2010-02-02 - Beckwourth, CA - Unknown

Two large blinking orange lights 20 feet high and 50 feet apart moving slowly away as we approached.

While driving home on a cloudy, dark evening on February 2, 2010 on a rural county road we saw two bright orange lights approximately 1 1/2 miles away on what we thought were power company vehicles. The lights blinked in unison and then separately approximately 2 seconds apart. They looked to be about 15 feet off the ground and about 50 feet apart. As we approached the dirt road were they had been hovering, we stopped because the lights were suddenly gone. The road is a dirt road which intersects our main county road and connects to the next parallel county road 5 miles away. We looked down the road for any sign of vehicles, head lights or anything that would have explained the lights. The dirt road has a small power substation adjacent to the beginning of the road which would explain our theory of a power company line truck being parked on the road. The power tends to go off periodically in our area due to normal winter wind and snow storms so seeing! a line truck is not unusual. We never saw any other vehicles, so we proceeded towards home again driving approximately 25 miles per hour so we could scan the horizon. This road is on the west side of a very large alpine valley in Northern California and the line of sight available across the valley at any given time is vast. The only time vision is obscured is when there is a white-out snow storm or too much fog. Neither were happening at the time, only a light drizzle of sporadic rain. After traveling one more mile the lights suddenly reappeared in the same fashion, approximately 20 feet off the ground now, still blinking bright orange and 50 feet from each other. The lights were in an area well known by both my daughter and I since we have lived across from this particular field for 11 years. There are no roads and no homes on this land, only alfalfa fields which had approximately 2 feet of snow covering the field at the time. We drove slowly on the road never ta! king our eyes off the lights and as we approached our road the! lights appeared to have slowly moved away from us in a southerly direction, yet they were still blinking in the same fashion and just as bright. We stopped on the road right before turning onto our dirt road and watched the lights for a few minutes. They stopped moving away but continued to blink in a random fashion, sometimes in unison, then separately. The distance apart never changed and was very steady. The height of each light was exactly the same. We didn't feel anything unusual and we didn't hear anything unusual. It was very dark outside so we weren't able to see if there was any sort of aircraft or shape around the lights. After we drove up our road we looked back down over the valley and the lights were gone. From our house we have a view of the entire valley as we live roughly 1/4 mile up a hill on the west side of the valley.