2008-09-20 - Salinas, CA - Sphere

Two faint orange objects moving in sky over Salinas

I was out stargazing at around 10:00pm with my 8” dobsonian telescope using a 25mm 1.25” eyepiece in my backyard. I was primarily looking at deep sky objects. I was focused on the Andromeda galaxy and wanted to look for the double cluster galaxy since know its location. I was looking towards the North-Eastern sky when suddenly I noticed two objects that I was never familiar with. There were two objects which were orange-ish in color. They appeared to be shaped as spheres. Both of the objects appeared within the eyepiece I was looking in. They appeared to be somewhat of a faint orange color. I can almost say that they were faint because they were in space around the Earth’s orbit and not in our atmosphere because I stopped looking in the telescope and tried to see them with my naked eye but could not. As I looked again in the eyepiece they were going in a south-eastern direction and suddenly made a quick turn going towards an easterly direction. One was below the other towards the lower right. The one below was sort of bouncing around or more like dancing around in no particular pattern. This stuck me as odd behavior. They kept their same formation and distance as they moved down the sky. I followed them for about 30 seconds and quickly called my 14 year old son outside. I asked him to take a look through the telescope and he saw the same objects I did. I tried to view the objects again, but they were probably below my fence and out of sight. I have seen helicopters, falling stars, satellites, & airplanes through my telescope and there were not any of those. I’m not saying they were UFO’s, but I certainly don’t know what they were. This was definitely a strange first moment for me.


((NUFORC Note: Witness elects to remain totally anonymous; provides no contact information. PD))