Appearance / Description of Object(s)

I couldn't determine a shape. I saw only lights. They were red-orange. There appeared to be possibly three lights on each aircraft in a triangular formation, and they blinked on and off.

Size of Object(s)

I have absolutely no idea, since I saw only lights. They were very earthly-looking, and didn't appear to be extraterrestrial at all.

Description of Area / Surroundings

It was in a rural area, with trees to the north and south. I was driving along a two-lane road that has a cleared corridor perhaps 1/2 mile wide, with houses and businesses along it. The Middle Peninsula is north of Hampton Roads, where there are numerous military installations, including NASA/Langley, the Norfolk Naval Base, the Norfolk Naval Air Station, Fort Eustis, a naval weapons station, and Camp Peary.

Full Description & Details

I'll begin by saying that I do not think that what I saw was extraterrestrial. The only reason I'm writing on a UFO website is to find out if anyone else saw the same thing.

At 8:25 p.m. on Oct. 20, 2012, I was driving westward on the Middle Peninsula in eastern Virginia when I saw red-orange lights in the north-northwest sky. They appeared to be rising above the tree line, like cinders from a fire, but as I drove under them, I realized they were just coming into sight over the horizon. They were not far enough above the earth to be large passenger airplanes or jets. They were also too close and too slow-moving to be part of the Orionid meteor shower.

At first, I thought they might be ultra-lights, but when I stopped my car at the post office and got out, I realized they weren't making any noise. I found out later that ultralights don't fly at night anyway. The lights blinked on and off. They appeared to be roughly triangular in configuration on each aircraft, but even wearing my glasses, I couldn't tell for sure.

There were probably 15 to 20 aircraft, flying randomly, some in ragged groups of 3 to 5, some in twos, and some in ragged single file. They all appeared to maintain approximately the same altitude. I could hear nothing from the aircraft, but I have a slight hearing loss and there was traffic on the road. The lights flew directly overhead in a south-southeasterly direction. I watched until they disappeared over the tree line. The entire "parade" took approximately 5 or 6 minutes.

The man who runs a small airport about 10 miles north of where I was located said the aircraft did not originate there. An airport approximately 100 miles northwest of where I was had an air show on Oct. 20, and I left a message there asking if any aircraft had left in a group, flying south, but I haven't heard back from them.

A child in the neighborhood saw two aircraft out of a bedroom window at around the same time and described the lights as red and blue and spinning around.

I'm curious to know if anyone else saw anything.

Can sighting be explained as any conventional man-made or natural object?

I think they were some kind of man-made aircraft, but I couldn't tell what kind they might have been, since it was very dark outside and only the lights were visible.

Witness Background

I was going to enter information about myself, but when I saw that there are no names associated with your website, I decided not to. Why should I tell you who I am if you aren't willing to tell me who you are?

Views on UFOs, before and after sighting

I am very doubtful that a civilization advanced enough to have traveled the millions of miles through space that it would have taken to get to earth from another similar planet would hover around the earth in widely different aircraft for years on end, making random landings for no discernible purpose. I'm positive that what I saw originated on this planet.

Other Comments

I took photos of the aircraft/lights, but my camera doesn't have much of a zoom lens and the shutter speed is automatic and was probably slow because of the dark, so the lights appear as streaks rather than discrete images. By the time I decided to take pictures, the groups of multiple craft had already passed, and I only got two at a time. Since I was by this time looking through the camera lens, I'm not sure if these three photos show the same two aircraft or if they're photos of two to three groups of two.

Reported Sighting? 

Reported To: 

Image Submitted by Witness: