2010-05-06 - Sacramento, CA - Light

Three bright lights low in the night sky almost equidistant from each other over Sacramento, California.

I was driving to my home in Sacramento from my work in Roseville, California on southbound Interstate 80. As I approached downtown Sacramento I noticed four very bright stars in the sky over the city. Within seconds I realized that one was a distant airplane (because of the red and green lights that I noticed it exhibited as I looked more closely). The "stars" were about seven full moons apart from each other.

As I got closer to the city I could see that the lights were seemingly stationary because their orientation altered naturally with my approach and the turns in the freeway. I apparently was getting closer to them.

As I got into town, near the area of Sutter General Hospital the three lights were to my side. The closest of the lights was about five times bigger than a very bright star or five times a magnitude 1 star. It seemed to be around three hundred feet in the air. I tried to notice how far the closest object was from me but I couldn't tell. At first it looked closer than my exit which was coming up (the 16th Street Exit) but as I approached the exit I could see it was farther away... perhaps twice as far.

Still, I knew these were not stars nor some other regular natural celestial phenomena. As I approached them they were in front of me; when I got closer they were next to me and then as I went further they were behind me and they were low in the sky.

I had seen them from the vantage of the freeway but as I took the exit which descended onto the surface streets the objects were lost amidst buildings and trees and I could not see them again.

In all I saw the objects for about six minutes. Because I was driving on the freeway I could only view them intermittently but, perplexed by their strangeness, tried to make as good an observation as I could and remember as many details as possible.