2001-11-26 - Lenexa, KS - Formation

Light Formation over Kansas City

I'm hesitant to report this, as I'm not completely convinced the objects we saw weren't conventional aircraft (helicopters), but am reporting it for confirmation in case someone else does as well. Last night at 10:20 PM I was carrying groceries in from the car when I noticed several bright points of light in the sky overhead that appeared to be moving in a westward direction towards me. As there is a lot of conventional air traffic overhead at night I didn't pay much attention at first until I noticed that they seemed to be flying in formation; not a V pattern or anything like that (they were all over the sky in no pattern), but in tandem with each other (they maintained roughly the same distance from each other as they crossed the sky). That night was very cold and the wind was blowing from the west. There was also heavy cloud cover that frequently obscured the lights for 15-20 seconds (at times I could not see all of them at the same time, and by the end of the incident cloud cover had thickened to obscure all of the lights). At first I thought they were just stars, as the moving clouds gave the appearance of the movement of stationary objects behind them, and indeed some of them were (as I watched closely I noticed that they didn't really move). However, even as the clouds moved I could see some lights that seemed to move while others didn't, and at least three of the seven lights I saw moved across the entire sky from the far horizon to directly above the eaves of my townhouse where they were finally obscured.

When I first saw them it looked strange enough that I called into the house for my girlfriend to come out and see them also (approximately 10:23). As we watched I tried to verify that the lights were actually moving by looking at them and a stationary object overhead and visually measuring the distance between them. At first I used the moon, as it was the only stationary object close enough in sight, but later I was able to use the eaves of the house as well. The objects looked like large, very bright stars (single blue-white lights just like stars but they didn't twinkle or blink; no red or green lights were visable at any time). They slowly moved across the sky, from east to west against the very strong (at least at ground and cloud level) wind, and at times seemed to change speed. As they got closer to directly overhead, the lights stopped and hovered in place for 2-3 minutes before starting to move again in the same direction, then quickly disappeared behind a very thick cloudbank and were obscured completely. As it was very cold with the wind chill and I was in short sleeves and still holding 25 pounds of frozen chickens and bottled water I decided not to wait and see if they were still there when the clouds cleared; the cloud cover was very thick by then and it didn't look like it was going to break anytime in the next several minutes. My girlfriend and I went through the townhouse and she went out the back door to see if they were visable, but said they weren't (the clouds were too thick). I went into the kitchen, where the clock said 10:37; earlier I had just come out of the kitchen and was going back to the car when I saw the lights which is how I knew it was 10:20.

As I mentioned, I am hesitant to report this as nothing happened which would preclude an optical illusion (stars and moving clouds) and some conventional aircraft (helicopters) being responsible for the incident. However, it seemed strange that so many craft (helicopters or otherwise) would be moving so slowly in apparent formation over Kansas City against a very strong wind at that time of night, and that none of them looked like anything more than very bright stars. I have reported one other incident, a non-incident actually in Lawrence where a strange appearing (but conventional) aircraft flew overhead similar to an earlier report from the same area in Lawrence.