Date: Summer of 1978 – 1979
Time: Evening.
This was a pretty long time ago, 32 years or so, around 1978-9. I was in my 20's.
I live in Southern California, just east of a large military base, Camp Pendleton and a naval weapons station. It has a restricted airspace, only military aircraft can fly across it’s sky or anywhere over it’s boundaries. All private and commercial craft have to go around. It's pretty heavily guarded.
It was sunset on a warm summer evening and I was coming out of an exercise class. The parking lot was (still is) on a west facing hillside. The sun was almost at the horizon, for us the low coastal mountains next to the Pacific Ocean. Very slowly, heading northwest and floating over the military base, was a huge craft of some sort. It mostly round/a little ob-longish, had a number of large very bright white and smaller colored lights on it.
The object was enormous, way bigger than the setting sun and much larger than any aircraft I have ever seen. There were 4 or 5 people getting into cars along with me and we all stopped to look at it. Someone's husband, there to pick his wife up, claimed it was a reflection from the sun off windows on a house from the sun setting. Everyone pooh-poohed him because it was next to the setting sun, you'd see a reflection like that if you looked the other direction. His statement absolutely made no sense. We stood there jabbering and excited, and looked at it for about 3-4 minutes, it wasn't going fast at all.
It turned directly north, passed in front of the highest mountain at this end of the coastal range (Case Springs), then off of base land into the Del Luz canyon area, and I noticed that some planes were coming up on it. They were way smaller than the object. Suddenly it sped up and just flat out disappeared.
Someone turned on the local radio station in Oceanside, where numerous sighting reports were being called in, and they called the military live on-the-air. A marine at the airfield on the base, who refused to have his voice aired, said that they had no aircraft up of that description and that planes had been launched to intercept an intrusion onto restricted airspace. This was relayed by the radio disc jockey. A few minutes later it was publicly denied that any of this happened by military officials. I never heard anything more about this sighting.
Never-the-less, this wasn't a weather balloon (too large and had lights), not a blimp (wrong shape and way bigger), not an airplane (there were no planes of this shape and size in the 70's), not a reflection; it was unlike anything I have ever seen before or since then. It was really really big and dwarfed not only the planes that were behind it, but the sun that set, while we watched the object. The incredible speed with which it disappeared was amazing too. One second it was there, the next it was gone.
If you have seen anything like this in the same area please be kind enough to contact Brian Vike at:
sighting@telus.net with the details of your sighting.
All personal information is kept confidential. Sightings.com website: http://www.sightings.com/
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