My bet is that you saw a Carrier doing flight ops off San Clemente. A launch and recovery cycle will often last about 45 minutes before the carrier turns out of the wind and heads back down wind for a re-set. It will usually start off with launching 12-15 planes of catapults 1-4. When they get down to the last few planes they wrap up the waist cats(3 and 4) and launch the remaining planes off the bow cats. The recovery cycle can start before the last planes on the launch cycle have even launched.
At night, the planes coming down to land on deck are several miles aft of the ship in the “Marshal Stack” and split up into altitude blocks by aircraft type before being called out of the stack in order to make their pass. My bet is you probably saw the planes in the Marshal Stack or the tankers flying in orbit overhead mother.
Red and green nav lights can appear to be blue and orange over long distances if the atmospherics are right. The shift from red to orange and green to blue would represent the same frequency shift in the same direction in the visible light spectrum. The luminescent strips mentioned by another poster and visible only at very short distances and are usually only turned on for launch and recovery.
Even after watching years and years of flight ops on carriers the the lights can get confusing on planes at night especially if they are flying in a two ship or four ship. It can really make them look like they are jumping around from one place to another.
