2011-01-15 - Darien, IL - Light

10+ orange lights following one another seen on the SW side of Chicago

Witness #1 12 year old male 10 circle shaped objects fly slowly across the sky. 9 of the objects got to a point and all the lights burned out eventually, all following the same course. The last of the 10 was slow, I was looking through binoculars at them and I was able to follow them but the last one shot across the sky at a great speed. The last one just disappeared and was gone.

Witness #2 17 year old male At approximately 11:30 my dad called me to come and look at something outside and I came outside to see 10+ orange lights slowly moving across the sky. They all looked to be maintaining the same speed except the last one. It looked like it had fallen behind, but just as I pointed to it, my brother and I witnessed it move at a tremendous speed to catch up with the rest across the sky. Once it caught up, the first one dimmed out followed by the second, then third, until the last one finally dimmed out with a heading of South-Southwest.

Witness #3 Father of above I am a Certified Flight Instructor/ATP with 16,000 hours TT. I have flown in the Chicago area out of Midway Airport as a pilot from 1974 thru 2001. Subsequent to that I have flown out a flying community airport Brookeridge (LL22). This observation was seen looking East thru South from our back yard in Darien, IL (Darien is in approx 20 miles SW of downtown Chicago). What I saw was amber light after amber light which seemed to be rising from a point east of us. I would say initially these light appeared about 15 miles East/South East of us. All told there were 10+ lights. They all seemed to climb to the same basic altitude and they followed each other on the same course that appeared to be a heading of 200 degrees. They were not exactly the same distance from one another, but were all in a line at varying altitudes and basically looked like one was following the other. They also appeared to slowly gain additional altitude and seemed to travel at the speed of a singl! e engine airplane. When they were more south of our position they appeared to take a slight course correction to the left….say more of a heading of 170 degrees. They appeared to stay the same brightness the entire time we saw them. Ultimately they dimmed in brightness and disappeared. They appeared to be 5 times the size of a planet you might see with your naked eye. My sons said they saw one of the last ones lag behind and then accelerate to catch up to the group….however I did not see that. Both of my sons reacted at exactly the same time when this happened. I was trying to video tape them and did not see this happen. The video tape results were very poor and I only got several frames of the objects, but in my opinion my recording is of little use. I did check with flight service station at the time. I checked surface winds for MDW, LOT and JOT. The briefer told me almost every station reported calm surface winds. Winds aloft for 3 6 and 9 were 340 at 12, 310! at 16, 300 at 33. In my opinion theses objects were not bein! g carrie d by those winds, their course seemed to be 90 degrees to the winds aloft forecast. Surface temp was 9 degree F. These 10+ objects looked like pyrotechnic devices to me….but 10+ pyrotechnic devices leaving a metropolitan area on a course 90 degrees to the prevailing winds aloft??