In the fall of 1999 I tore a short article out of the local paper, and then kept forgetting to do anything about it, until several weeks later the subject came up in discussion. I'd saved the piece because it contained the URL of the National UFO Reporting Center , which caught my eye due to an experience dating from approximately January 10th, 1987 -- an experience I'd never reported, other than to post my story on a bulletin board or two, probably, and eventually on The WELL. I'd just given up on moving to California, for the time being, after spending several days touring the state, covering several hundred miles per day, never pausing long enough to give any of the places I passed through a chance. The same unresolved issues that had driven me to move (combined with being accustomed, from work, to long hours of driving) also drove me to keep moving. As dusk came I was headed eastward along the interstate from San Diego to El Centro, in an old pickup loaded with everything I owned, feeling both defeated (in my immediate purpose) and hopeful (for having hit bottom). This state of reverie was beginning to drag on a bit. There were only a few other cars on the road, and I was beginning to feel isolated, as well as tired and hungry, and was looking forward to arriving in El Centro and getting a motel room and something to eat. But I was still more than twenty miles from town, and having to exercise more mental discipline than usual to keep from slipping into despair. Just as the last rays of sunlight were disappearing, I noticed the light around me brighten again, only it was strange, all reddish. Then I realized it was coming from behind me, and, craning my head around to look, I saw first one and then, turning my head around the other way, two large, bright red circles in the sky. They were almost directly behind me, just enough off to the right to be out of view of my outside mirror, gaining slowly. And they were clearly up in the air, high enough that, after the first couple of looks, I had to bend my head down and look through the top of the rear window to see them. (I don't know whether they were descending as they approached or in level flight, but my first impression was that they had been losing altitude, otherwise I should have seen them in my rear-view mirror when they were still further off, assuming they'd been glowing the whole time.) My mind began to race, trying to figure out what they might be, and what I might be able to do if they represented a threat. Before I had answers to either question, they moved almost directly overhead, out of sight, which gave me a long moment in which to collect my thoughts, even though the knowledge that they were still up there was beating down on me from above. (I half expected to be lifted up, pickup and all, but nothing of that sort happened.) While they were still overhead I took stock of the scene around me. The nearby desert was glowing with an eerie, deep-reddish light and what felt like fairly intense radiant heat. I guessed that they were putting out a lot more energy in the infrared than in the visible spectrum, although what I felt might well have been an adrenaline effect, and was almost certainly at least partly that. The glow didn't reach as far as the low mountain range to the south, but it extended out far enough that I couldn't accurately gauge just how far. There was no place to hide and nothing to do but keep driving or stop. I elected to keep driving, to stay within sight of them for as long as possible, and because I would have felt even more vulnerable if I'd stopped. I'm pretty sure that I rolled down the window during this time, or shortly after they reappeared, to improve my chances of hearing any sound they might produce, but couldn't detect anything above the sound of my pickup, which, being somewhat overpowered, was practically idling at about 55 mph. (Slight exaggeration. It was a deep-throated engine and I would have heard anything high-pitched. Also, it may be that the window was already down, and that I first rolled it up and then back down.) By the time they reappeared in front of me, I'd calmed down enough to be a semi-efficient observer. They appeared to be globes, since they still presented a circular shape from the new angle. At first I could only guess their size and how high they were. At closest approach they each took up about as much sky as would a basketball about twenty feet overhead ... maybe only two thirds that high. They were, to all appearances, identical, perfectly round, and so uniformly luminous that no detail showed. They moved without any hint of instability, keeping perfect pace with one another and maintaining a separation of about three diameters. In fact they maintained their relative position so steadily that my senses demanded to know what held them together, and I looked intently for any hint of a connecting structure, but saw none. (I sometimes also get this feeling watching video of precision flying teams, but more often not.) Except for the complete lack of bobbing and buffeting, it was, for that moment, as though they were suspended on invisible cables from the wingtips of a large, slow-moving airplane, itself flying so high as to be completely undetectable. As they pulled further ahead, this impression dissipated somewhat, as no cables were visible. With cautious but growing optimism that I might survive this experience, I began to be able to consider, somewhat dispassionately, that they might actually be of extraterrestrial origin, but reached no conclusion on that question. From a greater distance I got a clearer, although still imprecise, impression