2014-12-20 - Manteca, CA - Light

Purple-Pinkish colored light hovering, then slowly moves East, speeds up & makes hard turn North, stops, then moves East again...

At approx 7:50pm on 12/20/2014, I walked outside and noticed something that looked like a sort of amythest-colored, purple-pinkish light in the sky. It was completely odd and caught my attention right away. It actually looked like 2 lights side-by-side, horizontal to the ground, very close together or possibly even attached. Brighter than a star.. well, brighter than Sirius (which appears in the Eastern sky this time of year) I started watching it, completely perplexed by the color. My first thought was that it might be someone playing with a drone, but it wasn't like any drone I've ever seen (I've seen a few in my life.. my neighbor even has a large one). The light was steady and brilliant, not flashing. It didn't have the typical red/green, flashing lights that you would expect from an R/C toy or airplane. It wasn't a satellite either. I'm former military (Navy Electronic Warfare) and I can assure you that I've never seen anything in the sky with the same color light. In fact, the sky was totally overcast that night, but below the clouds it was very clear and there was good visibility. No stars were visible, nor could I see any of the usual air traffic heading into the Bay Area because of the cloud layer.

When I spotted the object, it looked like it was maybe 200-300 yards to the East at less than 500 ft in altitude... essentially over my neighborhood. At first it looked stationary, like it was hovering. Then it started to slowly move East (away from me). I noticed that I couldn't hear any 'drone' sounds.. nor any other sounds from planes, etc. As I watched, it seemed to speed up a little, the all of the sudden took a 90-degree left turn (at speed) and moved a short distance before abruptly stopping. I would estimate it moved maybe 200 yds in less than one second. I literally said “#@!*%$&!*” out loud to myself!! That's when I realized I had my phone in my left hand... duh!! I immediately launched the camera and started to record some video. It's not great video... the object looks really tiny, almost invisible on my Samsung s5, but you can certainly see it when playing back on a laptop, or something with a bigger screen. It looks like a white star moving away fr! om me and unfortunately, you can't see the purple-ish color, it just looks like a white dot. By the time I got the video going it had started to move Eastward again, slowly almost wavering a bit before moving behind the trees across the street from my house and out of my view.

Several minutes later I was still outside trying to play back the video and one of the typical airliners that I usually see flew overhead.. I couldn't actually see it because of the cloud cover, but I could definitely hear it. So, whatever I saw and recorded that night was flying below the clouds and not making any noise. It wasn't a plane or any other celestial object, not a drone, missile, meteor, etc.... I'm somewhat of a trained observer... I have a military background and also have a couple pilots in my immediate family.

Unfortunately, the video is only a few seconds long. At one point I tried to zoom, but it went out of view, then I un-zoomed and found it again. I'd be happy to share a link to my Google drive if your interested in seeing it. Otherwise, I don't really want to post it online anywhere.

Curious if anyone else has report something similar? The color was amazing hard to describe.. neon fuchsia, pinkish-purple... really really odd, but pretty.