It was New Year's Eve, after all, and people may be in altered states where they see lots of strange things.

But three groups of San Diegans swear they were sober enough to report seeing strange orange-yellow lights in the sky about 30 minutes after midnight. And the National UFO Reporting Center said Tuesday it got enough "similar reports from across the country" to warrant a follow-up investigation.

Ryan Keegan and his wife, Rachael, were leaving a friend's party at their apartment complex in Bay Park about 12:30 a.m. when they saw the unidentified objects. They went in and got their friends and took pictures with a cell-phone camera.

"We saw four orange lights in a square and right behind there were three orange lights in a triangle," said Keegan, who is in the home-financing business and whose wife is a kindergarten teacher. "There was no sound, no flashing lights, no vapor trail, just solid lights."

They continued to watch the sky and Keegan said the group saw four more lights appear about 12:45 a.m. The lights traveled east to west, then disappeared in the sky over La Jolla.

Keegan said he and his friends had been drinking, "but we weren't drunk being that it was Near Year's."

About the same time in Pacific Beach, Dustin Gannon, an amateur astronomer, said he and about a dozen friends saw the lights from the backyard of his home. Gannon described them as nine red dots that traveled across the sky for about seven minutes. About a half-hour later, the group saw four red dots. They captured the images on video.

"We're still a little freaked out," he said. "It was really crazy. It wasn't fireworks."

Reached at the National UFO Reporting Center in Harrington, Washington, about 50 miles west of Spokane, center director Peter B. Davenport said a woman he knows in the UFO field made a similar report. She and five people saw the lights traveling in formation heading west toward Del Mar. She described it as one single unit with seven lights in total followed by an orange triangle formation; both disappeared into the marine layer over the ocean.

"Based on the fact that I actually know the witness who submitted this report, and based on the other seemingly similar reports from across the country last night, I would categorize this sighting over San Diego as of interest to us," Davenport said.

San Diego police said Tuesday they did not receive any calls about New Year's Eve UFO sightings.

The National UFO Reporting Center also received reports of similar sightings in Santa Monica, the San Francisco Bay area and Canada.