of how large an area of desert they were illuminating, whether it attenuated sharply or faded out towards the edges (the latter), how high they were, and how large they must therefore be. They seemed to be at least several hundred feet up, and, at the bare minimum, each at least twenty feet in diameter. They continued on a straight path until what must have been miles ahead, gradually picking up speed as they went, I think. Then they turned to the left, seeming to bank as a unit as they did so, although it might have just been a random maneuver. When they were so far away that I had to search for them in the sky, I thought I saw them suddenly accelerate, accompanied by a flash, but the flash might have been lightning, or physiological in origin (from straining my eyes in darkly lit, unfamiliar territory, after a traumatic experience), and, even at the time, I wasn't altogether certain that they hadn't just disappeared in the distance or into a cloud bank. That evening, watching the news in a motel room, I learned that two helicopters (I think it was) from a nearby military base had been lost, and that there was a search in progress. I did my best to assume that the lights I'd seen were part of that search, but I couldn't quite suppress the suspicion that they'd instead been connected with the the _loss_ of those aircraft, or that the story about the helicopter loss was fabricated to provide a plausible explanation for any UFO reports. I never did inquire, nor report what I'd seen. I had no idea how to go about filing a report, and was already cynical enough to expect doing so would be an exercise in frustration. And, between that event and having gotten stuck overnight in a snowstorm about seven-to-ten days earlier, I was pretty well emotionally pulverized, and didn't have any spare energy for dealing with people for whom my experience couldn't possibly have been real. In retrospect, I can't altogether discount the possibility that what I saw might have been of terrestrial origin, after all "they" don't tell us everything. But it was definitely not a natural phenomenon -- the spherical (circular anyway) shapes were far too regular and clearly defined against the sky, and their movement and relative position too smooth and consistent. Except for being so uniformly luminous that no detail was visible, there was nothing fuzzy about them. I can think of ways to dummy-up something that would look more or less like what I saw -- ceramic spheres with a flammable gas passed through tiny holes from the inside and burned on the outside, for instance -- but I can't think of any reason to do so, nor any reason to spend what it would cost, since it wouldn't be cheap. Basically, if they weren't UFOs, then it just about had to be the USAF trying to hoodwink people, and going to quite a lot of trouble to do so, since if it were someone else's doing they would almost certainly have detected it. I've recently been told there is documentary evidence of the CIA recommending psychological operations of this general nature -- UFO imitation -- but I remain dubious that even all the resources at the disposal of the U.S. government could have created such a convincing display. I sometimes have cause to doubt what I hear, but my vision has never been prone to producing experiences not based in reality, not even under the influence of powerful psychotropic substances (which I had not recently ingested). This one sighting is really the only visual experience that leaves me stumped. Oh, and I never did move to California. I ended up back in the same hotel in the same town I'd just left, reinstated in the same job, and feeling more or less okay about it, since this was the beginning of Roy Romer's first term as governor, and I'd listened to his first State of the State Address as I was leaving, and had been impressed and thought that I was maybe picking exactly the wrong time to leave. That you may judge for yourself. ;-) NSA documents relating to UFOs, released under the Freedom of Information Act http://www.nsa.gov/docs/efoia/released/ufo.html July 4th, 2001 - It's not quite precise to say that these spheres were glowing "uniformly", but words failed me as I was writing this originally. In fact they had a mottled appearance, when viewed from ahead or below, and seemed somewhat dimmer with a hint of flickering, when viewed from behind. But this is getting into the realm of possible physiological effects, vision not being a perfect representation even of what enters the eye. And I was unable to resolve a pattern to the mottling; it seemed to shift continuously, so I was never sure whether it was really there or a visual effect. I don't clearly recall whether it occurred to me at the time that it might be a reflection of the desert, but I think that, had it been a reflection on a smooth surface, I would have recognized it as such. So, if it was a reflection, that would suggest that the surface wasn't a smooth sphere but perhaps faceted. Together they illuminated an oblong area of at least a few acres, to judge by the number of shrubs encompassed, which would put them several hundred feet high and each maybe fifty feet in diameter. May 25th, 2002 - I've recently seen an object with a similar shifting mottled pattern and reddish color. It's the sphere at the center of a decorative electrical discharge device. It's conceivable the light and pattern that I saw were the result of charge picked up by the spheres while descending through the atmosphere, which I've always presumed they just had when I first caught sight of them, or that they generate a surface charge as part of their normal operation.