UFO Report near Vandenberg AFB, California

COPY OF DETAILS/ REPORT FILED NUFORC
Thank You For Filling Out This Form: Below is what you submitted to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. on Wednesday, May 5, 2010 at 17:16:39

Date: 05/04/2010  Time: 21:20    Duration: 12 minutes   Sighting City: Santa Clarita  Sighting State: ca  Sighting Zip: 91354  Sighting County: Los Angeles   Witnesses: 2   Shape:Formation  Number of Craft: 2?

Description: It was around 9:20pm last night (May 4, 2010) and it was pitch black; the sky was clear and we could see the stars, and there was some wind, it was warm. My husband and I were walking our 2 dogs, and we were passing through the parking lot at Bridgeport Shopping Center, which is at the NE corner of the intersection of Newhall Ranch Road and McBean Parkway, in Valencia, California. Valencia is part of the incorporated town of Santa Clarita, if you're searching for it on a map. Bridgeport Shopping Center has pedestrian walkways and lower buildings - it's new, and is mostly empty in the evenings, we guess there were about 10 other people around the shopping center at that moment but no one was near us. We were at the far East side of the parking lot where there are few street lights. We were walking East toward Grandview Drive when my husband noticed a long line of red lights in the sky that appeared above the treeline, not too high up, and were acting in a very bizarre fashion. If the lights were on some kind of craft/s then it was completely silent. There were about 12 lights - all RED, no white, and they were in a line, as if connected to a leading edge.

At first it was just hovering - for maybe one minute, and then started to slowly float Southeast. The string of lights never descended. We didn't see a solid shape behind the lights, it was too dark, we could only see the lights themselves. They all seemed to be about the same size. The size of the lights themselves -- relative to a star in the night sky -- they were the same size as the brightest star in the sky. All together, the span of the lights in a line reached almost completely across our entire field of view. They were above the horizon, well above the treeline, and above the rooftops of everything around. It was very hard to gauge where exactly the thing was, we guestimated it was over Eastern Santa Clarita, East of the 5 Freeway, but West of the 14, North of Lyons Avenue and potentially South of Newhall Ranch Road, where we were standing – although it appeared directly over us. It was a straight line of lights at a 45 degree angle. Like a stick, turned up on an angle. This was the shape "/", with the tallest part rising on its right side, with the whole thing heading slowly South by Southeast. It (the string of lights) never broke formation. It slowly floated South-South East until it became so dim we could no longer see it, without ever changing the distances between the lights themselves. They were not evenly spaced. The whole line silently hovered and then slowly floated off, with entire sections blinking on and off randomly. It was very long/wide! As a gauge, if I hold my thumb out away from me (about 2.5 feet) and my thumb represents one of the lights that we saw - then the whole line of lights took up my entire field of view. (It took about 5 minutes for it to disappear from view.)

Just when we thought the whole line was lit up, another light would blink on, to the far left or far right - making the total string even wider/longer. The lights did not look like flares to me. I have seen flares and these lights were constantly blinking on and off, wildly -- quickly pulsating. There was never a time when all the lights were on uniformly at the same time, they were always shimmering. Sometimes whole sections would just go out and come back on again 10 seconds later, in random order. The lights, always red, were all blinking/shimmering fast, but not uniformly, and not strobing in any regular pattern and with no regular timing, not the way aircraft safety lights would. Any one light also had an irregular pattern. We thought -- could it be a squadron of helicopters? But the lights didn't behave in a predictable way. These red lights would go on and off in random order and with random timing by first becoming dim, then bright, then dim, then off, and then bright again -- as if they were shimmering. My husband commented that it looked like the special effects on TV when a craft goes into "cloaking" mode, or the way lights look reflected in water. He is a skeptic and he was dumbfounded as to what we were seeing. Position relative to each other: the lights kept their exact distance from one another the whole time, even as the line of lights drifted South. The size of the individual lights was like looking at red car brake lights from 2 miles away. That's the only way I can describe it - against the night sky they were as bright and big as the biggest/brightest star in the sky. We can't tell how high the string of lights was, but we couldn't see any other stars through them.

We could not see if it was one solid craft, or many lights. They did remain in a stable position relative to one another - at least giving the illusion that they were along the edge of one craft. I've seen sheriff's dept. helicopters fly nightly over town and I would say these lights appeared to be floating around the same height. They were not too distant, definitely over town, not over the mountains. It took several minutes for them to go a few miles. We ran East along the sidewalk to keep a view of it, and eventually the line disappeared as it floated out of view, and became dimmer, eventually disappearing completely from our line of sight. We stared for 5 more minutes and then started to walk home, heading East toward the edge of the parking lot. Then we saw another set of lights, doing exactly the same thing, just over the treeline to the East of Grandview Road. The line had the same weird pattern of red lights shimmering off and on and lasted for 2-3 minutes but was not quite as wide and was oriented horizontally. It didn't drift or descend, it just got more and more dim and finally was down to 2 lights, and then disappeared. We stared a little longer, and then walked home. I immediately called the Sheriff station for Santa Clarita. I reported what we saw and the police officer said they had over 100 calls reporting UFOs already that night. He could not say if people reported the same thing we saw. The sky was filled with other aircraft that night, heading into Burbank airport or LAX. They all looked normal compared to this. Our backgrounds: My husband is in IT and I am a technology and science editor for a national publication. We've never seen anything out of the ordinary before and have lived here 3 years, so we also know what's common in the sky here. My husband is a firm skeptic, and I'm uncertain. I'm aware of military testing at VAFB and I have seen missile tests at a distance from the 101, and this didn't look like that. I've also seen small meteors and meteor showers and they don't hover and glide.