Appearance / Description of Object(s)

Like plain round red lights about as bright as an automobile tail light a couple hundred feet away, but round and not oblong.

Size of Object(s)

About 1/8" across at arms length.

Description of Area / Surroundings

Uninhabited desert. Naval Weapons Center is located nearby to the north. I wrote to them about this case but recieved no reply.

Full Description & Details

I have lost my written description which I made at the time so this is

all from memory (and not as accurate). I was with a friend, David

Hough, the driver, en-route to Death Valley, California to climb

desert peaks covered with snow. We left the San Francisco Bay area

after 2 PM on Jan. 1, 1973, and drove via way of Bakersfield thru

Mojave and California City towards Death Valley. Between 11-12PM on

the Trona Road (on the Mojave Desert) about 20 miles before Trona we

saw two red lights in the sky ahead of us thru the front windshield.

Each was the same intensity and each seemed to be a few times brighter

that the red light on would see on a helicopter that was a few hundred

yards away. They were low in the sky at perhaps 10 deg above the

horizontal but there was only sky behind them (no mountains).

The strange thing about these lights is that they appeared to remain

stationary with respect to our auto. I said nothing for many

seconds and then asked the driver (David H.) if he saw them too, and

he responded yes. I asked him to blink off the car lights to make

sure they were not reflections from our car. The red lights didn't

blink. They remained in view for several minutes. Then as we got

close to the junction with state highway 178, the road curved and they

were no longer visible. But then after we drove on 178 about a mile

or two, I looked out the side window to the north and saw what

appeared to be the same 2 red lights which appeared to have landed on

the desert floor (about a half-mile away ??). I thought of asking the

driver to stop so we could get a better look at them, but was afraid

that if we stopped, the objects might bother us. I had read about

UFO's doing such things. I only observed them on the desert floor for

less than a minute as the view of them was blocked by terrain (hills)

as we drove towards Trona.

Many minutes later, as we were driving N. on route 178, I saw a

display of "falling flares" over the Argus Mountains to the west.

The display was red, but were not a bright as the red lights

previously seen. It looked like falling fireworks with many little

red glowing spots falling towards the ground and then erratically

turning dark after they had fallen say 15% of the way to the ground.

The red spots seemed to be erratically shaped and perhaps changing

shape like they were glowing gas. These red spots were concentrated

into bunches grouped together and I saw a few different groups, mostly

at the same time. We continued driving to Ballarat (ghost town) with

no more UFO-like observations.

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

Possibly two helicopters each with only 1 red light.

Witness Background

At the time of observation I was a graduate student in Operations Research at the University of California at Berkeley. I have at BS and MS in engineering and am currently an independent researcher in Transporation. My website is www.lafn.org/~dave

Views on UFOs, before and after sighting

Since I had read about UFOs, this sighting didn't change my views much. I thought that UFO's were likely real before this sighting. Also, the sighting is not a very good one as it could have an other explanation: helicopters, flares. But if so, why didn't the Naval Weapons Center respond to my letter to them

Reported Sighting? 

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