Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Large orange light moves over Santa Barbara then moves toward the channel islands. ((NUFORC Note: Missile launch. 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: 240s, a plausible sighting length
- Moderate witness text (82 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
- 2011-04-14
- Where
- Santa Barbara, CA, USA
- Shape
- Changing
- Duration
- 4 minutes
- Geo
- 34.421, -119.698 · exact
- Slug
- changing-over-santa-barbara-ca-2011-c8fb6b
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
- Santa Barbara, CA has 117 sightings on file here.
- 2011 brought 624 reports from California.
- The 2010s skewed 2.4% changing reports; the archive-wide figure is 2.5%.
Report
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.