A 2021 video that some Marines interpreted and believed to be a triangular UFO hovering over their base in California turned out to be… flares.

UFO researcher John Greenewald Jr. obtained dozens of photos, videos and documents from the Pentagon last week that appear to explain the lights on April 20, 2021 at Camp Wilson near Twentynine Palms, California, that they mistook for a triangular “craft.”

In May, documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell and journalist George Knapp shared with DailyMail.com three photos and five videos of the 2021 incident, showing five lights hovering in the sky.

One of the photos appeared to show a solid triangular shape around the lights, and two Marines who witnessed the incident said they believed it was a boat. Corbell and Knapp said they investigated the incident for two years.

However, videos and photos obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) this month by Greenewald, an expert on such requests, show smoke trails above the five lights that indicate they were flares and long-exposure effects, which after all they were not hovering but slowly descending like flares do.

Veteran researcher Mick West, who often appears on UFO shows expressing a skeptical view of alleged alien occurrences, was able to accurately match the alleged UFO lights with a confirmed video of flares taken during a training exercise that night at the military base.

In a video posted to YouTube, West explained the triangular shape around the lights in one of Corbell and Knapp’s photos as “just the bleeding of color, which you can see around other objects in the scene.”

The flares often remain lit for four to seven minutes, and the parachutes hanging below descend quite slowly and appear to be hovering from a distance.

“The five lights start out with a nice formation reminiscent of a triangle, but quickly break up into more random positions like flares,” West said in his video. “John found videos of five flares that look so similar, I realized it looked like it was taken from the other side. So I flip it over and overlay it, and it’s almost perfect.

A train driver who took some of the footage while serving at Camp Wilson spoke with Corbell days later in 2021. In a taped interview, he said the lights went on for about 10 minutes and left him and his companions “confused.”

“One of my friends was out. He was looking at the sky and said it just appeared out of nowhere,” he said, adding that “we all went outside and looked and then slowly 50-plus people started to come out and search. These lights appeared out of nowhere. If you look at the image, you can see a black triangular shape. With the photo I took of the black triangular shape under the lights, it’s definitely not some kind of flare or lighting rounds.”

However, military press releases indicate that there was a large training exercise with many flares, planes and drones in the sky on the night of April 20, 2021.

The “Night Air Assault” was conducted by “2nd Marine Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division and aircraft associated with Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics 1,” according to a post published by the Defense Visual Intelligence Distribution Service (DVIDS ) that day.

The corresponding video of the flares, where a trail of smoke is visible, was published in a collection of night vision videos by DVIDS and was first discovered by Greenewald. Among the 128 photos Greenewald obtained this month through FOIA is an image of two flares in the night sky, next to five smoke trails from extinguished flares that he believes were the source of the five mysterious lights, and could explain the description