2004-11-25 - Sacramento, CA - Light

Fast light approaches me and I shoot 2 Quicktime clips of it passing overhead while driving!

While driving home from work early 11-25 at approx 3:30 am PDT, it was partly cloudy with patchy fog that was illuminated by a nearly full moon. I was driving westbound on I-80 freeway and turned off at Truxel Rd and was turning south (left turn), heading back over the freeway.

When I straightened out the wheel, from the direction I just came from, I noticed a very bright unusual looking whitish amber colored light up in the sky. I estimate it was maybe 400 to 500 ft up. at about 35 degrees up from the horizon. At about a distance of a mile or so yet down the freeway. My first thought was its just a helicopter flying low over the freeway. Then I looked for the usual blinking marker lights around the big light which didn't look like anything I've seen on a helicopter before. That's when things didn't add up in my estimations of distance and speed and relative size of a chopper. I could pretty much see that the light was too large for a helicopter at that distance and it was closing fast. The light itself was not the usual bright spot light, with its search light spot ray pointing downward. More like it was the entire craft itself.

I remembered I had my digital camera with me and realized I could take a picture of this thing. It was in its case and I become really excited as I fumbled with the bag losing precious seconds trying to negotiate a moving vehicle and open my camera case at the same time. I slowed down to maybe 10 mph from about the 20mph that I was up to crossing the overpass. By the time I got my camera out and rolled down my window so as to not get flash reflection, it had caught up to me, I stuck my camera out the window, turned it back behind me and up. I immediately saw the bright light in the view finder screen. Holding the camera with both hands and trying to keep it still I pressed the button but the flash didn't go off as I expected so I just thought it 'misfired' and I pressed again. Neither time did I get a flash. I must have batteries too weak to fire the flash on my camera I thought and then it dawned on me that I didn't hear anything like a helicopter. This thing made No Sound! Then when I got home I pressed "review" on my camera and to my surprise it started playing back a video of what I saw and was trying to take a picture of. I had inadvertently captured 3 seconds of it in two very short movies of it. It turns out In my haste to get a picture I must have turned the mode selector button on my Kodak CX7300 past "camera" one notch to "Video" mode. Although the video is shaky and brief you can slow it down in Quicktime by manually dragging the playback head back and forth to see the light's path overhead relative to tiny more stationary lights below it.

I counted a total 22 frames of the object spread out over two seperate clips in a timeframe of 2.5 to 3 seconds. I actually saw it for almost 30 seconds total.

Note that my date on the file is correct the actual right time was never set on my camera.