2012-09-14 - Chicago, IL - Oval

Several Yelowish-Orang to Red lights over West Chicago

Mom and I were on our way to Chicago and took the I-94 exit for Belmont. We traveled west and as we got to around Cicero I (the driver) noticed a few odd lights in the sky to the left. They were traveling to the east. I told mom to look and joked that they were UFOs, but said they could be lanterns. Then, more lights came and they were all moving in the same direction along the same path. I thought that they moved too deliberately for me to think they were lanterns, so gave up on that idea. They may have been coming from somewhere around Midway airport area, but I am not sure. There are airplanes that fly near the area, but these objects were definitely not jets or planes; they were too numerous, slow and quiet.

So I asked mom if she’d mind if we pulled over to look. She didn’t mind as she was pretty curious too. We stopped the car and noticed that more and more lights kept moving on the path in the sky. We noticed that they were round (oval or orb-shaped) and yellow-orange. Sometimes the lights would pulsate and change color, but not in unison. They did this individually, deepening into a primary red-colored glow and back to orange or yellow. Sometimes they would fade out until you couldn’t see anymore light-- but only a gray round object floating in the sky. The streetlights obstructed some of our vision so we could only see them as they traveled towards us and next to us; as they passed they faded into a light polluted area. The unidentified lights were about low-cloud height, and could have been the size of a small car, I’m guessing-- I'm not sure how my judgement of this kind of thing is. We saw as few as 50 or as many as a hundred… it is hard to tell since I understan! d that excitement can obscure one’s judgment of numbers.

I tried to take pictures, but my phone's camera couldn't zoom in well enough and the streetlights obstructed the camera's ability to take in other lights.