2012-03-14 - Fountain Valley, CA - Light

At least 3 orange points of light varying in brightness and movement at night lower than Mars

My son is a professional engineer who has his office in my house in Fountain Valley, CA. On Monday, March 12, 2012 he was diving east to my house for late night work on some of his project deadlines. He told me that he saw some very bright points of light low in the eastern sky at approximately 8 PM PST. Upon arrival we both went outside the house looked in the sky and located Mars and the planet Venus high in the Western sky but I did not see anything unusual.

On Wednesday, March 14, 2012, the same thing happened but this time we both went upstairs in my bedroom that has a large window facing directly east. This time I did observe at least 3 points of light at different and varying brightness from approximately 8PM to 8:30PM. My observation was as follows: (1)The objects were orange I and varied in brightness from brighter than Venus to the brightness of Mars. There was no change in color, but the objects could suddenly vanish and reappear in a different place and could vary in brightness. Most of the time they were about 15 – 20 degrees above the horizon (about one half of the angular height of Mars.) (2) Since I used 5x50mm binoculars I could observe only one object at a time. Because of trees and houses across the street there was limited areas that allowed for view much below 10 degrees above the horizon. I will report only the movement of one bright object because the others had similar motion.

(3) At times the object would stay totally still in one place for as long as 5 minutes and then would move. I could tell that because it was either close to a given branch of a tree or the roof of the house across the street. The movement was usually to the left or right and less often vertically (up or down). The speed varied in reference to fixed, nearby object. It would move (sometimes accelerated) then stop or even disappear. At times there was only one object visible at other times at least three. I repeat again, these were more or less points of light whose size could not be estimated and therefore the distance could be millions of miles from the earth. If that were the case then the speed at which they moved would be extremely fast.

In the early '60’s I was a navigator for USAF. In that period we depended on celestial navigation and I was intimately familiar with all of the bright stars (by name) and position of the planets at different seasons. Later I acquired advanced degree in physics and worked for USAF as a research scientist, engineer and on various code name space programs such as GPS. I can truly say that this observation was most interesting and strange. I cannot call these objects UFO’s because the objects could be well outside the earth atmosphere where we normally do not use the term "fly."


((NUFORC Note: We spoke via telephone with this witness, and he sounded to us to be quite objective and credible, in his description of the sighting. PD))