2008-08-13 - Mendota, CA - Light

three bright beams of light near highway, swooping and hovering, searching ground

Account 1:It was around 9:15 PM on Wednesday when my mother and I were driving along I-5 towards Pacheco Pass. We were in the left lane and there were other cars and trucks around us. I noticed that this object with 3 beams of lights looked like it was coming towards the highway and I thought that it might be a plane in trouble, needed to land on the highway. Instead it stopped coming closer to the highway and was about 50 yards away, hovering in the middle of nowhere. After it hovered I thought it might be a truck stopped on an overpass but we couldn’t see any hill or anything because it was dark. Then it started to swoop downwards and closer to the highway again, I realized that it was in fact NOT a truck on an overpass and that there wasn’t even a hill there, it had been stopped, hovering for about 10 seconds and it looked like it’s light was searching for something. It appeared to be 20 feet across and had three round, white lights evenly spread about searching only on the ground. We were traveling in the car around 80-90 mph and witnessed it go into an orchard where it appeared to hover between trees with its lights shining out towards the highway. When we passed it, it was still in the grove and we didn’t see it fly away. In total we saw it for about 2 minutes before we passed it on the highway. I could not actually see a body of an aircraft or whatever it was, I could only make out three distinct lights.

Account 2:My daughter (age 19) and I (age 54) were driving north on Interstate 5 near the farming district in Ca. last Wednesday evening when we saw 3 bright highlights, ahead of us, but off to the side of the highway. The lights were bright and blinding and we wondered if a plane was trying to make an emergency landing on the highway. But that didn’t make sense since I’ve never seen 3 lights placed so closely together on a plane. As we continued driving I thought it might be a tractor intending to cross an overpass since the lights were a bit higher than the horizon. Suddenly the lights stopped moving and just hovered in one place, then it flew towards the highway and then counter clockwise away from the interstate. It headed north in an open area as if it were going to land on a runway but it didn’t. The lights illuminated a field which I thought had grass on it. I think I saw a small red light on the right side of the wings, I’m not sure if I really saw a wing though, I’m assuming it’s a wing. The lights were so bright I never could see what the lights were attached to but there did go across in a fairly straight line horizontal to the ground. As we drove by the highlights were about 100yds or one football length away from our speeding car and hovered over an orchard of trees. I couldn’t tell if it landed on the ground or just hovered about the tree line next to the highway. Nor could I identify the shape of what supported the three bright highlights .