note / May 11, 2026

Roderick Castle says 29 Palms was not just flares

file: UAP Logbook
status: public note
updated: 2026-05-11

A former Marine describes a 1997 encounter with a silent triangular craft and an unmarked armed team during Hunter Warrior. The useful part is the narrow frame: date, place, exercise, and repeated pattern.

video sourceReality Check with Ross Coulthart: Roderick Castle, UAP Gerb, 29 Palms

The short version

Roderick Castle says that in March 1997, during the Marine Corps Hunter Warrior experiment at Twentynine Palms, his team was sent out at night to check what was described over the radio as unknown flare activity.

What he says they found was not a flare. He describes a 200 to 300 foot equilateral triangle hovering near the range, silent or close to silent, followed almost immediately by armed men in black uniforms coming up the hill with weapons drawn.

The entire encounter, in his telling, lasted only a few minutes. The craft left fast to the north or northwest. The armed team left. Castle and the other Marines returned to base, where the story was quietly reduced to “little flare activity.”

Why this case is not empty

The strongest part is not the triangle. It is the setting.

Hunter Warrior was a real Marine Corps Advanced Warfighting Experiment. Contemporary Marine Corps reporting places it in March 1997 at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, with experimental equipment, new tactics, reconnaissance, surveillance, deception, targeting, and night movement all in play.

That does not prove Castle's account. It does mean the claim sits inside a real exercise, at a real range, in a period where unusual systems and tactics were being tested.

What Castle says happened

Castle says his small team was in a Humvee with fire suppression equipment, assigned to respond if an aircraft went down or if something needed checking. Around 2 a.m., tower radioed them about unknown flare activity roughly five miles outside base.

Coming over a hill, he says they saw the triangular object hovering. Below or near it were several jacked-up black vehicles and roughly thirty armed men in black tactical gear. Castle says the men had no obvious insignia and spoke with American accents.

He says the Marines did not have their rifles on them in a usable way. The armed men told them to keep their heads down. Castle says he could still see the craft peripherally, then watched it depart quickly.

The part Ross focuses on

Ross Coulthart frames the story as part of a pattern: Marines encountering anomalous craft or retrieval scenes, then being confronted by unmarked American-accented armed teams.

The two comparison cases in the episode are Jonathan Weygandt in Peru and Michael Herrera in Indonesia. UAP Gerb argues that the same broad elements appear again: Marine witnesses, black-clad operators, no normal unit markings, weapons pointed at service members, and a response that looks unofficial while still seeming protected by official access.

That is the claim to track. Not “three stories prove one program,” but “three stories are being presented with enough overlap that the overlap itself becomes the subject.”

The weak points

The episode leans hard into conclusions: alien reproduction vehicles, Navy and Air Force legacy programs, Department of Energy-style response teams, and anti-gravity craft operated by the United States. Those are large steps beyond Castle's direct observation.

Castle can speak to what he says he saw: the triangle, the vehicles, the armed men, the reaction after returning, and the later medical-bay “anthrax booster” episode. The program-level explanation is still an interpretation layered on top.

That distinction matters. The story is more useful when the witness account is kept separate from the theory built around it.

The detail that sticks

The most interesting line is not a technical description of the craft. It is Castle saying the armed team seemed surprised by the Marines but already knew what to do.

If true, that is a strange middle ground. Not a random group. Not a normal exercise interaction either. A team present in a secure range area, able to move armed and unmarked, reacting as if an accidental witness problem had a known procedure.

Where to look next

The useful follow-up is narrow: unit records, range logs, tower/radio logs, Hunter Warrior after-action material, medical records around the alleged booster, and any other Marines from the same detachment who can place Castle and his team on that duty.

If those pieces appear, the case gets heavier. If they do not, it remains an unusually specific testimony wrapped inside a real 1997 exercise.