Salinas, CA, USA
fireball shaped object. ((NUFORC Note: We suspect witness was looking south, watching a missile launch. 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: 600s, a plausible sighting length
- Brief witness text (23 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
- 2018-10-07
- Where
- Salinas, CA, USA
- Shape
- Fireball
- Duration
- 10 minutes
- Geo
- 36.678, -121.656 · exact
- Slug
- fireball-over-salinas-ca-2018-59185c
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 51 reports logged in Salinas, CA.
- This case is one of 331 California reports filed in 2018.
- Fireball craft made up 9.3% of 2010s reports, vs 6.9% across the whole archive.
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.