1998-04-10 - El Cajon, CA - Cigar

Observed object, nothing around it. Pulsing red light, bright-dim-bright-dim. Moved slowly toward us. Through binoculars, could see marquise-shaped lights, largest in center, and tapering to smaller in size towards edges. As approached, went up in altitude. Directly overhead, shot up quickly to a pin-prick size, then disappeared completely.

At 5:45 A.M. Pacific time, I looked out my kitchen window and saw a bright, intensely red light. The sky was clear, no clouds. We had just switched to Daylight Savings Time last Saturday. The red light pulsed bright-dim approximately every second. I looked at it for approximately thirty seconds, noting that it was not moving. I went upstairs to get our binoculars. I raised the blinds in the bedroom, waking up my wife. I told her, "Come here, there's something in the sky." She observed the same red light. We both determined it was not an airplane. In fact, we are near the approach flight path for Lindbergh Field in San Diego, and during the event, we saw the lights of a jet on final approcah, and the plane's lights were below the height of the red object. We also determined it could not be a helicopter. I would also like to note that it was extremely early in the morning and there was no traffic noise, and we heard absolutely nothing from this object. If it had been a helicopter, we would have heard the blades. My wife went downstairs to get our 35 millimeter camera (autofocus-type) to take a picture of the object. I retreived the binoculars and went downstairs also. My wife took two pictures of the object, hopefully one at its bright pulse and one at its dim pulse. To my observation, it moved slowly from the southwest toward the northeast, but not in a straight line. It moved in what I would call a Lazy S configuration. During all of this time, the pulsing of the lights did not change. When it got directly over my head, it stopped and it seemed like it disappeared. I looked for it through the binoculars again, and I found it, but it seemed much smaller and dimmer than when we first observed it, and then it completely disappeared. It seemed to me as if it went straight up very quickly. My wife did not see this movement because she had gone inside to try and find someone to call. My wife observed the object through the binoculars, and she reported that it appeared to her that the object had seven marquise-shaped lights that were glowing brighter than the surrounding part of the "structure". The largest one in the middle seemed to her to be the one that was pulsing. Each of the marquise-shaped sections were yellowish at the centers, graduating out to orange, and then red, with the spaces in between red also. I am 44 years old, retired USN Chief. I work as a Draftsman/Design Engineer for a metals manufacturer. I have never seen an object like this before. My wife is 43 years old, works as a freelance court reporter. She's never seen anything like this before. We have been married ten years this September and have two cats. I have three children from a previous marriage and two grandchildren. We've lived in this home since 1989. One other thing we would like to report is that we are close to a mountain in Spring Valley, CA called San Miguel. Atop this mountain are a multitude of communications installations for probably every radio and TV station in our county, as well as Tijuana, Mexico. We don't know if that has any bearing, but we did want to mention this. When we get the film developed, we will send the two pictures via regular mail.