It was spring break, 1996. I drove down from Sonoma State University to Orange County. From there me, my best friend from 1st grade, his highschool crush Angie (who awkwardly had a crush on me) and her younger sister Psyge (damn hippies) go to the grand canyon (another undocumented adventure). We are on our way back and stop at a diner near Joshua Tree. We drive under an hour from there and randomly pick a spot to drive off the freeway (just past Wiley's Well Rest Area off the 10fwy) and set up camp again. We have no drugs, no alcohol, and have spent a number of days together in campsites and hotels and are still in a rather good mood. It gets dark and gets a little cold. We have a raging fire. We are playing truth or dare. I pretend to throw an earring into the fire (I had dropped it in a safe edge of the fire pit where it wouldn't get hurt, with a bit of sleight of hand) and we're all abuzz about how I just destroyed Angie's nice earring and ruined the set. Then I look up. There are lights on, what appears to be, the bottom of a craft. It's floating toward us from far away, but something doesn't look right. We think there's an airbase nearby because of all the planes/helicopters flying over a ridge (across the highway and in the distance over 20 miles away) during the daytime, which is still visible by moonlight. This thing is heading from another distant place, toward the ridge (and ostensibly to the ocean). This is going to pass over us along it's path. We can't tell what it is. We can't tell if it's a formation of multiple things or 1 thing...it can't be one thing. This thing might be big. Like a building, big. Nothing appears that big unless you're really close. It must be really really low to appear that big, or it would have to be unimaginably massive. We tend the fire down and turn off the music blaring from the car, for better vision and out of nervousness. It flies near and then directly over us, blocking out the stars. A couple city blocks worth of stars are eclipsed by this silent black triangle. Even at a couple thousand feet, it's unimaginably sized. The only thing comparably massive I have seen is a cruise ship and this was bigger than The Angels Baseball Stadium. Dead silently, it floats over the highway and on toward the far ridge. Traditional craft (copters and/or planes) come from the same direction the UFO came from and along the same path toward the ridge and craft, then the UFO's lights start to move and it's tilting and then folding in a way that should not be possible, but it's just too far to make out at this point. Then the lights and shadow disappear behind the far ridge. Similar reports of what I saw (although not identical) can be found:
http://www.ufoinfo.com/roundup/v01/rnd01_34.shtml
http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/2010/06/two-triangle-ufo... <-- these are the lights I saw but MUCH MUCH MUCH closer to the ground
Back in 2001 there were still sites listing the other sightings of the same thing (and other unusual things) seen @ Joshua Tree around that time. Many of those accounts seem to have been lost to web-rot, some are featured on various Alien Encounters video trash.
Interestingly, a boeing employee posted (on some random site) about stealth blimps that the US was developing, in secret, in violation of a stealth-tech non-proliferation treaty. One of the prototypes was a massive triangular blimp (there's a site now: http://www.thestealthblimp.com/). This is likely what my friends and I saw. I never once believed it to be some sort of alien craft, but it did disturb me for awhile.