NUFORC Sighting 20758

Occurred: 2001-11-25 20:45 Local
Reported: 2001-12-10 14:11 Pacific
Duration: 5 seconds?
No of observers: 2

Location: Palo Alto/Stanford, CA, USA

Shape: Oval
Characteristics: Lights on object, Aura or haze around object, Left a trail

Bright blue oval-shaped glowing object hovering then proceeding downward

My friend and I were driving west along Campus Drive on the Stanford University campus, heading toward the campus exit at Junipero Serra Blvd. It was approximately 8:45 p.m. Suddenly, through the car's dashboard, we both saw an oval-shaped, hazy-glowing bright blue object in the sky, directly in front of us, perhaps 5000-10,000 feet above the ground(?)(i.e., much lower than a plane's cruising altitude) . It hovered for a few seconds in the sky and then proceeded rapidly downward and disappeared behind some trees. It looked like it landed within a mile or two beyond Junipero Serra, but we did not investigate it further. Also, it seemed like it left a faint trail as it descended downward, but this disappeared. We were astonished; this bright blue "thing" did not resemble a plane, meteor, or any other object that we have ever seen in the sky before. I have seen random lights and other things that I couldn't readily identify before, but nothing that I have ever felt the urge to report on a UFO site. What made this different was that the entire object was blue and glowing (i.e., it was not like a plane with lights on its wings or tail), and the straight downward path was unlike any other flight path that I have seen.

Observers: my companion, female, late 20s, microbiology PhD student at Stanford; myself, female, early 30s, attorney. No prior UFO reporting or researching in our backgrounds.

NUFORC Note:

Several other reports of the same event from the Bay Area. We suspect the object was a meteor, but that is only a guess. PD

Posted 2002-01-11