SIGHTING: TWENTYNINE PALMS, CALIFORNIA (UNITED STATES)
Witness Testimony
"I was out in the middle of joshua tree national park with a friend, at the ryan mountain trailhead on park boulevard. i was stargazing, and while looking for jupiter, at around 12:30 am, a large, bright light appeared about 32 degrees about the horizon, approximately south-west of me. the object, to the naked eye, appeared to be about the size of venus in the night sky. at first i thought i was looking at mercury for about 30 seconds, until i consulted my sky map to find mercury had already dipped far below the horizon and would not be visible until the early morning. the object changed colors rapidly, changing between white, silver, red, pink, orange, yellow, and green. it's brightness also changed, and it appeared to be moving up, down, and side to side slightly, as if dodging something almost. it stayed within a relatively small area, however, never moving more than half of a degree in any direction. i trained my telescope on it, which has a six inch diameter, and brought it into focus with the use of a 3x barlow lens. this action revealed nothing new about the object's appearance, and was hard to keep steady in the telescope's view on account of its dodging motions. the object was obviously far away, maybe even in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. upon consulting my sky map, i found that there was nothing in that area that would have been so visible. the object continued to change colors and brightness while moving back and forth like this for at least an hour and a half. it never moved closer to the horizon, really, nor did it ever move further from it. it stayed within its .5 degree by .5 degree box in the sky. the rest of the stars around it did move, as they should have. whatever i was seeing, it was geostationary. i initially felt confused, as i had no way of knowing what i was looking at. it was incredibly difficult to discern any true information about it, except that it was clearly closer than anything else in the sky, but too far away to make out details, even with a telescope. i stared at it in awe, along with my friend, then started to kind of ignore it, but never truly taking my eye off it for more than five seconds. it wasn't until the next day i decided i had no explanation for what we had seen, and i decided to contemplate the less obvious answers. we lost sight of the object after getting back into the car. we got in, and began to drive in the direction of the object, only for it to disappear after going around a small left curve, and turning back to our original direction. we had our eyes off of it for no more than four seconds, and it was gone."
