NUFORC Sighting 129369

Occurred: 2016-08-18 20:23 Local
Reported: 2016-08-19 09:44 Pacific
Duration: 30 seconds
No of observers: 2

Location: Long Beach, CA, USA

Shape: Orb
Characteristics: Aura or haze around object

Orange orb, then 22 minutes later, a blue light that disappeared in <2 seconds.

An avid sky-watcher and amateur astronomer, I've seen meteors, fireballs, comets, and satellites, as well as things that are frequently reported as UFOs, such as aircraft, birds, bugs, and advertising lights. I spend a lot of time sky-watching, and hadn't seen anything unusual in over a year, until last night.

At 8:23PM, I noticed a bright glowing orange light a few degrees east of due north and about 20 degrees above the horizon. At first I thought it was a plane, because it seemed to be near Long Beach International Airport, but the color wasn't typical of aircraft lights. Through my binoculars, it looked slightly vertically elongated, as opposed to round. I noticed no other lights on it.

I also couldn't bring it into focus and the upper portion was fuzzier than the bottom portion. It slowly moved upwards and then slightly eastward, and then it moved slightly erratically and quickly faded out without a trace. Having read numerous reports about the propensity of orange orbs to travel in groups, I watched for more, but no more appeared.

Then, at about 8:45 PM, I was looking towards the SSE at a light that was probably a high altitude jet, and in the same general area a bright blue light appeared about 20 degrees above the horizon. It was about as bright as Venus when it's at its brightest. Then less than two seconds later it disappeared without a trace.

Posted 2016-08-19

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