2012-12-26 - Bartlett, IL - Fireball

Slow moving amber colored ball meets up with others and disappears.

On this night I was driving westward in Bartlett, Il, and I was the first car stopped at a stop light when from the north west an orange/amber ball was moving across the sky in front of me at a slow pace. The object did not have any aviation lights and wasn’t moving very fast. I began to observe this object hard because it wasn’t normal to me. The distance was not far at all from me judging by the speed and the point of view. I was startled and called my girlfriend at home telling her about what I was seeing. She lives only a half mile north east of my position. I told her to drop what she was doing and look out her back window to verify. She did see it, but barley because of how low it seemed. It wasn’t raining, but the clouds had a very low ceiling and it was almost misting outside. There were planes above going to O’Hare, which were higher than this object. The planes were heading east like normally lining up for landing and their head lamps ! were coming through the clouds in a fog. These planes lights were totally different and moving a lot faster. I know in my mind that this light wasn’t normal at all. I’ve lived in this area 25 years and I know what planes look like. I also work next to Dupage Airport and see all different types of planes every day. Trust when I say this was not a conventional aircraft. If I were to accurately guess the height of the object I would say it was similar or lower than a single prop private plane would fly. As the light turned green I almost was directly under it and followed it left down a side street as it was heading in a south eastern direction. Now I’ve caught up with the object and it was basically directly above me as my head is above my dashboard looking straight up through the windshield. I pulled over to the right of the road at a park to get a good look at it. Once I got out of my car, there were 4-5 other similar objects all congregated in this air space abov! e me seemingly out of nowhere. The only noise I heard was the! sound o f passing cars and a plane that was in the area. These other objects were not a glowing amber color like the original, but almost a white color and brighter. I did not notice if these objects were in a certain formation or not because my mind was running a million miles a minute, but they were in some sort of cluster. As they began to move south east again, I hopped in my car and tried to follow again through a windy loopy neighborhood, but they were all gone within another minute or so with no trace.