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Remarks |
I was a front seat passenger in a car and had been gazing out of my window to the right, listening to my friend who was driving prattle on about nonsense. It was late & we were driving back home to Ventura County from San Luis Obispo. I watched as what I believed at the time to be a helicopter appear from behind/over a hill/mountain slope and slowly move toward me. All I saw was a wide glowing brightish yellowish white light moving toward me at about the same pace a helicopter moves when flying over a fwy doing traffic reports. (This initial visual is burned into my memory & it seemed like it took a long time to transpire or that it happened in slow motion). I interpreted it as the ‘headlight’ on a helicopter, just like car headlights coming at you on the road but it was obviously only 1 single light. I could only see the light & was expecting the rest of the helicopter to appear as it came closer.. It sounds ridiculous now but it’s not common to see copters flying at night that aren’t way high overhead with all the blinking lights etc. This was a rural Cantonese pass & we hadn’t approached the city lights of Santa Barbara yet. My brain was making instantaneous connections combining images of things I was already familiar with. It was in this (seemingly) several seconds I realized it wasn’t a helicopter that I grabbed my phone, yelled at my friend to pull over & then time (seemingly) sped up or the fireball moved faster, as it passed in front of us & over the left side of us & out of view - due to the fact that we were driving a canyon road. I remember seeing a ‘tail’ that wasn’t exactly fiery but glowing but also fiery? just not actual flames but the shape of something flaming. I remember thinking it looked just like how someone would draw an image of a kids soccer team ‘The Fireballs’. I thought I was capturing it on my iPhone 6 which is less than ideal to begin with but I made the critical error of trying to zoom in on it & frantically touching the screen to get it ‘clearer’. By doing this I missed virtually the entire thing except a few blurry frames at the top right corner of the video. We saw a small car with a couple in it also pulling over at the same time as we did, very obvious for the same reason. Both of us had our windows already down so we exchanged the ‘WTH! Did you see it too’s?!’ as we both pulled over to a turnout on the road. I got out of the car & as we were all still trying to make sense of what we had just collectively witnessed, my then friend started frantically asking if they believe in aliens and at this point they promptly departed. I wanted to ask (or did ask?) If they captured it & would’ve asked to exchange info. It felt like a huge moment & I was so glad it wasn’t just us. I was so pissed at her for scaring them off. I looked online afterward and expected to see a report of it but never did. Since I screwed up capturing it, I didn’t think it was valuable info, scientifically sp |
