The Pampanga Dancing Light, Mabalacat and Angeles City

In the autumn of 2000, strange lights were in the Philippine news. On 23 September, at least 10 people in Kabankalan, Negros Occidental, had reported a bright UFO landing with an "almost blinding light." The government weather agency, PAGASA, maintained a UFO team for reports like these, headed by Elmor Escocia. In Pampanga, people also remembered a "similar" occurrence at St. Jude Village, San Fernando, in 1995. Nobody had ever investigated it.

Friday evening, 17 November 2000. Over Mabalacat and nearby Angeles City, a light appeared in the sky. Witnesses called it a "greenish-white oblong light." Rendy Isip saw it at about 7:30 p.m., an "oval glow that seemed to dance in a circular motion." Others watched it move in "alternating circular or straight east-west patterns."

Text messages travelled from phone to phone. Scores of residents came out. In Barangay San Joaquin, the main viewing spot, people turned off the street lights to see better. Noel Tulabut, an employee of Clark Development Corp. who lives there, was among them. "It was very clear and the light, from our place, seemed to hover above the Sto. Rosario church," he said.

Some said it had been there since 6 p.m. Others only began watching around 10 p.m. It lasted until about 11 p.m. Five hours, by the witnesses' count. No sound was reported.

The obvious suspect was a searchlight, so Jojo Due, a correspondent who watched the light, phoned the police. They told him none were in use. "It could not have been a searchlight since there was no beam of light that led to the hovering glow," Due said. Observers said the light stayed in view with or without cloud cover. Many insisted the sky was cloudless.

The PAGASA UFO team was expected in Mabalacat on 21 November, and Escocia was candid about his first reaction. "We almost dismissed it as land-based halogen light reflected in clouds, until we received cloudlessness reports." He had a precedent in mind: in February 1999, lights over Caloocan City and Marilao, Bulacan, had been traced to a karaoke bar's lighting system. "The whole lighting system used there cost as much as P250,000 and therefore, was very powerful," he said. But the Pampanga witnesses described a clear sky, unlike in the Marilao case.

"Whether or not the case in Mabalacat is a duplication of what happened in Marilao, we have to investigate it and let the people know the results of our investigation," Escocia said. He worried that reports of strange phenomena lead people to see hallucinatory objects, and hoped to come out with a logical explanation. He also admitted that budget constraints meant the team could not always respond.

No published PAGASA finding on the Pampanga light has been found. Looking back in 2015, When In Manila noted that "no further updates were found." A ground-based light reflecting off cloud remains the conventional suggestion, first floated by Escocia himself. It was never confirmed. The light came hours before a meteor shower at dawn, a coincidence that only added to the night.

The case left a small footprint. No photographs or film of the 2000 light are known. In April 2015, new "dancing lights" filmed near Lubao in Pampanga revived the phrase, and the old Mabalacat night resurfaced as background. The two are separate cases. The 2000 light remains a newspaper story, five hours long, with an investigation that never reported back.