So, in all my time following this subject I've never once seen an object in the sky that I couldn't identity.
As curious as I am, and as many times as I look up, I've never once seen a UFO.
At least... until today.
Granted, it was blink-and-you-missed-it and not at all close, but it's still something I can't fully explain it, though maybe some of you can...
Basically, I was heading southwest on the 110, with downtown Los Angeles on my immediate left, heading from Pasadena down to the 10 west, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, maybe 300 yards north of Crypto Arena (formerly Staples Center). It was 5:32 PM (I looked at the clock right after it happened), it was a light orange/deep blue dusk, zero buildings in front of me, and not a cloud in the sky. Straight ahead, twelve miles further southwest was LAX, and on any clear day, no matter where you are in LA, as long as your view isn't obstructed, you can see any number of planes at various altitudes, flying into/taking off from/high above LAX. And like any airport from such a distance, plane lights around it almost appear to be hovering/hardly moving, even though they're obviously traveling hundreds of miles an hour.
Such was the case from my vantage point, where I noticed maybe four planes, which were all nothing more than blinking lights in that general direction, at various altitudes in my general field of view, and none very close to each other. But they all really stood out against the orange/deep blue dusk, even more so than the plane lights when it was a fully dark sky 10 minutes later. It was very stark and picturesque.
I was going maybe ten miles an hour, listening to a podcast, half paying attention to the traffic in front of me, half watching the planes in the distance, when, all of the sudden, BELOW two of the planes, roughly even with another, and above the fourth plane, a bright, distinct white light caught my eye and shot across the sky from my left to right (east to west) at a slight downward trajectory. I would say it crossed half the span of my windshield in three seconds, moving at a jaw-dropping speed, so much faster than either of the four planes, which, again, from my vantage point, all basically appeared to be hovering. Yet, while this object was slightly in front of them, between me and LAX, it was basically the same distance away as the other four lights. So this thing had to have been traveling thousands of miles an hour. It was SO fast, and SO distinct. And again, lasted only three-ish seconds… then disappeared. Not like shot-off-and-disappeared, but just blipped out of the sky as it was flying.
I immediately tried to explain it away as a shooting star and, granted, maybe the way the curvature of the Earth works, it could have somehow been so far off in the distance as to be entering from space. That said…
A) There was no tail/trail whatsoever. Just a bright, singular, distinct point of white light.
B) Again, it was BELOW at least two of the planes. I just looked it up, and shooting stars apparently burn roughly 50-75 miles above Earth's surface, while this light appeared in the lower third of my field of view, without raising my head at all.
C) The light didn't gradually go out, as if entering the atmosphere. It was there one second and the next it was gone. It literally blipped out of existence as it streaked across the sky.
Anyway, I don't know what to make of it.
Maybe it really was a shooting star and can somehow be explained as such. But man, the gut feeling I got was that it wasn't natural at all. It was both eerie and exciting, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.