CaseFireball2016

Phelan, CA, USA

I seen a strange looking object in the sky. ((NUFORC Note: Chinese rocket re-entry. PD))

Report quality: Low32/100

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
  • Brief witness text (43 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
Phelan, CA, USA
Shape
Fireball
Duration
3 minutes
Geo
34.426, -117.572 · exact
Slug
fireball-over-phelan-ca-2016-5ce047
Wave

Part of a wave

  • Historical wave2004

    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

  • Phelan, CA has 11 sightings on file here.
  • 2016 brought 579 reports from California.
  • The 2010s skewed 9.3% fireball reports; the archive-wide figure is 6.9%.

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.