UFO: I was on the roof of a friends apartment with 5 other people. We all witnessed this event.
This happend on friday night at a friends birthday party. San Francisco CA two block from the panhandle. Anyone else out there see this??
The first object to appear was a small red balloon sized glowing object that floated about the roofs of the houses 3 or 4 blocks from us. It traveled seeming only under power of the pendulum swinging motion it was making. Every front swing it would move forward and every back swing it would stay still. We all commented on how weird it was, but just assumed it was some party favor run amok from someones back yard.
This lasted maybe for 2 minutes before the light just fizzled and the whole apparatus disappeared from view.
About 15 minutes later. So around 11 or 11-30 I want to say. A HUGE red light, the exact same color of the red bobbing light, came over the hill of Buena Vista Park and moved fairly quickly in an arching motion upwards and over the city till it came to a complete stop over the city. It was quite startling and left everyone dumb-struck for a moment before we all became very excited at the prospect of what we were witnessing.
It hung in the air for about 10 minutes, just sitting. At this time it was about the size of a planet in the sky. One of my friends remarked it looked like it was trying to be Mars.
IT then slowly, very slowly descended about 40 feet in the air. Stopped flickered the way the much smaller light had, then was gone from the night sky.
We discussed the possiblity of it being a helicopter, however the light was one SINGLE bright source, and was not blinking the way flight lights do. Also SILENT no noise what so ever.
We tried to film it with our camera phones but nothing showed up on them.
Also please spare me the 4/20 jokes, this certainly was not because of weed...
I've looked and I've looked for other reports. None in the papers, just wondering if any other SF DUers were looking skyward that night.
= new reply since forum marked as read
http://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-Officials/dp/0307717089/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335209439&sr=8-1
The foreword was written by John Podesta, President Clinton's former Chief of Staff.
Very common this time of year, I mean night. 
...has nothing to do with the eyewitnesses themselves. Or whether or not they're drinking or smoking.
The problem is that in order to know an object's size, distance and speed at all, you need to know one of those values in advance. Otherwise the mind conveniently makes up a value for one of them and calculates the rest on bad data.
For example, when you see a helicopter flying "fast" some distance away (you guess), you're probably on track because you have some idea how big a helicopter is. When you see a swallow darting past, you don't think "that's a supersonic airplane in the distance" because you recognize the bird.
However a "light in the sky" is predictably impossible to gauge -- it could be a bright, distant light, or a much nearer, less bright light, or nearly any size -- in fact so much so that the phenomenon has been used in deceptive warfare since the event of air power.
That said, I of course have even less idea what you might've seen than you do. But thanks to the "fill in the gaps" power of the brain, I'd say it almost certainly was not the size, distance or speed you thought it was. 
