2010-12-02 - Silver Spring, MD - Circle

Five to eight orange circles in the sky.

I was driving down Bonifant Road in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was particularly cloudy out, so there were no stars visible in the sky. As I was approaching New Hampshire Avenue on Bonifant, I saw what I first thought was a star constellation, formed out of bright orange/red circles. There were five circles in a formation that at first resembled the big dipper, except without the scooper portion of the dipper itself. The circles seemed lower than the clouds, and a color I have not seen on any aircraft at night.

During this time, I called my girlfriend to get her to go outside to see if she could see what I was seeing. While communicating with her on the phone, I pulled off on a side street just after Notley Road. I was able to see at this points that the circles were not stationary as they first seemed, but were actually moving. I'm not sure if they were moving the whole time or not, but I traveled a relatively short distance before noticing them moving, so I feel that I would have noticed them prior to pulling off on the side street. Once on the side street, I drove up a little ways, and seemed to be directly under the 5 orange circles, still spaced a pretty good distance apart, best compared to the spacing of looking at the stars that form the big dipper. I turned onto a second neighborhood street to follow the direction they were moving, all the while talking to my girlfriend, aside from one call to my brother, to see if he could see them as well, but to no avail.

The second neighborhood street was a culdesac, so I turned around the circle, at which point I noticed two to three new circles of the same size and color, and at what appeared to be an equal spacing as the previous five from the previous five. They appeared to be moving in the same direction as the first five that I witnessed.

These crafts appeared to be lower to the ground than the storm clouds, as stars were not visible due to the clouds. After this point, I made a point to try to observe airplanes in the area to compare to what I saw. These circles were different in that you couldn't gather a distinctive shape, whereas sometimes with a jet you can pick up multiple lights in different parts of the craft, or perhaps even an outline of the jet. Usually if it's a jet, you can at least make out the shape of the craft until a point where it gets so high in the sky, that it appears to be like a moving star sized object. These circles appeared to be two to three times the size of a jet that is high up in the sky and resembling a moving star, but notably lower to the earth. They appeared to be moving quickly, and I was unable to discern any shape to the craft, even right I turned onto the side street and was directly beneath them.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I'm an open-minded person, but this was quite alarming to me for a number of reasons. I have never seen jets or planes with lights of this color, brightness and size. It was a bright, single solid orange color for each of the dots. Additionally, because of the storm clouds, these stood out on the sky well apart from stars since stars were hardly visible. Thirdly, they appeared to be stationary prior to moving.