2009-05-09 - unknown, CA - Formation

4 dark orbs emitting contrail somewhere over southern california

Unfortunately, I do not know the exact location of the sighting since we were on an airplane from Cabo San Lucas to LAX. It was about 30 minutes to our arrival at LAX.

I was looking at an unusual cloud formation that looked like a a contrail of some sort, that was nearly parallel in height to the jet plane we were in. The white contrail at first just seemed to stop, which is why I thought it was just a cloud formation. My daughter was in the window seat, so I asked her to look out the window and tell me if she saw anything unusual. We both stared out the window and she said she saw 4 dark circles that seemed to be in a boomerang formation. While she is saying this, I realized that the contrail didn't just end, it WAS behind 4 dark circles.

Whatever it was, it was flying slower than the plane, so we had had to strain to continue to see it. Neither of us thought to get a camera and take a picture of it. It did not appear to be that far away and the circles seemed to be about the size of a thumbnail at arms length. They were large enough, that if it had been a plane, we should have been able to see some detail, like wings and a fuselage, but they were just dark circles. It was strange.

Maybe there is a completely mundane explanation for what we saw, but it wasn't like anything I recognized. I was hoping that someone else might have reported seeing something, because it did appear we were over a populated area. You could see roads, houses, reservoirs, etc...