Hour is about 10, 10:30-ish in the evening, Southern California, where there is lots of air traffic seen from our deck, and it's nice to watch while enjoying an evening smoke (tobacco!!!). These nights, the sky was clear, no big banks of clouds.
Location is beneath flight paths of two international airports as well as who knows how many small city/county airports for civil aviation.
On most any evening, you might see as many as five or six moving objects in the sky at various distances, all blinking except those too far away to discern any blink. Their lights are not as bright as the closer planes/helicopters.
On three nights (two consecutive, then the night after) I saw what I first assumed was a plane/helicopter coming from the west traveling east, as it was the same speed and certain brightness of other air traffic and what looked to be the same general altitude. However, it didn't blink, turned very bright, dimmed, and disappeared over the course of maybe three seconds. It reappeared, dim at first then brightening like a glitterball, then dim again, at the same rate of speed only an inch or two higher in the sky traveling east, then disappear as it travelled ... to reappear again where it would be same rate of speed, only, again, an inch or two higher, then ... dim, but not reappear.
Per night, I saw this from the same point on the horizon, about four or five of them the first night during two visits to the deck over the course of an hour, maybe three the second, and the third night maybe twice, and never again since then.
It was if they would stay in motion, but only be illuminated for periods lasting three seconds or so before either disappearing at the height of brightness, or disappearing by dimming out ... then reappearing three or four seconds later at what looks like considerably higher altitude.
Was it a satellite? Or, I should say, were they satellites? I am totally perplexed.
It might have been a plane or chopper intermittently shinning a searchlight in your direction.
There are various atmospheric conditions and/or local environmental conditions that can produce all sorts of strange “mirage-like” optical effects, some of which involve distant car head or tail lights, or other such man-made sources of light. The cars themselves can actually be *below* the horizon, their light being refracted, or bent, by the atmosphere.
Helicopters.
Or a small private plane.
What you saw was a course correction. At one perspective it was coming at you. Then it turned and rose. Then it was coming back at you. When the lights were not turned at you...they were far enough away so you did not see anything.
It was a weather balloon.
It could be satellites. The ones in equatorial orbits will travel on an east-west trajectory, generally around where the Milky Way is in the sky, if you can see that where you live. In North America, that’s going to be between 30-50 degrees north from the horizon.
Of course there are lots of other kinds of satellite orbits, but from the way you describe it, satellites in equatorial orbit seem the most likely suspect to me.
“Perhaps someone might suggest an explanation for something I saw about a month ago that this article makes me remember. I’ll describe briefly”
Worthy of a MUFON report!