Salida, CA, USA
cigar shaped object with bright gold lights hoovering 20 feet above almond orchards then disappered
Report quality: Moderate51/100
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: 1200s, a plausible sighting length
- Moderate witness text (99 characters)
- Location geocoded exactly
- No other reports from this city within 3 days
- When
- 2009-09-23
- Where
- Salida, CA, USA
- Shape
- Cigar
- Duration
- 20 minutes
- Geo
- 37.706, -121.085 · exact
- Slug
- cigar-over-salida-ca-2009-3e974d
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
- Salida, CA shows up 4 times across the archive.
- 647 reports came from California in 2009.
- In the 2000s, 2.7% of reports described a cigar — the all-time rate 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.