The Southern California Teardrops

The two lights held a fixed distance apart, and witnesses said they moved like "controlled vehicles". One beam is said to have bathed a house in blue light. They were light-blue teardrops with short tails, flying in formation at high altitude and great speed from the south-west towards the north-east, and they vanished abruptly in mid-sky. A Huntington Beach police helicopter crew saw them before dawn on 22 March 1977. So did Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies, highway patrol officers and airmen at March Air Force Base near Riverside. Reports came from across the Los Angeles area and as far north as Sacramento. One crew described a white light like a magnesium ball that shed a particle which fell seventy feet and burned out.

What is on the record

Two tellings from one channel give six claimant entries, several of them crews or units counted as one. Our telling puts the sighting at about 3:15 in the morning; the published record clusters the times between 3:30 and 4:00. Some witnesses described the objects as tin-can-shaped.

One outside source has been found so far, a Los Angeles Times report the next day. It records seven airmen, five deputies and two highway patrol officers among the witnesses, and a cargo handler at Los Angeles airport. A spokesman for March Air Force Base confirmed the sightings on the base. He said no rocket or missile tests were under way and nothing showed on radar.

An astronomer offered an explanation at the time. Dr Edwin Krupp of the Griffith Observatory suggested a rare double meteor, a pair of fireballs crossing together. The archive holds no analysis that tests it against the falling particle or the beam on the house, both of which rest on witness accounts alone.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3 because trained observers in several places reported the same pair of lights, and the base confirmed it on the record. A second contemporary source would strengthen the file. What crossed the sky that morning is not resolved here.