I have never really spoken publicly about this experience, not at the time and not until now. Probably because it seemed minor at the time, and because we had no evidence.
We were showing our dad around San Francisco. We took him to the top of a very tall hill, called Twin Peaks, at the geographical center of the city. There's a vista point and a dazzling view of the Bay Area. I used a picture I took from that exact place as background :
 |
 |
|
|
Simulated sky and UFOs. San Francisco
below is real. UFOs shown brighter than stars for clarity.
|
||
After a while, I noticed three lights moving in the sky. There were three identical stars, the same size and brightness and color as any of the other stars in the sky that night, except they were moving. Then the lights stopped.
The lights were very high in the sky, about 70 degrees from the horizon (where 90 degrees is straight up).
The three lights had formed a precise equilateral triangle, one light at each corner. The triangle would stay rock solid, each light as perfectly still as any of the stars, not wobbling. The whole triangle was stock still, not moving at all, exactly like in the animation above, each light just holding its place in the sky. You could see stars through every part of the center.
This triangle was about as big as three or four fists held at arm's length in front of you. (Those of you with three hands may have been the ones driving those UFOs :)
Then every so often, about every 30 to 60 seconds, they would start moving again, simultaneously, in straight lines, towards each other's former spot. This is the movement I had noticed.
Light A would lazily move in a straight line towards light B's spot, as B would simultaneously move towardslight C, and C towards A. They would start moving at the exact same moment, and at the exact same lazy speed until they clicked into place at the exact same time at the other's formert spot. It took about ten seconds for them to do the switch. Then they sat rock-solid, for 30 to 60 seconds, after which they would do it all over again.
When they moved, it did not look like a solid triangle rotating. (That would have made the movement lines look like a circle.) The movement lines were straight.
Very casual, very lazy, "we're just playing around here, see, we're UFOs and we trade places".
We watched them for about half an hour. The place was fairly empty, and we didn't point them out to anyone. We weren't excited, we were all very "scientific" about it. "Hmmm. What could that be?"
I didn't bother reporting it to anybody official. I knew they would say it was just three clouds or a flock of geese or swamp gas, like they always say.
It was about 9 or 10 PM, crystal-clear sky, only a little haze, and some light pollution from the city below us. This was around the summer of 1980.
There were four of us in the group, all of whom saw the lights. Since we had tourists on board, we did have still cameras, but we knew there was no hope of catching anything significant. Too faint, moving too slowly, looking just like stars. We didn't have a tripod to hold the camera perfectly still while we took time-lapse frames.
All
we could do was sit there in admiration.