The Tinley Park Lights

Tinley Park sits in Cook County, 30 miles south of Chicago, beneath the busy airspace of O'Hare and Midway. Saturday, August 21, 2004. Ozzfest had just finished at the Tweeter Center. Thousands of concertgoers were leaving, stuck in gridlocked traffic. Around 10 p.m., three lights appeared over the Southland.

They were red or red-orange, spherical and silent. Bob Peterson saw them from his back deck. "It was a nice night out. Me and my son Tyler were out on the back deck just hanging out when we saw them."

Bill Dooley, 48, watched them come in. "If you can imagine three bright lights coming at you, in single file, for about 20 minutes." He added: "There was absolutely no sound. They formed their triangle and started to move away again."

T.J. Japcon, watching with his sons Justin and Jake, recorded the lights on a Samsung camcorder: "I was just in awe, you've never seen anything like it before." The lights would float for a distance, stop, and hover in a triangle for as long as 30 minutes. Sometimes they flew single file or stacked vertically. Before vanishing, they shifted from red to white, and once a light turned right and was gone. About 45 minutes later, a single light came back.

October 31, 2004. The lights returned. Entire blocks of trick-or-treaters and parents stopped in the street to watch. There were 77 separate reports, from Oak Forest and Orland Park to Frankfort, Mokena and Matteson. "Me, my husband and the kids stood in the driveway and watched them," recalled Maria Pascale Allen.

Doug Veres was at a block party on 169th and Olcott when they flew over. Officer Greg King of the Tinley Park Police saw them while on duty. The lights were reported again on October 1, 2005, and on a later Halloween. Sources disagree on whether that was 2005 or 2006.

No known FAA or other agency investigation was undertaken; Illinois MUFON, under State Director Sam Maranto, gathered the accounts. MUFON says the observers included police, military members and aviation workers. In 2008, UFO Hunters analysed witness video and argued for a single craft, 1,500 feet end to end, or "six Boeing 757 widths." Its image-processing expert said: "Without saying it's an alien spacecraft, I can definitively say by the strictest definition that it is an unidentified flying object." The team's recreated flare setup looked "very different."

Evanston astronomer Mark Hammergren concluded the orbs were flares on balloons, probably launched by a prankster, and asked: "Where's the hard evidence?" The Halloween dates fit a prank, but nobody has ever confessed. Others point to video showing a persistent relative order between the objects, hard to square with free-hanging flares, and no navigation lights were seen. Dooley dismissed model aircraft: "Not a chance… There was no noise associated with it."

Maranto calls it "not a hoax." After the US Navy acknowledged its UAP videos, he said "the phenomenon is genuine." He noted that the Halloween mass sighting came "just days before the Nimitz encounters," the Tic Tac case of November 2004.

Dateline NBC featured the "Tinley Park Triangle" in 2008, and UFO Hunters opened its second season with it. In 2021 Patch released a documentary, The Lights, with resident Michael Newren, Greg King, Maranto and astronomer Christopher Impey. The lights remain unexplained, but for T.J. Japcon, that changes nothing. "I don't think it makes a difference. I know what I saw."