Revisiting the Tinley Park Lights

"I received a phone call at 1:10 AM on Saturday the 1st of Oct. from a family member who lives in Tinley Park IL. The first thing I heard on the phone was 'they're back, the red lights are back!'"

— NUFORC Sighting #46659, Manhattan, IL, October 1, 2005

I revisited one of the most well-documented UFO cases in the United States. Most people in this space have heard of it. Not many have looked at the actual data.

In 2004-2005 there were three events that spanned 13 months, where 175 people filed independent reports (NUFORC) and described the same exact thing.

I pulled every Tinley Park sighting report from the NUFORC database and ran them through the same analysis framework that I built for the study of the overall 152,000 UFO report dataset. What I found is that there are amazing consistencies that make it hard to explain this case away. For example, 96% of the witnesses agreed on the color that was seen and 100% agreed on the sound, or rather the complete absence of it.

Here's the detail on the events that took place on those three nights in Tinley Park, Illinois:

Event 1: August 21, 2004. 39 reports. A Saturday night during the Chicago Air & Water Show weekend. Witnesses across Tinley Park and neighboring towns reported three red lights appearing in the sky around 10:00 PM, hovering in formation, shifting between triangle and linear arrangements, and disappearing one by one over a period of 20 to 45 minutes.

Event 2: October 31, 2004. 76 reports. Halloween night. The lights returned, this time appearing earlier in the evening (around 7:30 to 8:00 PM) and visible to families out trick-or-treating. A single red light reappeared roughly 90 minutes after the initial three faded. Over 200 calls were placed to local law enforcement.

Event 3: September 30 to October 1, 2005. 60 reports. Thirteen months after the first event. Witnesses reported two lights initially around 11:00 PM, with a second wave of three lights appearing after 1:00 AM. The Midlothian Police Department was fielding calls before witnesses could finish their sentences. Dispatchers were already asking, "Is it the three red lights?"

175 Reports in a 25-Mile Radius

To understand how truly unusual these events were, I compared them against a baseline of every state-level daily sighting volume in the NUFORC database. On a typical day, an entire U.S. state generates a median of 1 sighting report. The 90th percentile is 2. The 99th percentile is 5.

Tinley Park, a few suburbs with just a twenty five-mile radius, produced 39, 76, and 60 reports on the three event nights. Each event generated more reports than an entire state typically sees in a day.

That's amazing, and there's no arguing that data point. Something unusual was seen and by a lot of people.

Looking through the eyewitness accounts, it was also amazing how precisely they agreed with each other.

Here are the key reported attributes across all 175 reports:

• 96.3% reported the lights were red
• 100% of those who commented on sound said the objects were silent
• 60.3% described solid, non-blinking lights; another 22.4% described slow blinking
• 50.6% described the objects as hovering; 52.6% described slow, straight-line movement
• 31.9% identified the shape as triangular; 45.8% described lights only with no visible craft

These percentages were remarkably consistent across all three events, not just in aggregate. Event 1, Event 2, and Event 3 each independently showed near-identical attribute distributions. Whatever people were seeing, they were seeing the same thing, on three separate nights, across 13 months.

If these reports were the product of mass hysteria or fueled by social media (was there even social media in 2004?), you'd expect the descriptions to drift over time. I've seen this with other flaps - there's always inevitable embellishment, variation, contradiction. In this case, the descriptions were uniform. The consistency across events, at least from a data perspective, is the single most compelling aspect of this case.

The Reporting Curve

Here's where I believe I have novel analysis for this case. I noticed the speed that witnesses filed their reports changed dramatically across the three events, and the pattern tells a story.

During Event 1, only 5% of witnesses reported within 24 hours. Over half (54%) filed a month or more later. Many people simply didn't know NUFORC existed until media coverage brought the sighting to wider attention. One report came 7.6 years after the event.

By Event 2, the community was on the alert. 54% reported within 24 hours. People had seen the coverage from August, knew where to file, and were watching the sky. As one witness described, neighbors had their phones programmed to call each other if it happened again.

By Event 3, 93% reported within a week. 100% within a month. At this point, the reporting protocol was well known and established.

That acceleration curve is itself evidence that these were real community events, not manufactured reports. A hoax doesn't produce a learning curve.

Star Witnesses

Another finding is that these weren't "fringe" observers. Reading the 175 narratives, the witness pool included:

• An amateur astronomer with 12 years of experience (and a practicing attorney) who was setting up his 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope when the lights appeared. He noted the absence of all air traffic near Midway Airport flight paths, something he'd never observed in years of backyard astronomy. His report reads like a professional observation log.
• A recently returned Iraq veteran who reported the sighting with his brother and girlfriend, noting he'd seen the same thing months prior.
• An aircraft technician and amateur astrophotographer whose Perseid meteor shower photos had been displayed at the Chicago planetarium. He observed the lights simultaneously with a family member 12 miles away in Tinley Park, confirming via cell phone that they were tracking the same objects relative to passing commercial aircraft.
• A fire department captain, multiple attorneys, a college professor, a paramedic, and a news station employee who attempted to contact his station's news director during the sighting.
• And probably most importantly...the MUFON State Section Director for Illinois and the Director of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), who conducted a formal investigation, interviewing over 100 witnesses and reviewing no fewer than 14 videos. Their summary: "Genuine unusual craft (UFO) have been seen and recorded in the Tinley Park area... This may very well be one of the best documented mass sightings."

The Black Triangle

Most reports describe lights with no visible structure. But one witness in Oak Forest described something else. After the initial three red lights faded on August 21st, here's what he and his family described that happened next:

"There was this air ship that was moving from the north to the south. This ship seemed to be moving slow but steady and as it got closer we got a real good look at it. It was black and shining and triangular. I could see the light from the surrounding townships reflecting off it. It seemed to be flying low, maybe two thousand feet off the deck. And it was silent. It didn't make a sound. Just moving straight as an arrow. Once it passed over our house and headed out south it turned into one of those red lights for maybe three or four minutes and then faded like the other lights."

This is the only narrative in the complete dataset that explicitly connects a visible, structured object to the red lights, describing the moment a solid, reflective, triangular object became one of the red lights as it moved away.

There are several that mention three lights in a specific unchanging formation - I'm willing to bet that these are also black triangles vs three distinct objects.

Interaction

Almost every one of the 175 reports detailed lights that hovered, drifted, and eventually faded from view. Interestingly, one sole witness described something reciprocal. A man sitting in his yard at 1:10 AM during Event 3:

"I saw three red lights above my house in a triangle form. I shined a light on it. When I noticed, it came closer to me and shot a beam of light at me, then it was gone."

When I did a broader analysis of the 152,000 NUFORC reports, interaction events (where witnesses describe a perceived response from the object) represented a small but persistent category. They show up across different timelines, geographies, and object types. This report is the only one in the Tinley Park dataset that fits that pattern.

Ok Skeptics...

There are a number of skeptical explanations that just don't mesh with the actual report attributes. Here's my favorite: "F-16 afterburners from the Air & Water Show". Afterburners do not look like silent objects that hover for 30-45 minutes and they do not return on two additional dates when there's no air show in progress. Chinese lanterns is another one that's frequently mentioned. I'm not entirely sure that Tinley Park is known for Chinese lantern displays, but regardless they don't maintain rigid geometric formations, change formations in coordinated patterns or return three times across 13 months. Also consumer drones weren't a thing in 2004. The reality of the data eliminates these types of explanations.

So What Was Seen?

I honestly have no idea. 😄

But to recap, here's what the data reveals: 175 independent witnesses across three separate events spanning 13 months. A degree of narrative consistency that's atypical even by the standards of the best known and well-documented cases. The witnesses included trained observers who specifically ruled out conventional explanations in their reports. Multiple witnesses captured video. The events were reported to police in real-time, with departments confirming high call volumes.

The MUFON/CUFOS investigation called it "one of the best documented mass sightings." After analyzing the data, it's hard to argue that.

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