At about 10:55 pm CT on December 1, 2010, while driving up the lane to my rural home in central Illinois, I saw a very bright round orange light to the north, but upon getting closer to the house, I could not see the location of where it had been due to trees. In taking out the dogs from the house just moments later, though, I felt nervously compelled to take the camera out with me. As soon as I got outside, I saw an object which had an easily discernable dark triangle shape but seemed somewhat rounded in the back. It had 3 solid bight white lights on the back, with a red blinking light on each side of these 3 lights, and seemed to have a dull solid white light on the front point. It came from the north, traveling south/southwest, and was at a height much lower than the average commercial aircraft, certainly less than 5,000 feet. I could not tell its true size, but a nickel at arm’s length would have easily covered it. It seemed to move a little slower compared to the usual aircraft sighted in the area and may have emitted a faint rumbling sound, but I’m not sure. The path of this object was nearly identical to a triangle object which I saw on August 9, 2007, and reported earlier this year. The sky was very dark and completely clear of any cloud cover. It should be noted that all commercial flights in this area travel from either east to west or west to east, at a much higher altitude, and do not have the pattern of lights that I saw on this object. Duration of the sighting was less than 30 seconds before it just seemed to fade away, perhaps due to distance.
I took 5 pictures with a new Sony Cybershot 14.1 megapixels camera. The first one picture, numbered 00441 on the camera, shows the object’s lights, although the image is small. The odd thing is that this first picture, #00441, did not download from the camera to the computer, even though I downloaded all of the camera’s images three times. The other 4 shots did download, and all were just black. The first picture is still viewable in the camera. The only other time that this camera and its download malfunctioned at all was in a sighting report I made of an orange light which occurred on September 23, 2010.
Via Mufon.
Mystical Night Research 