2011-04-01 - Homer Glen, IL - Light

Sightings of 7 different objects in the night sky over Homer Glen, Illinois

At approximately 9:00PM on Saturday (April 2, 2011), my wife had just taken the dog upstairs to go to bed and I was downstairs in the family room playing a video game before turning in myself when she came running down telling me that she sees “a UFO outside”.

I immediately put the game on “pause” and followed her upstairs to our bedroom to see what she was talking about. As she led me to the window of our walk-in closet (which faces north), she was telling me that, with the window partially open, she started hearing a lot of the neighborhood dogs barking so she got up to look and see what was going on. As she looked out the window she heard a “crackling sound” (like fireworks) and looking north-eastward she saw what appeared to be some strange type of orange “firework” rising from beyond the tree line trailing white sparks down to the ground. The orange ball, after shedding the white sparks, then moved slowly across the sky. At which point she ran down to get me so I could see it.

As I approached the window, I observed this orange glow in the sky moving slowly in a northerly direction. As I looked at it more closely, I noticed the single orange glow appeared to be three smaller orange lights hanging beneath something I could not make out and then thought it would be good to try and get a picture of whatever it was. I ran downstairs, grabbed my camera but by the time I got outside, the glowing orange ball had vanished.

After things calmed down a bit, my wife proceeded to call her parents to tell them what happened while I returned to finish the video game I had postponed. No sooner than a few minutes later my wife ran back down the stairs saying, “It’s happening again!” So, for the second time, she heard the “crackling”, looked out the closet window and saw another orange glow, trailing white sparks appear in almost the exact same location as before. This time, by the time I ran outside with my camera, I again only saw the orange glow as it moved north and vanished attempting to take a picture of it but I was unable to focus on it. I decided that I would prepare my video camera in the event it happened again because the digital camera couldn’t seem to focus on the object..

And, sure enough, it did happen again; but this time, I got to see what my wife was trying to describe. The orange glow was, indeed, trailing white sparks and there was the distinct sound of “fireworks” but what I noticed is that the sound was more of an electrical “pop”, than an explosive “pop”. Also, the orange glow, once it shed its white sparks, did not burn out, fall back down or make any sound whatsoever as fireworks should do, this one also continued on a trajectory north as did the two prior orange balls which, again, slowly flew out of sight. (It should be noted that the wind was blowing from the west to the east, so these orange objects were flying in an angle, adjacent to the wind current.) Now, totally unsure of what I just saw I thought to myself, “if it happened three times, it can happen again” I loaded my video camera with fresh batteries, a blank tape, went outside and waited. As I stood there with video in hand looking toward the north-east, expecting to hear the crackling and see the next odd-orange ball, I turned and looked west and was startled to see two orange balls, a great distance apart from each other, hovering in the night sky. I quickly turned my camera on and tried to catch them on film they were very far apart and could not get them both in the frame and as I moved toward the back yard pointing the camera skyward and to the west, the orange glow lower to the horizon was already fading into the distance while the other, which was higher on the horizon, had already vanished.

Frustrated, I began to make my way back around to the front of the house and as I turned the corner and stood in my driveway, I saw another orange glow over and passed my neighbor’s roof to the south moving north.

This is the glow I caught on film for approximately 20 seconds.

In the video, as it slowly moves north it appears to turn south slightly before it disappears.

Before this is explained away as normal air traffic, I will say that there are planes that fly over all the time. We may even be near an approach corridor for Midway; however, being very aware of what planes do look because they fly by all the time and are seen in the sky around my house to the point where you are very familiar with typical aircraft, these objects/lights were not typical aircraft.