The Mystery Lights at Sea… Solved
The mystery lights as they appear on the horizon
I'll admit it was a pretty long time ago, like a year and a half, but a while ago I did a blog post about some mystery lights that often appear off the coast here in southern Orange County. From my house, they can be seen on many clear nights, ranging from about 180 to 190 degrees south, magnetic. They swap around a bit, and if you leave and come back ten minutes later, you may find the lights have moved one way or the other.
Closeup of the light on the right
Each object has about a half dozen very bright lights, tending toward the orange. They look like a ship only superficially. Cruise ships have many more lights, much dimmer; and cargo ships run dark with hardly any lights visible at all. So really they don't look like a ship. They do look quite similar to oil platforms though, which tend to have bright floodlights. They are out there quite often, though I couldn't tell you exactly how often. Not every night, but some nights, on no apparent schedule.
Having sailed these waters most of my life and being familiar with them, I know that there are no offshore oil platforms in southern California south of Long Beach. This is easy for anyone to confirm with Google Earth or other online reference sites; and anyway, oil platforms don't move around back and forth along the horizon. But nevertheless, when I posted the blog, more commenters suggested oil platforms than anything else. I could get up on my ear and assert that it's perfectly obvious to determine that there are no oil platforms there, but still people insisted that's what the lights had to be. OK, whatever.
Triangulating on the lights
The reveal can now be made. The lights are indeed ships, but not commercial. They are military. They come out of San Diego, and hover off the coast of Camp Pendleton (the huge Marine Corps base that dominates the coast of northern San Diego county). From what I've been able to determine, the ships stay on station within a rectangular area, and guys go back and forth from the shore by helicopter, hovercraft, what have you, and practice — well, going back and forth between a ship and the shore. Readers who are in the military and helped me out explained that the few bright spotlights on the ship are characteristic of these exercises.
Before posting this, I wanted to be able to give specific information about which ships these are, and of exactly what type, and precisely what vehicles are going out to them. However, I was thwarted. My military readers gave me a good start, telling me who to call and what to ask for, but alas, I finally conceded defeat. The experience was dominated by disconnected phone numbers, wrong phone numbers, unanswered messages, surly operators, and public affairs officers who didn't know anything and didn't want me to either. The Navy doesn't know what the Marines do, and the Marines don't know what the Navy does. But obviously they manage to work it out between themselves on the water.
Also, my repeated requests to go out for a joyride on a Mark V Special Operations Craft probably did not help my cause.
I was hoping to get the coordinates of the box station where they go, but I never got close to that. I can give you the three sightings that I made, however. They are illustrated in the accompanying graphic. If I were a professional researcher of paranormal claims and was trying to take this case seriously, I would (should) be run out of town for such a slipshod explanation with no real details. But hey, here at SkepticBlog, you get what you pay for. They're military ships. Probably pretty cool ones, but I don't know.
Couldn’t you at least claim that these military ships are preparing for the day when the US Armed Forces start killing all citizens as dictated by the Bilderberg Group? I mean, come on, you cannot just give us a rational explanation without inserting a conspiracy!
Probably a covert operation to recover a crashed UFO that was travelling to one of the underwater Pacific colonies of Atlantis where the NWO created the H1N1(tm) bioweapon. What else could it be?
USS Germantown?
http://bit.ly/cTSUu9
Dawn Blitz 2010 was in early June. Was there more activity then?
Looks like that’s very likely one of them…
No, no – they’re moving oil platforms! Hehehe. BP is secretly drilling at night when no one is watching …
I bet the Coast Guard would know, since the Navy probably has to let them know so they can warn commercial shipping.
I grew up in Fallbrook, about a half mile from camp Pendleton and was convinced that there were aliens every so often because of war games they would play with flares. Funny how “marine base,” didn’t occur to me till I was probably 17.
That phenomenon is not limited to this particular case.
You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you?
Yet another cover up from Mr. Dunning. How much did they pay you this time ..huh ?
I’m so glad you posted a follow-up to this! I’ve wondered about it a few times since I first read it.
I think this, in a nutshell, is a classic example of how UFO reports get made. It doesn’t help matters that you can’t get a straight answer from the military about any activity they do, even if in a generic “yes were there” non-answer. This only adds fuel to the fire. It’s easy to see how someone might interpret what they’re seeing as extraordinary, but with a little digging you can usually ascertain what the object was. The only time I ever thought I was seeing a UFO made me completely laugh my ass of when I realized what I was looking at. (light reflecting off of a CB antenna, covered in ice, in the winter time)
Thanks for following up on this.
Sounds like a conspiracy brewing
Yeah, Yeah… spooky lights. Screw the spooky lights, I too, want to ride the Mark V Special Operations Craft! I wonder if it would fit in the San Marcos River…. Hmmmmmm?
Having spent some time on the beach at Camp Penleton, and on ships off the coast, I would move your box farther south. The main landing area is right about where the Las Pulgas exit is on I5. Kinda hard to keep a beachhead secret when its right next to the freeway. On google maps you see the tire tracks on the beach.
Tire tracks my ass! Marks made from UFO landing pads is more likely.
We have something similar happening in country Victoria, Australia. A newspaper (I think) reported strange lights on an isolated road just outside of town. The “theory” was that you had to be traveling at a certain speed. Unfortunately, this speed is well above the legally posted speed in that area and the police have been reaping the rewards with their fixed speed cameras.
Idiots have been traveling in excess of 180kmph to witness these amazing lights, followed shortly by the blue and red lights of a pursuing police interceptor.
The drivers leave with an amazing experience and venture through the journey of knowledge. They lose their license or face hefty fines and they learn the lights in the distance are nothing more than oncoming traffic. Who said you can’t teach these hoons anything? One day, possibly soon, one of them will pay the highest price and then maybe, just maybe, someone will be held accountable for publicly peddling such tripe.
Can I say I was right now? lol
https://skepticblog.org/2009/02/12/solving-the-mystery-lights-at-sea/#comment-3698