampoline and watched something he could not identify glide silently over his backyard at 400 feet. He knew what stealth aircraft looked like. He knew what they sounded like. This was neither. The record files his professional assessment alongside his personal observation and notes that if the man who builds the things says this wasn’t one of the things he builds, the archive takes that seriously. Unexplained.
