Appearance / Description of Object(s)

All I could see were five or six lights in more or less of a circle. Their brightness and size were somewhere between that of a star and the light reflecting off of Mars or Jupiter.

Size of Object(s)

The diameter of the circle of lights was less than two hundred feet. This is a guess that feels right to me.

Description of Area / Surroundings

I was in an urban setting. The lights were over a military base. Three military bases were fairly close to me: Point Mugu naval air station located six miles southeast of where I first saw it. Port Hueneme Seabee Base Located three miles northeast of where I first saw it. Camarillo AFB located eleven miles northwest of where I first saw it. Ormond Beach Electric Generating Station located five and one third miles north-northeast of where I first saw it. Oxnard Airport was located five and a half miles northeast of where I first saw it.

Full Description & Details

This one happened in about 1962 or 1963 around nine p.m. My wife and I were in bed, but not asleep, in our apartment in Oxnard, California, when the sky outside our south-facing window lit up. We jumped out of bed and went to the window to see what was happening. It was dark outside, but I could see a cloud of smoke in an otherwise cloudless sky. I could see several lights above the smoke. At first I thought they were stars, but as I continued to watch the smoke cloud, all the lights moved together as one unit to the north. It was as though there was no time for acceleration; they were just instantly going fast. They went out of my view through the window and were headed straight over our apartment. Disturbed by what I just watched, I turned around to run to the other side of the house, knocking my wife down in the dark room as I ran. I wanted to know where they went but the lights were gone by the time I picked my wife up and got to the other side of our apartment.

After we settled our nerves, I called my parents wondering if they saw what I saw. Sure enough, Dad had been returning one of his nephews to Point Mugu Naval Air Station, where the nephew was stationed at the time. Dad said they saw a rocket launch from Pt. Mugu and he and my cousin had watched the rocket until it explode over Pt. Mugu. He said that they couldn’t keep an eye on the explosion site and drive at the same time, since it was directly over their car. To keep watching it they would have needed to stick their heads out the side windows, but didn’t, so they didn’t see whatever it was I saw leaving the area. Ah, heck!

Can sighting be explained as any conventional man-made or natural object?

No! I don’t know of anything that can go six miles in three seconds from a dead stop.

Witness Background

I am a retired pipefitter with a highschool diploma and instructor credentials from UCLA to teach my trade to other fitters. During my working years, I installed mechanical system controls on electrical generating plants, rocket engine test facilities, paper making plants, various science laboratories and a space shuttle launch, recovery and payload preparation facility. My hobbies are building and flying radio controlled gliders, riding my bicycle and flying single engine, fixed wing aircraft.

Views on UFOs, before and after sighting

I know things are flying around out there that I can’t explain. I read next to nothing about UFOs before this sighting.

Other Comments

The next day the Oxnard Press-Courier quoted the naval authorities at Point Mugu as saying that they had to destroy a scheduled missile launched that night because of a guidance malfunction.

Well, I knew people who worked at the Raytheon facility located on the east side of Highway One across from Point Mugu. These people monitored all scheduled missile launches from Point Mugu to test their missile tracking equipment. (Raytheon designed, built and tested missile tracking systems for the Navy.) They said they were not notified of a scheduled launch that night. They were mad as hell because they didn’t get the chance to ready their tracking equipment and test it. It was standard naval procedure to notify Raytheon of upcoming launches so the tracking equipment could be tested and upgraded, if need be.

Personally, I think what I watched that night was an averted attack on whatever it was I saw hovering above Point Mugu. Instead of the missile destroying the UFO, the UFO destroyed one of our navy’s ground-to-air Hawk MlM-23A missiles—and the navy didn’t want to admit it was defenseless against whatever it was. At that time (fifty years ago) the MlM-23A was one of our best homeland defense systems. If whatever it was had been one of our own aircraft hovering over Point Mugu, why would our navy fire a ground to air defense missile at it?

The ensuing bright flash of light and loud noise made by the destruction of the Hawk-23A missile covered all or most of the Oxnard plains. They were definitely attention getters so there has to be a lot of eye witnesses to the event.

I have other interesting stories I’m willing to share, related to this incident but they are too lengthy to share here.

Using Google Earth distances and stopwatch timed reenactments, I just figured out the approximate speed of the lights as they left Point Mugu. Wow! They were traveling close to 7200 miles an hour. I now know why people tend not to believe me. Anyway this is the way I saw it.

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