Santa Ana, CA, USA
This flaming ball was falling at an extremely fast speed from the sky. ((NUFORC Note: Chinese rocket re-entry. 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: 180s, a plausible sighting length
- Moderate witness text (70 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
- 2016-07-27
- Where
- Santa Ana, CA, USA
- Shape
- Circle
- Duration
- 3 minutes
- Geo
- 33.746, -117.868 · exact
- Slug
- circle-over-santa-ana-ca-2016-23d7d0
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
- This is one of 61 reports logged in Santa Ana, CA.
- This case is one of 579 California reports filed in 2016.
- Circle craft made up 12.3% of 2010s reports, vs 10.6% across the whole archive.
Nearby in space & time
within 30 daysReport
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.