TINLEY PARK LIGHTS

Opening

At around 10 p.m. on Saturday 21 August 2004, people in Tinley Park and the neighbouring suburbs south-west of Chicago looked up and saw three bright red lights moving slowly across the sky. Families at a block party watched them. So did crowds leaving a concert at the big outdoor amphitheatre nearby, where the heavy-metal festival Ozzfest had just ended. The lights moved in single file, then stopped and settled into a triangle, hanging silent above the houses for something like twenty minutes before fading away.

At least one witness filmed them on a home camcorder. On Halloween night the same year, the lights were reported again, and over the following years more sightings were added to the story. Investigators from the Mutual UFO Network said the case was not a hoax, and a television series estimated the object could be a quarter of a mile across. A simpler answer, red lights carried aloft by balloons, has never been proved or ruled out.

Timeline

21 August 2004, about 10 p.mThe three lights are seen over Tinley Park and nearby towns. It is the weekend of the Chicago Air and Water Show, and traffic is leaving Ozzfest at the Tweeter Center amphitheatre. A police officer at the scene tells neighbours he does not know what the lights are, as his dispatcher fields calls.

Later that nightAbout 45 minutes after the three lights disappear, witnesses report a single bright light, then a red light following the same path.

31 October 2004On Halloween night, three red lights are reported again over the area, in a series of sightings by many witnesses.

2005 and 2006Further sightings are reported around the same suburbs, including on later Halloweens, though accounts disagree on the dates.

29 October 2008The History Channel series UFO Hunters opens its second season with the Tinley Park case, testing the balloon theory and analysing witness video.

2014The Illinois branch of the Mutual UFO Network says it wants to reopen the investigation for the tenth anniversary.

Key figures

Bill Dooley, a local businessman, was watching a football game when a neighbour shouted at him to look up. He became one of the case's most quoted witnesses and helped test the balloon theory himself.

T. J. Japcon was at a block party on Dorothy Lane with his sons when one of them, eight years old, urged everyone to look up. Japcon filmed the lights with a Samsung camcorder, and his footage became the case's main evidence.

Sam Maranto, the Illinois director of the Mutual UFO Network, investigated the sightings, collected the footage and has argued firmly that they were not a hoax.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: witness accounts from several towns; home video, including Japcon's camcorder footage; reports to police on the night; the Mutual UFO Network's investigation; local newspaper coverage; and the UFO Hunters episode with its video analysis.

The analysis for the television show concluded that the lights were probably fixed in a triangle, which would look like a straight line from some angles, and used a helicopter visible in the footage to estimate the size of the object at about 1,500 feet across. That estimate depends entirely on knowing how far away the lights and the helicopter were, which nobody did.

What is missing is anything that fixes the lights in space: no radar data has been published, no two videos have been used to triangulate their height and distance in a published study, and no aviation record from that night has been produced to show what was or was not in the air.

I honestly can't tell you what it was.

Things you might not know

• It happened on air show weekend. The first sighting fell on the weekend of the Chicago Air and Water Show, one of the biggest air shows in the country, which some people see as a clue.
• A heavy-metal crowd were witnesses. Many of the people who saw the lights were leaving Ozzfest at the nearby amphitheatre.
• The lights were silent. Witnesses said they heard nothing but dogs barking, even as the lights hovered steadily in the wind.
• The balloon test looked wrong. The UFO Hunters producers and Dooley tried to recreate the sight in Indiana with balloons and flares, and said the result looked very different.
• Nobody claimed an alien ship. Even Dooley has said, "We never came out and said it was an alien spacecraft."
• Similar lights turn up elsewhere. Maranto noted similar red-light triangles later reported in Melbourne, Australia, and red lights in formation have been reported over many cities since.

Competing explanations

Balloons carrying lights. The most common explanation: helium balloons, or later sky lanterns, carrying flares or red lights, released as a prank, perhaps tied together. That would explain the silence, the slow drift and the colour. The test for the television show did not match, but other combinations of balloons and lights have produced very similar sightings elsewhere.

Aircraft. The Chicago area has some of the busiest airspace in the world, and the air show weekend added more. Witnesses, though, described hovering and silence that ordinary aircraft would not produce.

A large unknown craft. The reading favoured by the Mutual UFO Network investigators and the television show: one large silent object with three lights. It rests on the size estimate, which depends on distances nobody measured.

Later life of the case

The Tinley Park Lights are now one of the best-known American UFO cases of the 2000s, regularly listed among the best-documented, and a point of local pride and argument in the south-west suburbs. They also became a template: since 2004, clusters of red lights over towns, many later traced to sky lanterns or balloons, have been reported again and again, and each new one is compared with Tinley Park.

Finding

Something with three red lights was seen and filmed by many people over the south-west suburbs of Chicago on 21 August 2004, and again on Halloween. The witnesses were sincere, numerous and consistent about what they saw. The size of the object was never measured, only estimated from video, and a simple explanation, lights carried by balloons, has never been ruled out even though one attempt to recreate it did not match.

What still will not resolve: how high and how far away the lights were, which two well-placed videos from that night could still answer if anyone ever triangulates them.