2000-04-15 - Torrance, CA - Disk

Bright daylight sightinh of disk shaped opject moving westward, taking a turn northward and climbing out of sight.

Saturday, April 15th, at 3:35 PM, my girlfriend and her son were driving east on Lomita Blvd. in Torrance California near the intersection of Lomita and Hawthorne Blvd. when they witnesses a silvery object at about 30 degrees off the horizon slightly north of due east. They were on their way to my office and were only a couple of minutes from my front door when they spotted it. The object was about 1/8" diameter at arms length and was clearly visible. The sky was absolutely clear with no smog or clouds. It was described to me by her son, who is 12 and a half years old as a saucer shaped object with a line at its girth separating the top half from the bottom. Interestingly, the top half was described as rotating on its axis while the bottom was stationary to the top. My girlfriend's son also described some purple and blue flashes that were being emitted from the surface of the object. He described these as flashes that would have the perspective as if you were looking into a tunnel. After viewing the video, these are clearly visible. Also, from his vantage point where he saw the object lower on the horizon, these would have been more in direct line with his line of sight and would have given him this tunnel perspective view. In contrast to this view, my video shows the object directly from its bottom. The object was hovering motionless for several seconds when two airplanes crossed ahead of it. These two airplanes were seen by both the mother who was driving and the son. Immediately after the planes crossed each other's paths, the object disappeared from view until the two planes were a fair distance away. It then re-appeared and began moving westward into the wind direction. Upon arriving at my office, they both frantically called out to me to get my video camera out, that there was a UFO. I immediately grabbed my camera and went out to take a look and hopefully get a shot. When I first viewed it, it was about 65 degrees off the horizon looking due east. I was in the parking lot of my office complex situated directly at the corner of Lomita Blvd. and Madison. I took my 5X telephoto lens with me to make sure that I got a good close up shot of it. It was climbing steeply and getting smaller very quickly as it moved westward. It was very hard to get a fix on it with my long lens. I simply couldn't find it fast enough, so I laid down on the pavement to steady the camera pressing my elbows against my ribcage. I found it and got about 4 seconds of video and quickly lost it again. In my video, it appears that the UFO is jumping around, but it was in fact moving very steadily. It continued west for about ten seconds, then took a fairly sharp turn to the north, crossways to the wind. It continued north with apparent slowing as it was climbing very fast until it was out of sight. I immediately took the video into my office where I have several computers and image processing programs. Upon looking at it, I not only got a very good shot of the object even though it was nothing more than a speck in the sky, but was able to get a few good frames of these purple and blue flashes that my girlfriend's son had described. When I looked at with my naked eye, I did not notice these probably because the object was so small. I took some of the frames and began doing some computer enhancements using only the hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, histogram, midtone enhancements and so on to bring out what detail that might be obtainable from the unchanged original video frame. I own an engineering company and have won several photography awards with the Kodak International Snapshot competition and PSA the Photographic Society of America.