@sfchronicle: Last one night in the Eastern Sierra town of Lone Pine, Cayden Thompson was hanging out on his friend’s front porch when the two men noticed a pair of what he described as “incredibly bright” beams of light shining down thousands of feet from the mountains near Mount Whitney into the low-slung desert below. Thinking that perhaps the beams came from a car that had driven off the side of a winding road and that someone might need help, Thompson and his friend drove up the slopes west of town, toward the light source. “We wanted to investigate,” he said. Motoring up the switchbacks on Horseshoe Meadows Road, the men got to within about 1,000 feet of the lights and stopped. A pair of high-wattage spotlights, connected to a generator, had been stationed in a dirt pullout on the roadside and pointed downward, illuminating a swath of the distant desert landscape south of town thousands of feet below. A technician manning the spotlights warned Thompson and his friend not to get too close. “They put out so much energy that you can’t stand in front of them or you’d get burned,” Thompson said. “It was pretty unbelievable.” The two locals would come to learn that the lights belonged to an L.A. tech company that was conducting a kind of experiment near their hometown that night. Read more via the link in our bio. Credits: Courtesy of Cayden Thompson, Reflect Orbital and China Lake Mountain Rescue

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Monday 19 October 2026 03:02:44 GMT