On the evening of April 6th, 2001, I saw something strange out on the low desert in Riverside County. It's been bugging me since I got back from the trip. Here's what happened and what I saw.

I was traveling on a weekend getaway to the desert town of Blythe, California. I was heading east on I-10. It was a Friday evening, approximately 9:00pm local time, well past sunset, with a full moon overhead and clear skies. This illuminated the desert landscape in very faint light, enough to see the mountains rather well.

There are several minor exits from I-10 between Chiriaco Summit and Desert Center. The one called "Red Cloud Road" leads to a dirt road going south. It follows a railroad line over a pass.

I'd been past this place a number of times over the years, in daytime and nighttime. This time however, I noticed some kind of brightly lit structure out beyond the mountain.

This is my own rendition of what I saw:
This is the crude drawing I made soon after the trip to accurately show what I saw. This big structure was sticking up from behind the mountain. It was studded with lights. I could clearly see three greyish-blue vertical structures. The one on the right stuck up at a 45 degree angle and all I could make out clearly on it were the lights.

So this thing had to be huge to stick up from behind a mountain that was several miles away like that. I figured it was a new mining operation out there. It sure hadn't been there on previous trips.

That pass is several miles from I-10, off to the south. A railroad line uses it.

So I got off at Red Cloud Road. I followed the exit and looped under I-10. The road became a poor dirt road leading southeast. About two miles or so later, it split up. One road continued southeast, the other one continued south on an earthen berm next to the train tracks. I followed that one for another mile before I turned around. The road was in such bad shape I was afraid it would shake my truck to pieces, even at 15 mph. Besides, I was most of the way to the summit and there was no sign of anything like what I'd seen Friday night.

This is on the south side of I-10 looking south toward the pass. There are some high-tension powerlines out there about ¼ mile away. Don't confuse them for what I saw that one night.

Compare this to the sketch above. This was shot while moving on I-10 but it shows the pass better than I could see when I got off the interstate. The mystery structures stood behind that ridge on the left. They stuck up about as high as that leftmost power pole does above the ridge, but they were definitely on the other side of it.

For comparison, the picture on the right was shot at Red Cloud Road, on the north side of I-10, looking northwest. There is a large pumping station for the Colorado River Aqueduct. You can see several large pipes going up the face of the mountain. If this keps give any scale to the other pictures, that plant is about the same distance away (albeit in another direction) and the mystery structures were maybe 3/4th as tall as those pipes. The railroad line in the foreground is the one that traverses the pass to the south, and continues northeast to Eagle Mountain.

This is a closeup of the pumping station.

• Map 1. This is the Red Cloud Road exit off of I-10, between Chiriaco Summit and Desert Center.
• Map 2. This is about where I turned around, which was near the summit.
• Map 3. General location of the structure, by my estimates. Note several mines in area.

Any further information from anyone who's seen what I did would be welcome.

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Page created April 12, 2001
Last updated August 7, 2001