NUFORC Sighting 41499

Occurred: 2005-01-12 20:01 Local
Reported: 2005-01-13 12:43 Pacific
Duration: 4 seconds
No of observers: 1

Location: Thousand Oaks, CA, USA

Shape: Formation
Characteristics: Lights on object, Aura or haze around object

Three high speed orange lights in a long narrow triangular pattern over Thousand Oaks CA.

I have been an amateur astronomer for over 45 years. In the old days, I listened to Sputnik and watched the ECHO satellites. I have built telescopes and have spent many hours watching and photographing the sky. Over the years, I have seen all of the usual UFO candidates like satellites, flocks of birds, highflying aircraft, balloons, blimps, and rocket launches (we can see them from Vandenberg). So, I am reporting this in the hope that someone can give me an explanation for what I saw.

The sky was clear and dark. I was looking for a comet when I saw three orange lights (approx magnitude 4) traveling at an apparent high rate of speed from north to south, passing about 3 degrees west of the Pleiades. I believe that their altitude was greater than that of an aircraft on approach to LAX or Burbank. Even though the sky was dark and clear, the lights did not appear to be true points of light, as the stars did. I had the impression that they had ?dimension?. It was as though I was viewing them through a light cloud, but there were no clouds. One light was distinctly ahead of the other two by at least 2 degrees. The trailing two appeared to be side-by-side with approximately a ¼ to ½ degree separation. One of the trailing two then appeared to overtake the other and their separation decreased to near zero. The one that appeared to overtake the other then went slightly ahead. They all vanished about 45 degrees above the southern horizon. There was no sound or trail. The behavior is consistent with a typical satellite, except that there were three at once and the apparent passing of one by another. I checked satellite-viewing websites and could not find any naked eye satellites that would have matched what I saw.

Posted 2005-01-19