Palm Desert, CA, USA
It was over 5 minutes changing colors from red to green to blue to a soft yellow color. ((NUFORC Note: Possible "twinkling" star? PD))
Report quality: Low35/100
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: 300s, a plausible sighting length
- Moderate witness text (87 characters)
- Location geocoded exactly
- No other reports from this city within 3 days
- NUFORC attached a skeptical explanation note (e.g. Venus, satellite, meteor)
- When
- 2017-11-23
- Where
- Palm Desert, CA, USA
- Shape
- Triangle
- Duration
- 5 minutes
- Geo
- 33.723, -116.377 · exact
- Slug
- triangle-over-palm-desert-ca-2017-fd0171
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
- Palm Desert, CA shows up 53 times across the archive.
- 594 reports came from California in 2017.
- In the 2010s, 8.4% of reports described a triangle — the all-time rate is 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.