LATEST Oct. 6, 10:34 a.m. While the airship spotted in Salinas belongs to LTA Research, SFGATE has since learned it is not the 400-foot Pathfinder 1.Oct. 5, 1:00 p.m. A few years ago, Google co-founder Sergey Brin turned his attention from search engines to airships. He started an airship company, LTA Research and Exploration, which began covertly building dirigibles in Silicon Valley in 2017. By this spring, we knew LTA’s first prototype airship had been built and was estimated to be ready for flight by the end of 2021, but no one had reported seeing it take to the sky. Until now.SFGATE learned that on Sunday, an LTA airship was flying around in Salinas. “We were getting groceries, and on our way home ... we saw the blimp off in the distance north of town,” said Alan Wilson, who witnessed and took photos of the airship along with Kate Wilson, his wife. “We took our groceries home and essentially just chased it down.” Wilson grabbed his camera and started snapping photos. Once he felt he had enough, they started heading home — until they noticed the airship was heading toward the Salinas Municipal Airport. “We ended up chasing it to the airport,” said Wilson.The Wilsons’ photographs and video show the airship with a visible red “LTA” logo on its gondola landing at the Salinas Municipal Airport. If this is indeed LTA’s first prototype airship, called Pathfinder 1, the registered dirigible is 400 feet long, powered by 12 electric motors and able to carry 14 people, according to the Daily Beast. Pathfinder 1 was planned to “support a gondola, diesel generators, solar panels, batteries, electric motors, and vectored thrust propellers, as well as a small gangway running the length of the envelope for accessing the interior frame,” according to Air and Space Magazine.Brin’s vision for LTA airships is to serve humanitarian goals (they can land or deliver goods pretty much anywhere) as well as to offer a zero-emissions alternative to airplanes.LTA also has other airships in progress, including Pathfinder 3, which will be much larger than Pathfinder 1 and large enough to carry passengers. But LTA won’t say much about another, even more massive rigid airship in the works. “All LTA will say on the record about its next-gen giant is that it will be too big to be built in Sunnyvale—LTA is in the process of moving into the former Goodyear Airdock hangar in Akron, Ohio,” read the Air and Space Magazine story.While this mysterious ship won’t take to the air until 2023, LTA is currently focusing on taking Pathfinder 1 for a series of flight tests around the Bay Area, according to Air and Space Magazine. Eventually, Pathfinder 1 will fly all the way to the new facility in Ohio. It’s possible, then, that what the Wilsons witnessed was one of these test flights. And if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll witness one, too.“We see blimps coming through relatively frequently going between LA and San Francisco for football games, so this wasn’t my first time chasing a blimp,” said Wilson. “... It was just fun, it’s nice to take the camera out and take some fun pictures.”