1997-09-17 - Delilah Lookout, CA - Disk

Right around dusk, my girlfriend and I had just finished dinner in the fire lookout tower. She spotted something to the north, over a mountain range about twenty miles away, and alerted me. It looked like a huge, flaming star. I put the binoculars on it and it looked like something on fire, a metallic, electrical-looking fire. Long "flames" shooting out of something in the core. All of a sudden the "flames" collapsed in on themselves, seemingly sucked into the center. What was left was a flashing light that jumped around the sky, seemingly at random. Then the object began moving south-southeast, almost directly at us. It flew in basically a straight path but it would jump around from time to time. It was disconcerting to watch. It didn't seem to obey the laws of flight we are familiar with. It passed within a few miles of us. I kept my binoculars trained on it the entire time. It was saucer-shaped, with multi-colored lights moving around its edges, a large white light at the bottom and a smaller red light on top. My girlfriend got scared and ran inside the lookout. I stayed on the catwalk to watch it. It went through the sky at sort of a 45-degree angle; not flat like a frisbee. It flew, still jumping around some, over the San Joaquin Valley. AS far as I could tell, it stopped at about five thousand feet above Woodlake or Lindsay, somewhere in that area. There it remained, nearly motionless, for several minutes. Then, from the west (the direction of Lemoore Naval Air Station) there came several flashing white lights, five or six of them. These lights behaved like helicopters. Above these lights was a another, larger light which behaved like a large airplane. As these lights approached the object, the object suddenly shot nearly straight up, going from five thousand to about 30,000 feet in a blink of an eye. There it remained while the white lights flew around the airspace it had occupied (searching?). I kept my binos trained on it for many minutes until my eyes became watery. I wiped them off and when ! I looked up it was gone. The white lights eventually peeled off and returned to the west.