Black Triangle UFO

Black Triangle UFO sighting during the Lunar Eclipse in August 28, 2007

By Bill Schaeffer

1. The sighting

I had been working the Night Shift for two months as a rotoscope artist and wanted to switch to the Day Shift.    Night Shift was ok, but it was tough to sleep, or socialize, and for my health, I needed to work days.   

We worked on the top floor of an old art Deco building.   I had been doing rotoscoping for over ten years and was working on the movie National Treasure 2.     I worked with two other guys: Dirk and Mel (not their real names).   Dirk was a young married man.   He came in to work, put on his headphones and finished his assignments.   He didn’t talk much, but he was friendly and helpful.   Mel was the other artist on the Night Shift.   A single middle aged guy like myself, he had been rotoscoping for years.     Mel was a hard worker that took his job seriously, but liked to joke and have fun.    He had just bought a new pick up truck that he would take camping on his time off.    Occasionally, Mel and I would sneak out to the roof on our work breaks to relax.

While surfing the internet during a render, I noticed that a lunar eclipse was going to occur the next week.   I thought it would be cool to video tape it.   The eclipse was starting at 2:00 AM and I got off work at 3:00 AM that day (unless there was overtime).    I could punch out an hour early and videotape the eclipse from the roof.

I told Mel and we thought it was a great idea.

The night of the eclipse, I had my camera and tripod in the trunk of my car.    The shift went smoothly.    When the Day Shift left, I got my camera gear from the car.

Around 2:00 AM,  I finished my work and went out to the roof to set up the camera.   Everything was busy .    The lunar eclipse was going to be cool, and I was thinking of getting some great images on tape.    Stabilizing the camera tilt proved to a struggle.

By 2:30 AM the camera was set up and I was rolling video.    I had the camera in a tight shot on the moon, so I could get the greatest detail and the highest resolution. 

The eclipse progressed slowly and steadily.   I had a great deal of difficulty tracking the moon smoothly and spent much time fiddling with the tripod adjustments.    Finally I got a reasonable setting and only had to adjust it every minute or so as the moon drifted out of frame.   When the camera is zoomed in on the moon, you can see the effects of the rotation of the earth.   The image of the moon slowly drifts across the visual field of the camera as the earth moves.   This necessitates a tripod adjustment every few minutes.

Mel came outside and we sat and watched the moon slowly change.   Mel is a big UFO fan and he kept joking about how we were going to see a UFO.   “Oh, there’s a UFO launching off the moon right now.”    “Oh, look there’s another UFO over there.”    “Oh, I see another one over here.”     Every few minutes this was good for a laugh.   

The night was perfectly clear.   There was not a cloud in the sky.    The moon was full and had just risen a few hours earlier.    It was moving toward the perihelion of its arc as it started to eclipse.   Ever so slowly a reddish shadow gradually moved across the face of the moon.    The dull red glow making the silver white seem even brighter as the eclipse progressed.    The stars became more visible in the night sky as the moon dimmed.  

Mel kept on joking about UFO‘s.   I talked about other lunar eclipses I had seen.   Several years earlier, when I was videotaping a lunar eclipse from the Marina, a strange man appeared out of the darkness and talked at length about UFOs.    This man quoted Revelations from the Bible and said that UFOs were really Angels.   He even claimed to have seen an Arc Angel that was a UFO fifty miles long.    He said he lived in the desert and that UFOs would chase him.    He had even seen fleets of over three thousand UFOs on occasion.    After this explanation, the man started talking about politics.   He got extremely irritated at Government policies and I thought it best to pack up and leave.

But now we were on the roof and there were no strange visitors.   Not yet.   Since it was late at night there was very little air traffic.   I do not remember any helicopters or airplanes.   Civilian air space usually shuts down around 1:30 AM in Los Angeles, but occasionally you can hear planes flying late at night.   These  must be military supply flights from the Air Force bases in the desert East of Los Angeles.    In the months before the second Iraq war, I heard a tremendous amount of air traffic in the wee hours of the morning.    I would lay in bed and listen to the planes rumbling overhead at 3:00 AM.    I knew the U.S. was planning a huge military exercise, just from the amount of air traffic.

