The article below was published in the daily newspaper Mercury News, San Jose, California, USA, on October 23, 1986.
By Kathy Holub
Mercury News Staff Writer
A beautiful apparition has been glowing in the night sky over Saratoga, leaving viewers baffled and entranced.
About 15 people, all agog, called Santa Clara County dispatchers on Tuesday night to report a mysterious bright red light that hovered in the sky from 8:15 to 8:30 and then disappeared.
Dozens of callers described a similar phenomenon on Oct. 16, same time, same place.
"It was very exciting," said Maureen Denton of Los Gatos, who watched last week's display during a break in her real estate class at West Valley College.
"It was very bright, much larger than the lights you see on airplanes. At one point, something burning or flickering dropped from it. It was just a tiny little flicker that came down. We all went: `Oooh, what was that?'"
No one seems to know.
That includes Vicki Yauger of Saratoga, who spied the object Tuesday night while lounging with her husband in thier backyard spa.
Yauger said the light appeared high in the northwestern sky, first moving toward them, then away.
Through her binoculars, the apparition became a cluster of lights. "It was scary. When it started getting larger, it seemed to be coming down," she said.
Yauger didn't see the object fade from view because she had just gone into the house. Her husband told her the light turned green and slowly disappeared.
Spokesmen at Moffett Field Naval Air Station said nothing flew out of their airfield Tuesday that looked like that. And officials at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc said they didn't launch a thing Tuesday night. Ditto for Oct. 15.
Other watchers of the night sky - air traffic controllers and astronomers at Lick Observatory - said they saw nothing unusual.
