Mount Davidson & Redwood City UFO Connection?

From the San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, October 27, 2005.

Residents across California and people as far east as Las Vegas reported seeing strange lights in the sky late Wednesday, according to Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central coast.

Read the article here.

Now, what ten minutes of cheap detective work will get you...click on the article link above, and look at all three of the photographs. In two of them, a green light is visible. (In one of them, a red light as well.) 

Then, check out this report at the National UFO Reporting Center. Location: Redwood City. Note the date. Key quote:

My family apparently saw a scene of two bright white objects destroyed by a green object.

What to make of it?

Publicly, Mysterious SF says: The similarity of the two reports is intriguing. If what was seen by both parties really did appear over Redwood City, the person quoted in the Chronicle article must have been north of Mount Davidson--considerably north. The phenomena must have been at a very high altitude, moved a considerable distance, or was actually two or more different phenomena for all of this to have been sighted in both San Francisco and Las Vegas. 

It's a little much. In particular, Mysterious SF is troubled by the repeated use of "a.m." to describe an event that happened in the evening. He asks, if this really happened to you, would you make this mistake? You might if you were inventing it in your head as you filled in the online form. 

The NUFORC report introduces more questions than answers. Who filed the report? The person and his family were in Redwood City, but where was the object *really* located in the night sky? Is this a hoax, inspired by the Chronicle story, and meant for someone like Mysterious SF to find and link to each other? If it is a hoax, why introduce the bizarre "space war" aspect to the story? Why say your wife and children saw most it if you aren't going to leave your contact information? Why invent the wife and children when you can say you saw it yourself?

A little advice for amateur paranormalists. Never get too excited about anything. There is almost always a rational explanation for everything. Your mind may be, intentionally or unintentionally, suppressing things that would make a rational explanation more plausible. Every student of the paranormal with a functioning, critically-thinking brain has had plenty of head-slapper, "I can't believe I believed in that" memories. (Don't even get Mysterious SF started on the first time he saw those "ghost orbs" in a night-time photograph of a haunted house.) Hint: many so-called paranormalists do not have such memories. 

Privately, Mysterious SF says: Sometimes, there isn't a rational explanation. 

UPDATE: Maybe it was a Grooloo.