This night, however, was beautiful and silent.    Except for the air conditioners on the roof, there was no noise and the sky was clear.  There was no wind and we were all in fine spirits.  The video tape was running, but was  tightly zoomed in on the moon.     I had no idea there would be anything else of interest in the sky.    Dirk was still inside, and I was talking to Mel about working night shift.    On the tape you can hear me say,  “Third shift is kind of cool when you get used to it…”      I stop in mid sentence and almost immediately we both say, “Wow, did you see how fast that went.”

I was looking up at the moon when I saw an air craft slowly approach from the left.    At first I thought it was an airplane because of the triangular shape.    But then, when I really looked at it, I was stunned.   

This was like no airplane that I had ever seen.    I remember saying, “Look at that!” and pointing out the air ship in one dramatic gesture.  But there is no recording of me saying that on the video tape.  

In fact, the entire incident I am going to relate appears to happen in just a few frames of the video.    I am talking on the tape, and suddenly , mid sentence we both stop and say, “Did you see how fast that went?”   Unfortunately the image on the tape is an extreme close up shot of the moon in partial eclipse.

***

Off to the left, coming over the roof of the building and below the moon, was a dark shimmering craft that appeared to be huge.   It was close to the same size as the moon in the night sky and was moving very slowly.     We were looking up and seeing only the bottom of the ship, as if we were on the bottom of a lake and looking up at the bottom of a row boat.    There were two sections to the craft, a forward triangular section and a back rectangular section (remember we are just seeing the bottom of the craft).    There were lights on the very points of the leading triangle and fainter points of light on the back corners of the rectangle.   The edge of the craft was very sharp and hard.   There was a faint dividing line between the triangle and rectangle, almost as if the triangle was the “cab of the truck” and the rectangle was the “bed of the truck.”   Both Mel and I had the distinct impression that we were looking at a real, metal, mechanical machine of some sort.    The surface was dark and indistinct.   It appeared to be the same color as the night sky and almost seemed to shimmer with a reflection of stars and night sky.  

Since I am an FX artist, I have a somewhat artistic eye.   The surface of the ship had some indefinite quality to it like it kept changing shades of color.    But the effect was quite subtle as the ship seemed to match the night sky very closely.    It almost seemed like (in FX terms)  I was looking at a bad “rig removal composite,”  where the surrounding sky was used to replace the ship.    But this was real and not a computer image.

The points of light were on the vertices of the triangle shape.    They were just pin points of light and bright white.

Time seemed to slow down, because I remember staring at the craft for a long time trying to make sense of it.   It was one of the most remarkable things I have seen my entire life.   

Then, at almost the same instant I pointed out the ship to Mel, the ship started to accelerate.    I have never seen anything move that fast in my life.   In less than two seconds it shot across the entire arc of the night sky and disappeared over the Santa Monica Bay, and over the Santa Monica Mountains, to the North West.  

***

I am a semi professional musician and have a pretty good sense of time.   I never wear a watch and usually know what time it is to within 15 minutes (even when asleep).    I am fairly confident of the two second time to the horizon.

This event was phenomenal and the only thing I can liken it to is the shift to hyper space in the Star Wars movie series.   Except, in this case, there were no light trails and it was perfectly silent.   This hyper fast movement of the ship to the horizon is the most amazing aspect of this whole event.

After the ship disappeared over the horizon I thought I heard two faint booms, but it is difficult to tell.   You can not hear them on the tape because the roof air conditioners had turned on, and were fairly were noisy.

As the ship sped away, I must have seen the back of the craft (initially I saw only the bottom).    After thinking hard about this, I think that the craft superstructure had a triangular, or trapezoidal, cross section, but I am not entirely sure.

The strange thing is, there is not two seconds of dead air time on the video tape for the ship to fly to the horizon.    In fact, there is not time on the tape to fit my memory of the whole event.    And again, unfortunately, there is no documentary image on the video, because it is an extreme close up shot of the moon

A few calculations can estimate the speed of the craft.    If it took two seconds to go twenty miles to the horizon,  this would be about 36,000 miles per hour or 57,960 kilometers per hour.    Escape Velocity from planet Earth is about 40,000 kilometers per hour.    According to Wikipedia,  the NASA New Horizons spacecraft has an Escape Velocity of 58,356 kilometers per hour.   As a point of reference, the speed of sound is 1,240 kilometers per hour and a typical jet flies around 700-900 kilometers per hour.

