NUFORC Sighting 48896

Occurred: 1998-03-10 07:00 Local
Reported: 2006-01-28 09:48 Pacific
Duration: 1:30
No of observers: 2

Location: Santa Monica, CA, USA

Shape: Sphere
Characteristics: Aircraft nearby

Metallic sphere over Los Angeles International Airport.

On Mar 10, 1998 at approximately 5:30 a.m. my wife woke me, she was very excited and wanted to show me a light in the sky to the south of Santa Monica, she was sure it was something unusual.

I went out my front door with her and looked up, it was a very brilliant white light, I told her it was just a star (I'm forever a skeptic), we had planned a flight to Las Vegas that morning and I had to check weather and file my flight plan.

As I was making coffee (first priority), I kept checking the light up in the sky, it didn't appear to move at the time. After I had prepared for the flight we walked out to the street to get in my truck and leave and to my surprise when I looked up in the sky, the light from earlier was now lower on the horizen and appeared to be directly over the north complex of LAX, it now looked like a large metallic sphere. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, nor could my wife(and of course, she told me so). I grabbed my binoculars from my vehicle to view the sphere and it was definitely metallic, was no longer glowing and was just hovering, at about 2500 ft.

I am a commercial pilot and have been around aircraft since I was a child, this was nothing like I have ever seen. To estimate the size I referenced it against a 747-400 above and behind the object traveling southeast and roughly state 50 ft in diameter, and thats very rough. The sphere very slowly decended to a slightly lower altitude as we observed it, I decided that I was just going to go ahead and leave for the airport, assuming that if it was anything of significance it would be all over the news, but of course after returning that afternoon and watching the news, nothing. That is the first and only time I have ever witnessed something like that, and it really has sparked my curiosity about such sightings.

There is a NASA photo that looks exactly like what we witnessed that I came across on UFOevidence.org: http://www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/section/space/Photo142.htm.

Posted 2006-02-14

© 2023 National UFO Reporting Center. All rights reserved. Use or reproduction within any application without written consent is prohibited.