2011-08-31 - Castro Valley, CA - Light

Moving from the west in a south or south east direction - small single white object dimmed and disappeared

At approx 9:20 pm tonight,I was out front on our driveway waiting for my wife to come home from work.

As usual while out front, even though we have a street light in front of the house and there's a lot of light from Castro Valley and the surrounding cities like Hayward, San Leandro, San Lorenzo and Oakland, you can still see most of the brighter stars in the sky - like the Big Dipper, Orion's Belt and some of the Zodiac signs. There's been a couple times over the last several months that I've seen something strange, but I am not about to say it was a UFO - as I was alone with my dog and I know it was not a meteor or a plane. At any given time you can see on an average of about 7 to 8 aircraft at any given time in different parts of the sky around the SF Bay Area, most have just their navigational lights on and a few occasionally have their landing lights on.

Tonight, like before, I was looking up towards the west (approx 264 degrees) and I saw that I thought was a bright star or possibly be a planet, then I looked down and saw my wife's car coming down the street and turn and start to park out on the street.

While she was doing this I returned and looked to the west at this "object" but it wasn't a star, it was small like one of them but it was more of a bright white color and appeared closer than the "normal" stars, and it was moving sorta towards our general direction (which I later determined to be towards the south or south east).

As my wife walked up the drive way I didn't turn to look at her, instead I kept my eye on the object and it was continuing to move - not real real fast, but appeared to be maybe the speed of a plane or a little faster. When she asked what I was staring at, I told her I don't know that that is up there, I told her I didn't see any navigational lights on it and she looked up and with her typical doubt she said it's probably a plane. I was just about to agree when it started to get dimmer, like someone hit a switch and it dimmed real low and you could still see it but there was a definate difference in brightness. I told her look, it's getting dimmer and as we both watched it seemed like it was going up and got dimmer and then totally disappeared. We both looked for about 15 to 20 seconds trying to find it but it was not there - this was at approx 9:25pm. She then said mayby it WAS a UFO.

I know it was NOT a plane, the only plane that I have seen that would do something similar to his is the U2 Spy Plane and Nasa still uses them, I"ve seen them take off numerous times at the old Navy Moffett Field in San Mateo County over the years - saw one not more than mayby 1 month ago.

I know it was NOT a meteor, I've seen hundreds, if not maybe a thousand, over the years in the US, Korea, and Germany, I've seen them do all kinds of different things but they do NOT go up!