TR-3B

The TR-3B is a rumored black-budget American aircraft — often nicknamed "Astra" — described as a large, triangular, silent, antigravity-propelled craft with a distinctive plasma ring around its hull, popularized largely through claims made by Edgar Fouché in the 1990s about supposed classified programs he said he had insider knowledge of. The designation caught on quickly within ufology as the default "it's ours, not an alien's" explanation for the wave of black-triangle sightings that had been accumulating since the 1980s, from the Hudson Valley boomerang reports to the intense Belgian wave of 1989-92, offering a mundane-but-still-secret alternative to either extraterrestrial hardware or straightforward misidentification. No procurement record, contractor paper trail, budget line item, or corroborating insider testimony beyond Fouché's own claims has ever surfaced to support the TR-3B's existence, and aviation researchers who study the genuinely disclosed classified-aircraft record (the U-2, the SR-71, the F-117) note that programs of that real scale eventually do leave a documentary trail once declassified, which the TR-3B never has. The craft nonetheless remains a fixture of black-triangle discussion decades after Fouché's original claims, functioning less as an established program than as ufology's standing placeholder answer whenever a triangle report needs a terrestrial, if still secret, explanation.