Bright craft observed by two teenagers in fresno ca 1989

Around the summer of 1989, a friend and I both about 13 years of age were on the roof of my moms’ house pretending to be ninjas and sword fighting.  It was about 9pm.
We noticed a light in the sky. It was a very clear calm night; it looked like a ball of fire like a hot coal. The closer it got to us it looked more like a football or possibly saucer shaped thing, which was hot white/yellow in the center and got orangish gold toward the outside. This thing flew from a distance away toward us and above and beyond us across the sky. Approximately 500ft up?  It was totally silent. The size to our vision would be similar to if you held a children’s “nerf” football out at arms length. Being at the height that I assume it was, it was very big. Bigger than my moms house easily. I have seen the EXACT SAME style craft on a ufo show. the one where craft hits the desert then bounces back up then hits again and explodes into a million firey lights, its pretty popular i think.
Here is the weird part, we had my moms camera up there to use like a scope (kids ya know) it was an old 80’s rectangular style one. Anyway with camera in hand I saw all this. Never once thought to take a picture at all. It was too strange for me to do anything but stare at this thing.
It didn’t move super fast either. 100mph? Now that im almost 33 im a better judge of visual speed applied to something at a distance and 100mph for an air craft isn’t that much I think. We had our parents look through the news papers to see if a meteor had hit or other people reported seeing it. it was really big. There was nothing.
Ok, years later, when I spoke to my friend about this again, he said something I didn’t remember and still barely remember. Within 5 min of the sighting, he said 3-5 military style helicopters flew across in the same direction. This could have been at the point that I jumped off the roof and frantically tried to explain to my mom what had just happened.
Since those days, I have become a huge ufo enthusiast as well as other unexplained things. All stemming from personal experiences like this one.  I will post more sightings I have had over the years right after this one too because the form wouldn’t let me use “various” under times and dates.
Witness indicates that the date of the sighting is approximate.  PD