NUFORC Sighting 60620

Occurred: 2007-12-31 22:15 Local
Reported: 2008-01-01 19:26 Pacific
Duration: 1 to 2 Minutes
No of observers: 2

Location: San Carlos (of San Diego), CA, USA

Shape: Light
Characteristics: Lights on object, Electrical or magnetic effects

A well definied red light, that looked electronic, drifted overhead and disappeared right above us.

For the past few years, I have read about the reports of red lights being seen over the city of San Diego during both the 4th of July and New Year’s Eve. I believed that due to a vast number of reports over the years, coming from all over town, that this must be a legitimate sighting. I believed that something really was being spotted by people in the skies over San Diego.

The reports usually involved at least two red lights appearing high above the city at night. They appear to hover or drift slowly, lasting a few minutes, and then the red lights either flicker or fade out. It sounded like flares to me. The behavior seemed to mimic what they do.

However, I wanted to hold my opinion until I saw it with my own eyes. Last night, I finally did.

I brought a friend with me to Cowles Mountain, located near San Carlos and the Mission Trails Regional Park area. The summit has an elevation of 1591 feet. I figured this was the perfect location to see anything that might appear above San Diego’s skies because I could see so many communities in and around the San Diego area, while still high above the city, close to everything. The majority of sightings seemed to occur around the Le Mesa area which we would also be very close to. There would be no missing it should the red lights appear in the same skies. We just hoped the weather would be clear, which luckily for us, it was.

We arrived by the mountain side at 10:15pm. After grabbing our gear and locking up the truck, my friend and I started walking towards the entrance to the trail. We didn’t get too far before I stopped and stared at a light directly above us. We hadn’t even left the neighborhood street yet and there it was! Sure enough, I was staring at a single red light just hanging in the sky. My friend turned, wondering why I stopped and followed my gaze. He saw it too. We couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t even midnight yet. We hadn’t even started our climb yet.

We watched it, expecting to see it turn or flash some other lights that might identify it as a normal aircraft. The red light was clear and crisp in the sky. It didn’t glow or appear fiery. It looked electronic to me. It was sharp. We watched it very slowly move to our right. Had this been a normal aircraft, only seeing a red light, it should have been going the opposite direction. The light should have been going left as on a normal aircraft. The left side light navigation light is red and the right side light is green. Seeing nothing but a red light, It should have flown to our left. The red light was instead drifting right. That was the other thing. It was drifting. It was traveling way too slow for a normal aircraft as well. It moved so slow in the sky that a normal plane would have stalled. It seemed to hesitate and bob in the sky as well. It flew a certain direction, but it wasn’t a perfectly straight line. I thought it might be a trick of my eyes at first, so as I watched it, I compared it’s movement to the stars behind it and a palm tree that rose up into the sky near it. It really did appear to be inconsistent in it’s forward movement. There was no sound.

Even watching it, I was thinking, “Balloon. That’s gotta be something attached to a balloon.” We watched it move to our right, directly overhead, towards the mountain. This was flying in a NW direction. More specifically, I would have to say the object was directly over Navajo RD and just past Boulder Lane Ave flying towards the northwest. Quickly, I swung the backpack off my back and set on the trunk of a parked car. I fumbled for the video camera I had packed. I wasn’t ready. I was expecting to climb the mountain, have time to settle in, and break the camera out when I was ready nearing midnight. I didn’t expect that I would see it so soon! I fumbled in the dark for the zipper, but I didn’t want to take my eyes off it either, so I wasn’t able to get my camera right away.

While I did this, the light dimmed. My friend commented that, “It’s going up.” It appeared to be the case, but I wasn’t sure if it was going upwards or if the light had a direction to it and now was turning away from us, so that it appeared to dim. Watching a fainter light now, it did appear to raise up higher into the sky for me too. Before I could hit record and zoom in, it faded away completely. The light was gone.

The two of us stood there and kept our eyes on the same general spot in the sky. We couldn’t see anything there any more. There was nothing was moving. There was no light, no silhouette of an aircraft with it’s lights off. Nothing. There was only the stars of a clear night sky with nothing to be seen in the air at all.

We began out trek up Cowles Mountain. As we walked up the long fire road, we occasionally looked back up into the sky, hoping to see something like that again, and we discussed what we had seen.

I was certain that the light was actually lower than it seemed. The very first thing I tried to gauge was how close the object may have been to us. A lot of people say that the lights are really high up in the sky. I actually got the impression that the light we saw was a lot lower to the ground than it may have seemed. I thought the object was only as high as the mountain itself, of maybe a little bit higher but not by much. So, I would say it was under 3000 feet. Saying that, that would also mean the object was really small. I thought the object could not have been any larger than the size of a tire. I also thought that I could see a vague shape behind it, like it was attached to something. However, it didn’t expand beyond the light much so it was very hard to see. I thought I saw a dark enough shadow behind it to be something attached to it and I’ll be honest, it did look triangular shaped. The red light was on one point, towards the back of the direction it was moving. I will not report this as a triangular sighting, however, as the light is the only thing I'm sure about.

My friend disagreed on a few points. He didn't see anything behind the light. To him, the light also appeared to be much higher. He did think that it was high up in the sky, above 3000 feet. He thought it was high enough for other planes to possibly see and be up near. I asked him about the size and he thought it had to be something closer to the size of a car, maybe 6 feet wide. We pretty much agreed on everything else, though, including movement and speed.

I told my friend that I was sure it was a prank, still. The light didn’t do anything “out of this world.” I thought there was still possible explanations for it. I told my friend that, in my opinion, someone somehow attached a red light to a balloon and released it into the air. The wind that night was blowing in the same general direction the light was going.

However, there are some things I wonder, like how the light went out. We watched the sky for a while. If the light was simply on a string, it should have turned to face us again. It never reappeared. I also find it hard to believe that it would simply go out after being released into the sky.

It wasn’t a flare because we were close enough to it, we should have been able to see smoke, a flickering of light, or some fiery effect. It wasn’t a glow stick because it didn’t “glow.” There was nothing vague about the light. It was sharp and clear, like a bright bulb, unwavering in it’s brightness. It only dimmed before fading out. We watched flares later that night. I pointed out to my friend how flares were different. We were given plenty of examples as people near and far fired flared into the sky for new years. The flares were much brighter. The red light would be suddenly real bright in the sky, burn with a fiery effect, even have a hot pink fluorescent glow to it as it drifts back down towards the ground. This object was definitely not a flare. We ruled that out.

We’re pretty sure it’s a prank, we just couldn’t explain how it simply vanished right over us.

To add more weirdness to the night, the very next time I checked my watch to check the time, the light inside it died. That could have been a coincidence. It is an older digital watch, but some people like to know about electronic things failing during UFO sights. That actually did happen, so I’m reporting it, but I think it’s just an odd coincidence there too.

Nothing else was seen by us for the rest of the night, to our disappointment. We did get to see fireworks all over the city. It was cool spending New Year’s up there. It’s an amazing view, but no other unexplained lights appeared anywhere over the city that we could see. I was hoping that if it was a prank, that what we had seen was a test, perhaps planned before they would release more lights into the sky right at midnight, but that never happened. It was just that weird red light at 10:15pm over San Carlos.

My friend and I are in our mid-to-late twenties. I have investigated UFOs for a short while and was in the Navy as a trained observer for close to 6 years. I extended and got out with an honorable discharge. I currently work security for a tele-communications company in the San Diego area where I have lived for the past 10 years now.



Posted 2008-01-21

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