Light over Evansville, IN

The report, as filed

On July 4th, 2014, at approximately 9:30 to 10:00 p.m., my husband and I walked the dog down the driveway to the street in front of our house to show her some fireworks which the neighbors all around us were setting off. We did this in order to ease her panic about the noise. We suddenly looked up in the eastern sky and saw two crafts emerge from behind a tall tree which appeared to us like small airplanes with several red/orange lights in a parallel formation to the ground on each craft. We did not hear any aircraft noise, as we were familiar with small aircraft noise due to my neighbor building and flying his own planes – sometimes coming over our houses in the neighborhood. After these two emerged, they traveled southwest and went behind another tree. They appeared to be flying fairly low, at about the same height and speed of a small aircraft. Then two more emerged, flying in the same direction. I would say that at least 8 appeared (in pairs) coming from behind the trees and flew in the same direction as the others, but as they flew on, they appeared to rise some and disappeared before our eyes. At that time, we looked back at the first tree, and they were still coming, sometimes alone and sometimes in twos. When they flew in twos, one flew directly over the other craft. We watched as they all flew to the southwest and disappeared before our eyes. A friend on facebook said they saw the red lights as well while they were outside with their family in another part of town. However, only two miles away, a couple with which we are close, said they saw three of them heading directly west. The husband of this couple was a Vietnam vet and an Iraq vet and was familiar with aircraft. He alerted his wife to come see the strange lights before they disappeared. Some family members thought they were “lanterns” due to the popularity of same. However, I "googled" all types of lanterns and balloons, and none of them had any similarities to what we saw. These things were not floating, but traveling with precision and each of them–nearly 15 to 20 in all–had approx. 3 red/orange lights on the crafts, and we never saw any blinking like air crafts (or noise as I stated above). They were very unusual.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #111222). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.