This craft accelerated to escape velocity in two seconds.   And it moved with total silence.

The rest of the night was relatively uneventful.  Mel and I discuss the UFO at great length, but mostly just comments like, “Wow, I cannot believe what that was, or how fast it went.”   and, “It was like a black triangle.”   Later, our other coworker Dirk, came out to photograph the eclipse and eventually we packed up and went home.

2. The next day

The next day at work, it was like nothing happened.   It was real strange how ordinary everything was, considering we had both seen something phenomenal.

I got sick the next week and took the whole week off of work.   I bought some books on UFOs and realized that “Black Triangles” have been sighted many times.    Another book talked about channeling entities from the Pleiades Star Cluster.   

Shortly after that, I got in a huge fight with my girlfriend and we broke up.    

When I returned from sick leave, I started on Afternoon Shift.   The movie was stressful and I got in several arguments with co workers about taking my office chair. 

Two months later, when the movie ended, I got laid off and I haven’t been back since.

In the weeks after the sighting, I would go out to the roof and look up and the sky and try and make sense of the whole experience.    I would stare at the clouds, or stars, and try and remember what it looked like, and what it “felt like.”    Now, I occasionally think of the event, and it is still a strange and amazing memory.

Mel thought it was probably a top secret USA military air craft of some sort.   I don’t know what it was, but it certainly was like no air craft I have ever seen.   It was totally silent.   It very well could have been a UFO.    I theorize that it used the cover of night sky and the planetary alignment of the eclipse, to “slingshot” the craft back to its appointed space time coordinates.    I will never know what we saw, but I do know that we saw something.    And I know that Mel saw something very similar to what I saw.   And finally, we are both convinced that what we saw was a real, metal, “nuts and bolts” air craft of some sort.  

Appendix A.   The initial description a day or two after the sighting.  (sent to a UFO website)

Not interested in "registering" or anything, but a friend and I
saw "something" on the night of the eclipse. We were watching the
eclipse from the roof of a building in Santa Monica CA. It must have
been around 3am because the moon was fully red.

All of a sudden I saw a strange group of lights in the sky. Three or
five lights at the points of a transparent shape that looked like an
elongated pentagon, or like an elongated "home plate"

Instantly I called to my friend, "Look at that." The shape appeared to
be directly overhead when I saw it and in a matter of seconds it had
"flown" across the entire arc of the sky. My friend saw the same thing
and we were both glad to have a witness. The shape was totally dark
like the night sky and appeared to be just an outline.

The night was perfectly clear with no clouds. The moon was red and I
presume many others in LA were watching the sky also.

This shape moved incredibly fast. I estimate that it was visible for
only two or three seconds before it had flown "out of sight" It moved
at least 20 times faster than any plane I have ever seen.

It was totally silent, but there were air conditioners on the roof. I
thought I heard a low rumble from the distance just after it disappeared,
but it is difficult to say.

This entire episode lasted two or three seconds. it could have been
some strange light reflection from the ground, but there were no clouds
in the sky. Both my friend and I had the impression that we had just
seen a "air plane" of some sort that moved at an incredible rate of
speed, totally silently. Although appearances can be deceptive.

We work as digital artists and consider ourselves to have fairly acute
vision. We wish to maintain our anonymity, but are curious if anyone
else saw the same thing?

additional note: The shape was "flying" from the east to the west and disappeared over the Santa Monica Bay.    

Appendix B.   The Calculations:

The horizon is about 20 miles away. 

20 miles in 2 seconds = 600 miles per minute = 36,000 miles per hour = 57,960 kilometers per hour.

  

Escape velocity from planet earth is about 40,000 kilometers per hour.

The NASA New Horizons spacecraft has an escape velocity of 58,356 kilometers per hour (according to wikipedia.com).

The speed of sound is about 1,240 kilometers per hour.

A typical jet flies around 700 - 900 kilometers per hour.

Appendix C.

Drawing of the event made a few days later

Copyright 2008, 2014 William A. Schaeffer