Taft, CA, USA
I'm a truck driver and I've seen the reddish/orange balls of light before. But never this close. One passed over my truck from E to W.
Report quality: Moderate55/100
This score reflects report-quality signals on file — how complete, corroborated, and precisely located the report is — not a claim about whether the sighting was a real craft.
- Duration parsed: 20s, a plausible sighting length
- Detailed witness text (134 characters)
- Location geocoded exactly
- No other reports from this city within 3 days
- When
- 2017-05-04
- Where
- Taft, CA, USA
- Shape
- Changing
- Duration
- 20 seconds
- Geo
- 35.142, -119.457 · exact
- Slug
- changing-over-taft-ca-2017-0a8540
Part of a wave
The Navy Encounters & the UAP Era
U.S. training ranges (Pacific off San Diego; Atlantic off Virginia), then worldwide reporting
The wave that renamed the subject. The USS Nimitz 'Tic Tac' encounter (November 2004: radar drops from 80,000 ft to sea level in seconds, pilot visual by Cmdr. David Fravor, FLIR video) stayed classified-adjacent until…
In context
- This is one of 10 reports logged in Taft, CA.
- This case is one of 594 California reports filed in 2017.
- Changing craft made up 2.4% of 2010s reports, vs 2.5% across the whole archive.
Report
Full narrative lands with dossier import for famous cases, or the NUFORC free-text summary above for standard reports. This shell is SSR-ready: one D1 row (including connections_json) per page.