It was approximately 6:30 PM as my wife, two sons, (17 & 19) and I, had just returned home and one of my sons noticed something unusual in the sky. From our driveway where we were, at around 700 ft elevation, he pointed to the eastern sky. Above the hillside at a 35-40 degrees angle, where we are on the foothills to Mt. Diablo, in the early evening as the first few dozen or so stars were shining in, what was a clear and so far moonless sky, we cast our gaze almost directly east.

The area of interest that my 17 yr old noticed, was occupied by something relatively low in the sky, a whitish light that seemed to be not a solo point, but something not really twinkling, but maybe a close collection of white points of slightly, dimmer and smaller, than the majority of the bigger or brighter stars that had already visible in the early evening.

It did not seem as clear or as motionless as the other stars. It sort of seemed like a tight cluster, sort of ebbing and flowing in a slightly less dark, almost shrouded area. If you held out your thumb and index finger in front of your field of vision, about an inch or 1 1/2 inches apart, that would approximate it.

As my eyes got accustomed to the dark, I noticed there was a lot more to arouse our curiosity. The white lights which instantaneously and at random seemed to dance, sometimes forming a line of three bright spots, lasting a second or so, then a light point or two might disappear, or even seem to change color. We started to notice very random, very small and dim points of green, blue and red lights.

Some which seemed to come from what was a space just occupied by a white source, and at other times they just came and were moving and then in a second or so, would be gone.

Occasionally, there would be a streak of colored light too. The only repeating pattern that I noticed, where we watched for the next thirty or so minutes steadily, then came in and out to see if the lights were still there, was a coronal array of four or maybe up to six white lights that briefly would seem to orbit or encircle the central source. This pattern like other images or events were pretty fleeting, and in all directions.

With our naked eyes we all felt there were at least 6 -10 independent sources of light that we could make out at any one moment.

We decided to see if our neighbors were home and tell them about what we were watching, and see if they may have a camera. Just prior to this, we saw a shooting star, which was very large, like the biggest, brightest evening star you might ever see. It fell from a position directly below this area we were watching, in a vertical drop starting from a spot halfway up from our hilly horizon to the light sources we'd been closely watching for about 15 minutes at that point.

One of the neighbors next door wasn't home yet, but next door our brand new neighbors, who had just moved in and whom we had yet to meet were.

They came out and had a small telescope, which unfortunately only the sighting small lens was functional.

At about the same time, my other son had located our 7 X 50 mm field 7.1 binoculars, sort of standard strength. Through these two devices we were able to locate, and get a different perspective of what had caught our collective attention. Unfortunately we did not have any cameras to capture the sightings.

The magnification through these 2 instruments did not match my expectations. The lights remained essentially stationary in the sky for at least the next hour until about 7:30. I did go back on two occasions and see the lights were still visible until nearly 9 o'clock. I did go back around 10 and the lights were no longer there.

With the magnification we had, the light was apparently a configuration of typically 6 points of light mostly maintained in a somewhat regular formation. It perhaps did hover, or rotate, giving me the sense of very slight motion. The typical collective shape was, on my left, 2 relatively close lights, up to down in alignment, and to its right two similar light sources in tandem, up/down but further apart from each other. Below these four were two, trailing this quadrangular shape, like a tail. With the binoculars, I was unable to get the panorama where the visible colored activity was present to the unaided eye.

My final estimate of what we saw needs just one final addition. With the binoculars the field and periphery which appeared not to be in front of the basic formation, glowed and seemed to be in motion and hold specks of which light, in number were viewed by several of us, to be upwards of thirty unique light sources.

I felt with six independent witnesses experiencing and agreeing that what we saw was very unusual and worthy of passing this sighting on to you for interpretation, and hoping others may have seen this unusual activity.

S.Jackson

permanent link: http://www.ufocasebook.com/2008c/danvillecalifornia.html

source & references: