2017-09-02 - Lewistown, IL - Light

Red lights traveling in the same general direction, moving slowly and steadily across the night sky.

I am a 56 year old female, with two years of college education and I have worked in county government for 36 years. My friend is 57 years old and an elementary school teacher. She has a Bachelor’s and two Master’s degrees in the field of education. Her husband is 72 years old and retired. He Is a US Navy veteran of the Vietnam War, is also a college graduate. He returned to this area and retired from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. We are all from Fulton County originally and have lived in this area most of our lives.

We were enjoying an evening campfire on their property which is located approximately 2 ½ miles southwest of Lewistown, IL. Around 8:30 pm, I was kicked back in a zero gravity chair, when I noticed a mostly red light moving horizontally across the sky. The way we were sitting, my friends had their backs to it, and so, I immediately started yelling for them to look! We like to go to this same spot to enjoy the yearly Perseid or Leonid meteor showers and at first, I thought we were being treated to a rather large random meteor. However, that was not the case. It continued to move slowly across the sky in a southwest to northeast direction. While we were focused on it as it moved away from us, I noticed another one coming from the same area! It was the same thing, a solid, mostly red light, moving slowly and in a southwest to northeasterly direction. When I say mostly red, it is because it did appear to have some white with it or around it. My friend was able to get ! some video of it using her iPhone.

Needless to say, this sparked some very lively discussion for a while as we speculated on a possible explanation for them. There was no noise of any kind associated with them, they were not huge and we guessed they were flying at 500’ or less. We almost immediately thought of them as drones of some sort, but, then wondered about the logistics and legalities of flying them at night? We also thought it might be some sort of study being conducted by the Department of Natural Resources or some other such agency, perhaps studying animal activity at night? Along those lines, we concluded that they were traversing the area in a grid like pattern. We came to that conclusion because the trailing one, while appearing to follow the first, was offset, so to speak, flying at the same altitude, but, parallel to the first and not directly behind it.

We were still in the same location, I was again kicked back in the zero gravity lawn chair and at 9:20 or so, when another one appeared!! Same size, same color, everything. It was much farther offset than the first two, but, traveling in the same general direction and at the same altitude and speed as the first two. We waited and watched the sky for quite some time, thinking another “trailer” might be behind it, but, we didn’t see anymore. We wondered, if perhaps, we had missed the lead one and the one we saw this time was the second one? Again, there was no noise associated with it, nothing that would have made you look up, I just happened to be looking up.

All three of them just moved steadily across the sky until they appeared to blink in and out until you couldn’t see them anymore. We didn’t feel like they “disappeared.” It was more like, they just got far away and probably went behind the cloud cover. We left probably 40 minutes after the second sighting and went back to town. None of us had seen anything like them before.