Triangle over Macomb, IL
A witness account on file, unevaluated. Most of the archive rests here, and honestly so.
The report, as filed
What I saw happened during the Leonids Perseid shower. I wish I had written this down after the event but I am only now writing anything about 2 months later. I wanted to go see the meteor shower and I convinced a friend to brave the IL cold of November with me and watch the sky. I know it is best to watch the showers late night/early morning and away from city lights. I decided to drive to Spring Lake Park outside of Macomb. I believe what my friend and I witnessed happened around 1-2AM. The sky was partly cloudy which mostly foiled our plans of meteor watching. Anyway, as I was staring up I saw something move. It was no meteor and I don’t think satellites move the way this thing was. I told my friend I saw something strange and tried to get her to see it, which she did. We ended up watching this thing for about 45 minutes. But enough stage setting, this is what I saw: It was bright and triangular shaped. It was high up in the sky, higher than planes fly. It moved way faster than a plane. But the strange thing is it moved in short bursts. When it made turns, these turns were almost immediate and in 90 degrees. It also didn’t move across the whole sky, just in the same area of space; as if testing out its speed and maneuvers. If you held a notecard out with your arm extended and the card facing you, the area of the card would block out the area of the sky this object moved in the entire time I watched (~45 min). The craft would sit still for amounts of time between its bursts of high speed moving. When it did make the sharp turns it would start out fast and then slow down just before the turn. If I remember correctly it took a break after making turns. Witness elects to remain totally anonymous; provides little contact information. PD
Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #132195). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.
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Routed to: Federal Aviation Administration · records window 2016-07-14 → 2016-07-31
From the same sky
Related entries
April 16, 2019 · 10:00 PM · LIGHT
Macomb, IL
A light would appear, followed by one or more lights slightly in front of it which sometimes looked like fireworks or some kind of explosion, and the first light would disappear. There were two sets of these. This continued across the sky for at least 2 minutes before disappearing completely. There was no noise from it.
April 16, 2019 · 9:30 PM · CIRCLE
Macomb, IL
A light would appear, following by one or more lights slightly in front of it which sometimes looked like fireworks or some kind of explosion, and the first light would disappear. There were two sets of these. This continued across the sky for at least 2 minutes before disappearing completely. There was no noise from it.
August 26, 2016 · 8:30 PM · TRIANGLE
Macomb, IL
It was triangular in shape it looked like several spheres making connected making up the triangle. It had a weird glow to it, it was flying pretty low and almost blended in with the orange colored sky at sunset except you could tell it was made of a reflective metal. It was totally silent it was heading south and after it flew over it disappeared very quickly or blended in very well. There appeared to be an aura or haze around it as well.
November 7, 2014 · 5:38 PM · SPHERE
Macomb, IL
I was looking for a place to rent during my semester at college. As soon as I was done looking at this house, I got back in my car with my girlfriend and after sitting there for a just a minute not even leaving the house yet, I saw clearly in front of me in the the sky, (South of the football field) a bright dense yellow ball. It was floating around 20 storys high. It was there for a few seconds and then disappeared. It reappeared a few seconds later, close to where it was just at. It repeated this creating a zig zag type movement in the sky. It did this 5 times lasting 10 seconds total but the sixth time it reappeared it had 4 lights sequentially appear on each side of it creating a V shape of 9 similar balls/circles of this very dense yellow light. It then sequentially disappeared each light on each end almost immediately after it just appeared in the V shape. It did not appear again. After 25 seconds or so of looking I saw a faint blue light deep into the sky and instantly saw 2 jets fly over head. I tried following but my girlfriend was freaking out during the entire encounter and did not want me to continue following. It was an incredible moment for me to watch and no one can ever imagine how insane it was. The yellow light did not create a dim or haze around it it was so dense and perfectly cut out circles, it looked unreal.
November 7, 2014 · 5:25 PM · LIGHT
Macomb, IL
I was loading the truck to go duck hunting for the weekend when I noticed a bright light in the sky through a tree. The light brightened and then went dim. Almost immediately after the first light dimmed a second light appeared higher in altitude than the first light. It brightened and went dim. I continued loading the truck and heard the sound of jets in the sky, about 15 minutes after seeing the lights. There was a cloud cover that night and jets were lower than the clouds flying in circles as if searching. While looking at the jets, I noticed about 8 lights flying in a straight line. It appeared they were moving in a South to North direction. The lights were too far apart to be a single object and they got really bright and dimmed suddenly just as the first two lights did. The jets remained in the area for a few minutes, and I did not notice when they left as my grandfather and I got on the road, headed to the duck blind.
December 13, 2012 · 8:45 PM · TRIANGLE
Macomb, IL
3 orange lights in triangle moving in unison then disappearing.