UFO Sighting in Carson, California on May 1st 1969 – White disk seen overhead. Object burst and out came smaller objects similar in appearance.

I was in front of my house during the afternoon when I happened to notice a white dot straight overhead. The sky was perfectly clear and the weather was nice. The object I saw was small and unmoving. I had enough time to bring out and set up my small refractor telescope. At the time of this incident, I was a budding amateur astronomer so I was pretty good at using my telescope. I called one of my neighbors over to look at the object in my telescope. Several more of my neighbors appeared and were anxious to look through my scope. I was magnifying the object about 30 times. Looking through the scope, the object appeared as an off-white circular disk with a slight darkening in the center. We observed it for about 20 minutes and finally one of my friends ran home to tell his father. The father called the Los Angeles Air Force base but got a run around and was unable to report this to anybody in authority. About 45 minutes into this, I looked back in the eyepiece of my scope and noticed the object now had what appeared to be smaller versions of it revolving around it. Each of these smaller copies had a puff of smoke coming out one end, like a "vapor trail." Total number of smaller objects was about 5 initially but the number increased over the course of several minutes to about 15. All of my friends were extremely excited as we were well aware of the UFO phenomenon and we were of the opinion that we were actually seeing a UFO. I and my friends were only about 12 years old but my friend's father also looked through the telescope and was equally amazed, and mystified by the sight. At some point I must have either bumped my telescope and was unable to reacquire the object, or the object had left the area and we lost sight of it. I never reported this to anyone and never thought about it again until recently.