Other over Buellton (near), CA

The report, as filed

On Saturday, Nov. 7th 2015, at approximately 6 pm, my husband and I were driving south on the CA.101 freeway. When we were between the 246 and the 1 highways, we noticed two illuminated “dots” in the sky that seemed to be joined by a beam of light, while we were looking through the windshield on the drivers side. This beam looked similar to a helicopter's search light, but was more narrow and did not reach the ground. A larger “dot” was above a smaller one and it was a glowing white. The smaller dot below it, was slightly to the left (east) of the larger one, and was blinking. My husband saw it as glowing red and I saw it as white. There was a beam of light between them that looked like either the upper dot was sending the beam to the lower one, or visa versa. We began to comment on what we had seen and then noticed that the beam was gone (we did not see it disappear) and that the lower, smaller dot was moving away, slowly, to the east. After a couple of seconds I leaned forward to look through the windshield on my side, the passenger side, and saw that there was a spiral in the sky. (I didn't see it form). My husband looked through the windshield on my side of the car and saw it too, and pulled over beside the freeway; got out of the car and stood at the rear of the car, on the passengers side; I stayed inside and looked through the window. The sky was dark and the spiral looked like clouds or fog that were in a round pattern with a small dark hole in the center, similar to what a satellite photo of a hurricane looks like on the TV weather news. It quickly elongated, moving to the west, towards the ocean. As it expanded I saw a blue stream of light in the center of the “cloud”. The cloud became cone shaped in the front and continued moving away from us, westward. After several seconds the formation seemed to end and the cloud dissipated, although the blue streak stayed suspended in the air for several minutes. We continued to look to the west, in the direction that the cone-cloud had been traveling and I could see a faint plume that appeared to be going straight up, far in the distance. US Navy missile launch. PD

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #123865). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.