United States.Tinley Park lights · three reddish lights in a triangle

On the night of August 21, 2004, over Tinley Park (a southern suburb of the Chicago metropolitan area), numerous residents reported three reddish-orange lights arranged in a triangular or linear formation, moving slowly and in complete silence. More than a hundred people, in Tinley Park and neighboring towns such as Oak Forest, Mokena, Orland Park, Frankfort and Evergreen Park, described the same phenomenon simultaneously. Many people were outdoors: an Ozzfest festival concert had just ended at the local amphitheater (then the Tweeter Center), and thousands of people were heading home and looking at the sky. Several witnesses captured the lights in photographs and video.

Bill Dooley, a Tinley Park resident, recalled in 2011 that around 10:00 p.m. he saw three lights coming at him in single file for about twenty minutes, with no sound. At one point they seemed to him stopped and together despite the wind. They went from single file to stacked, then formed a triangle and moved away, turning white. About 45 minutes later, another red light came down the same path and did the same thing. T. J. Japcon saw the lights arrive from the southwest and stop in a triangle over a block party, and filmed them with his camcorder. He recalled that a passing police officer said he did not know what was going on but was keeping his radio open because dispatch was getting calls.

The episode repeated on Halloween night 2004, with dozens of additional witnesses: reports cite some 77 people describing the same pattern. The next day's Daily Southtown account describes a dark, overcast sky, between a hundred and nearly two hundred calls to the police, and the FAA (the U.S. civil aviation authority) radar at Aurora showing nothing unusual. A notice sent that night to NUFORC, a center that receives sighting reports, with twelve witnesses, says the three red lights "came back as they were in August," hovered in the eastern sky for about 40 minutes, with the middle light moving to the left and returning, and then faded away.

Years later it was covered on television, in an episode of History Channel's UFO Hunters titled "Invasion Illinois." MUFON, a civilian network that investigates sightings, looked into it, in particular Sam Maranto, director of the Illinois chapter. Maranto compiled the testimonies and the visual material and has publicly argued the event was not staged, stressing that the observing conditions (clear sky, a crowd of sober, dispersed witnesses) were optimal.

The local press reported conventional explanations: model aircraft, a hoax using flares and balloons, and military aircraft, in an area with heavy traffic to O'Hare and Midway airports and on the same day as the Chicago Air and Water Show. Others have proposed sky lanterns, which the blog Enigmatic Ideas rejects because they do not maintain rigid geometric formations. The UFO Hunters team tried to recreate the lights with flares and balloons in Indiana and, according to one participant, the result looked very different. In that same episode, some witnesses maintain it was a single triangular craft over 1,500 feet wide. Neither the conventional explanations nor the idea of a single craft was conclusively demonstrated.

The Tinley Park lights were seen at the same time by more than a hundred people in several towns, on two different nights, and witnesses left photos and video. The only instrumental data known do not corroborate them: according to the FAA spokesman quoted by the Daily Southtown, the Aurora radar showed nothing unusual on Halloween night.

The observing conditions are also in dispute. Maranto describes them as optimal, with a clear sky; the Daily Southtown account of Halloween night describes a dark, overcast sky. Neither the conventional causes proposed nor the single-craft hypothesis has been demonstrated.