2007-12-30 - Vista, CA - Other

Pale object hovering over heighbor's house, with two dangling search lights up front, and 3rd light at tail.

December 30, 2007 My family had just returned home from trip to Anza Borrego desert, myself driving, arriving in our home's driveway in Vista, California about 8:30 pm Sunday night. Sky conditions were dark, clear and starry. No cloud cover. I did not notice any wind.

My wife pointed to a point above my neighbor's house, one to the north of ours, and said something like "look at that." There, at some height was a pale, whitish object, with two distinct lights hanging down a distance greater than the length of the object's body, and a third light right at the object's tail end. The object's body was about the same apparent field-of-view as the length of my finger held up at arms length. The object made no discernible noise, yet moved in a forward sense, and turned slowly, such that the "tail light" was always to the rear. At this time I took three photos with my digital camera (that I had been wearing on a hip pouch, therefore was immediately at hand), with flash disabled so as not to wash out the picture. The object seemed to be above the tree-line of a eucalyptus grove behind our house, so it was probably between 100 ~ 400 feet above us.

10 X Nikon Binoculars were at hand within our family vehicle and I grabbed those, and saw the object clearly and in some detail. The body looked to me like a sack or bag, and I could see texture to the bag's surface, like the material had some kind of "lay" to it as if it had been made from layers. It got weird when I saw the two front lights up close--though there was no apparent swinging motion of the lights at all, the lights themselves were actually swivelling independently and looked like miniature searchlights, scanning the area beneath the object. The lights were intense as they projected from their mount position, such that I could clearly make out the narrow "light cones" just beyond their source. My recollection is the light had an orange-ish hue to them, and when the object had moved directly overhead I could see the light "flare" as it passed directly over me, and then one light seemed to train on me directly for a few seconds (evidently as I was looking at it, it looked at me looking up at it). But the light was not blindingly bright as it did not even leave a "blind spot" of persistence of vision when I looked away, though I had been watching through binoculars.

At this time I ran inside and grabbed my videocamera and came outside. My wife pointed to where the object had moved, which was now a few houses down to the south, apparently along the same course that the houses on our side of the street took. I then shot twenty seconds of video of it as it made a 180 degree turn, allowing me to make out the shape of the craft, seeing it from below and to the side, and as it turned head-on. A striking feature to me was that in as much as it was always moving around up there, it followed a pretty much straight-line course that took it over our houses. My understanding is that that is an exceptional engineering feat to get any kind of balloon or blimp to manuever like that and keep to a course.