El Centro, CA, USA
I was with my girlfriend camping in the Anza Borrego desert in November 1997 at about 8pm. I looked up to the south and observed a hug
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: 60s, a plausible sighting length
- Detailed witness text (134 characters)
- Location geocoded exactly
- No other reports from this city within 3 days
- When
- 1997-11-15
- Where
- El Centro, CA, USA
- Shape
- Oval
- Duration
- 1 minute
- Geo
- 32.792, -115.563 · exact
- Slug
- oval-over-el-centro-ca-1997-59f8bc
Part of a wave
The Phoenix Lights
Arizona, USA (Phoenix–Prescott–Tucson corridor)
The largest mass sighting in modern U.S. history — actually two events: an enormous silent V of lights (many insisted one solid craft blotting out stars) crossing the state around 8pm, and a string of stationary lights…
In context
- El Centro, CA shows up 21 times across the archive.
- 152 reports came from California in 1997.
- In the 1990s, 3.6% of reports described a oval — the all-time rate is 4.3%.
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.