NUFORC Sighting 81945

Occurred: 2011-06-26 22:00 Local
Reported: 2011-06-27 10:19 Pacific
Duration: 2 minutes
No of observers: 1

Location: Willits, CA, USA

Shape: Oval
Characteristics: Lights on object, Emitted beams, Changed Colo

Red, orange, gold slow-moving crafts appeared and vanished June 26, 2011 California.

Sunday night, 6/26/11 about 10:00 p.m., outside of Willits in Northern California. I skywatch every night and had just gone out, facing west, clear dark night, when a beautiful bright, sparkling object appeared towards the south, and silently moved at a height lower than our few commercial flyovers, quite slowly and steadily without variation in altitude, apparently heading north-northwest. I of course assumed it was a plane—and from my angle it did seem to be a flat elliptical shape, but I knew the colors were wrong: red at the rear, gold at the front, with the lights moving and interplaying into brilliant orange and a coppery gold at the center. No separation between the lights and colors. They weren’t flashing but instead moving and pulsing, really lovely.

After only a few seconds of watching this, the lights all suddenly and uniformly dimmed and got hazy and changed character and it looked like a tiny version of a nebula cloud like I’ve seen in Hubble photos—but then I was distracted by a sudden narrow streak of dull white light that shot down, from some distance southward behind the “craft,” straight down to the ground (which I thought well, this could be a meteor, just without luminosity which isn’t uncommon). Then the original “craft” immediately got bright again, back to red and orange and gold, and traveled only a short distance more when it just disappeared. I waited and searched the sky to see if it reappeared but it didn’t.

Then about 30 seconds later, another one appeared from almost the same point of origin, again out of nowhere, again silently and fairly slowly traveled the same flight path, but this one was all gold light and the light was more steady and the “craft” seemed a bit smaller. When it got to the point where the first one had dimmed, it vanished. All of this took between 1 – 2 minutes. Nothing more occurred.

I had not myself heard of any UFO sightings with orange as a key color but I’ve now googled and see there are some, including multiple sightings in Washington in 2009.

Posted 2011-06-27