2014-03-09 - Inver Grove Heights, MN - Formation

4 yellow-orange lights flying against busy Sunday night flight traffic.

I pulled up to a stop sign at the intersection of two roads in a wooded suburban area. It was 8pm and darkness obscured the fact that it was fairly cloudy.

I saw four yellow/orange lights 45 degrees up from me. The color of the lights was immediately perplexing.

This area is a well-used flight path for the busy Minneapolis airport and is about 7 miles from there.

The lights I saw were about the color of sodium streetlights and solid - no strobing like one sees with commercial aircraft.

All 4 lights were slowly traveling west to east with little deviation from their path. A single non-pulsing yellow/orange light was following a considerable distance behind the three other lights that when I first saw them were in a triangular pattern.

It was hard to ascertain their altitude as it was night. Most of my attention was on the group of three lights.

As I watched the lights the shape of the formation changed. The light in the back moved closer to the two front lights and the triangle turned more into a straight line. All the while, the fourth light kept considerable distance.

The intensity and color of all four lights was constant throughout my observation. At one point, a commercial aircraft bound to land at MSP was headed close to the formation and from my vantage point almost crossed paths. It is hard to imagine that pilot would not have seen the formation.

Eventually, the four lights passed almost out of my field of vision so I attempted to follow them to the east, but there was no road that would take me in that direction and I was never able to track them again.

In all, I saw the lights for about 2 minutes and got one minute of video on my cell phone including the time that the plane appeared the nearly cross paths with the lights.

I am not quite sure what I saw and neither are the people who watched my video.