2012-11-17 - Springfield, MO - Flash

Red flashing lights in sky

Was driving westbound with my wife to pick up a pizza.

She pointed out a cluster of lights in the sky and asked my if I could see them and if they were stars. I looked to where she was pointing and at a glance what I saw did appear to be stars of constellations. As I continued to look at these lights I noticed that they appeared to be moving. The lights were not maintaining the pattern they were in when I first looked at them. They also seemed to be much closer in distance than what most stars look like. I looked around in different directions and noticed that there were not any actual stars out yet. These lights were the only lights in the sky.

We arrived at our destination and got out of the car for a better view. The lights appeared to be moving in a north/northwest direction. They looked as if they were flashing red and white. At first, when we first saw the lights, there were about 20 to 30 lights. When we were out of the car there were only about 10 to 15. As we were watching the remaining lights, the lights were moving and would just disappear. Two more individual lights appeared in my peripheral vision, coming out from the south over some trees. These lights did not make it as far across my view point before vanishing.

All of the lights observed while outside of the car seemed to be as close in distance as a local airplane might be if flying through the sky. Definitely within the Earth's atmosphere. Thought these might be related to the meteor shower that was being reported to be taking place, but there were no streaks or tails and they were not moving very fast. Tried to get a photo taken with camera phone. Zoomed in to 4x zoom. The image at that zoom level was a fuzzy red dot and that dot was about a quarter of an inch wide. From first sighting to last light vanishing, t