Unknown over Los Alamitos, CA

The report, as filed

On the evening of November 18, 2014, at about 7:35 PM, I was walking outside my place of work (a business park), and noticed a bright orange-red colored light hovering in the night sky, maybe a half mile away. From the direction it was, it seemed to be in the airspace above the nearby Joint Forces airbase at Los Alamitos. At first I thought the light was a helicopter, as they fly in and around the airbase quite often, day or night. But at this time, I saw no other air traffic going or coming from the airbase. After maybe 20-30 seconds of watching the hovering red light, which made no noise, as a helicoptwer would have, it began to drop small red balls of glowing light (or a glowing red-hot material?) I thought that this might then be a chinese lantern, but it hovered in one exact spot, not drifting left or right, and dropping about 5-6 of the glowing 'red balls' (which dissappeared after falling halfway to the ground). After 4-5 minutes of observing the above, the 'object' or orange red light then went out - but a few moments later, I saw a non-symetrical object there in the same spot in the sky, very dimly lit from the city lights below, which slowly moved in a North-Westerly direction, and seemed to slowly lose altitude. I lost sight of it after 30-40 seconds, as it was too far or low to see clearly anymore, now traveling behind a building and trees across the street from my location. I also thought the object was a silent drone, but the asymetrical object that I saw at the end of my sighting was definitely not a drone, or a chinese lantern, or any flare - the shape was so strange I can barely even describe it. And the usually busy airbase (helicopters, etc.) was absent of other air traffic before or after the sighting of the object - like they might have been watching it too, and did not want to interact with whatever 'it' was (my own guess here, of course).

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #116264). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.