One still, quiet night atop Otay Mountain near the Mexico border, my fellow soldier and I were engaged in our routine monitoring duty. I was pointing out familiar landmarks in Tijuana when something extraordinary shattered the calm darkness: a brilliantly radiant cyan-blue light. At first, it hovered idly, but suddenly began dropping, morphing into a crescent-shaped propulsion of luminous energy. The glow was unlike anything I’d ever seen, an intense aqua hue that soon shifted through a spectrum of mesmerizing blues, purples, and eventually hints of green.
We initially thought it might be a meteor, but the object’s behavior quickly betrayed that notion. With sharp precision, it banked nearly 45 degrees away from our vantage point, the crescent flattening parallel to the ground as it swept through the sky. The play of colors in its radiant trail was as if an energy blade—akin to something out of science fiction—had been hurled across the night, its arc spanning the width of two to three large buildings as we observed from a distance.
Throughout the approximate five seconds of this breathtaking performance, we remained silent, taking in every detail. The object’s propulsion seemed to pulse with a green-blue light, executing the banking maneuver with sharp, uncanny control. Surrounding us, commercial planes took off from the distant Tijuana airport, their familiar sounds contrasting with the eerie stillness the mysterious object commanded. As suddenly as it appeared, the luminous crescent disappeared, leaving us in awe and searching the dark sky for any sign of its return. We waited for over an hour, but the enigmatic energy wave was gone—vanishing without a trace, yet leaving a permanent impression on our minds.
Such an encounter challenges our understanding of the night skies. It wasn’t just a light in the dark; it was a spectacular display of agility, color, and shape that beckons us to question the cosmos and our place within it.