2019-11-05 - Morehead City, NC - Light

I am a 57 year old retired medical assistant. On 11-05-19...7:06 pm my neighbor (42 year old female) called asking me to go outside to see some strange orange lights in the sky. She said she had never seen anything like it before. I & my stepdaughter, age 17, went outside on my south facing 2nd floor porch. I'd say we were outside by 7:10 pm. At first we didn't see anything. There was the sound of a plane going over but not extremely loud & that soon passed. Approximately 5 min after we went out, my stepdaughter saw first, then I saw, 3 or 4 clear, bright, orange round balls of light in a cluster. They were at around 45° and in the southeast direction. They seemed close, though I'm unable to give any estimate of distance. They suddenly appeared and after no more than 5 seconds had all disappeared again. They seemed to disappear sequentially, not all at once. No sounds at all were heard at this time. I thought possibly flares, but, like I said, there was no ! sound of any planes or helicopters in the sky. And also, these seemed to be not far from me, in a very populated residential area. Why would anyone be dropping flares in such an area? We waited but didn't see any more balls of light. However, about 5 minutes later, we both saw just inside the bottom of a low cloud an oval appearing white light, much larger than the orange lights. It flashed on just once, for a few seconds, that we saw. It was mild with patchy clouds & light breeze that night. Although it has rained earlier in the day, there were no storms or lightning in the area. It made us wonder if the small orange lights could have been dropped from whatever the oval white light represented. I've never seen anything resembling this before.