Irvine, CA, USA
Orange fireball in front then no color. ((anonymous report)) ((NUFORC Note: Rocket launch from Vandenberg AFB. PD))
Report quality: Moderate42/100
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: 420s, a plausible sighting length
- Brief witness text (39 characters)
- Location geocoded exactly
- 1 other report from the same city within 3 days
- NUFORC attached a skeptical explanation note (e.g. Venus, satellite, meteor)
- When
- 2017-12-22
- Where
- Irvine, CA, USA
- Shape
- Fireball
- Duration
- 7 minutes
- Geo
- 33.669, -117.823 · exact
- Slug
- fireball-over-irvine-ca-2017-50637a
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
- Irvine, CA shows up 85 times across the archive.
- 594 reports came from California in 2017.
- In the 2010s, 9.3% of reports described a fireball — the all-time rate is 6.9%.
Nearby in space & time
within 30 daysReport
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.