The Tinley Park Lights

August 21, 2004. A clear Saturday night in Tinley Park, Illinois. Traffic was streaming out of the Tweeter Center amphitheatre after an Ozzfest concert. Planes for O'Hare and Midway crossed the sky as always.

Around 10 p.m., Bill Dooley, 48, was watching a Bears preseason game. A neighbour called him outside.

Three bright red lights were coming in, single file. They held together despite the wind. There was no sound. They lined up one above another, then formed a triangle. Then they moved away, turned white, and disappeared. About 45 minutes later a red light followed the same path. It "floated slowly over rooftops, stopped and started again, turned right, and disappeared."

On Dorothy Lane, near 174th Street and Harlem Avenue, T.J. Japcon was at a block party with his sons Justin and Jake. The lights came "out of the southwest, moved northeast, stopped literally right above us in a triangle pattern." It was so quiet that dogs could be heard barking. Japcon ruled out an aeroplane, a helicopter, a flare gun and Venus. He picked up his Samsung camcorder and filmed.

On their back deck, Bob Peterson and his son Tyler called it "a nice night out." They watched the lights float, stop, and hover in a triangle for up to 30 minutes at a time. Across Tinley Park, Oak Forest, Orland Park, Frankfort, Mokena and Evergreen Park, people stood and stared. A police officer in a marked squad car said dispatch was getting calls.

October 31, 2004. Trick-or-treating. The three red lights returned. One report listed 12 observers who watched them hover in the eastern sky. "The middle light moved to the left light and returned to the middle." Another group watched them drift east and vanish one at a time, without a sound. A MUFON preliminary report described a triangular object "over 5,000 feet long," hovering at about 4,000 feet. A year later, on the night of September 30, 2005, the lights drew 72 more reports.

Illinois MUFON, led by state director Sam Maranto, gathered video and photographs and spoke of "hundreds if not thousands" of witnesses. "We have enough video evidence to exclude many other things," Maranto said. "It was not a hoax." He doubted it was a secret military craft. No government inquiry was found. In 2008 UFO Hunters aired Japcon's footage, and its experts put the span at about 1,500 feet, "roughly six Boeing 757s." Dateline NBC ranked the "Tinley Park Triangle" third among close encounters caught on tape.

The main sceptical answer came from an Evanston astronomer who studied the footage. Flares dangling from balloons, "the likely work of a prankster." UFO Hunters tried to recreate the effect in Indiana. According to Dooley, "it looked very different." Military flares were considered, but witnesses saw no slow parachute descent, and the lights kept their order. Some ufologists say the video shows the lights moving as if attached to a dark object, a black triangle. Other witnesses saw three independent lights.

"We never came out and said it was an alien spacecraft," Dooley said. In his view, the lights "remain unexplained." MUFON sought to reopen the case around its tenth anniversary. In 2021 Patch released a documentary, The Lights, featuring Greg King, the Tinley Park officer on duty that night, and astronomer Christopher Impey. The case is still set beside the Belgian UFO wave and the Phoenix Lights.