SIGHTING: LAFAYETTE, INDIANA (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"I was leaving for the store at about 9:30 PM when I noticed three bright, red-orange objects in the sky. They were rather distant from each other, but they formed a perfect, straight line from about 20-50˚ above the horizon. I didn't see them for long because I had to turn a corner into our subdivision, but I rolled down the window to see if I could hear anything. Our house is close to both a hospital with a helipad and the Purdue University Airport, but vehicles from either of those places are extremely audible from the ground; the objects in the sky, that night, were absolutely silent.The store is only three minutes away, and I was only inside long enough to grab one item. When I pulled back onto the road to head home, there were at least seven of these objects in the air still in a straight line, but now reaching from about 10˚ above the horizon. (It's possible a lower one had been there before; there would have been trees in the way, on the road I was first traveling.) At 9:42:24 I texted my wife: Me: Look outside! Me: UFOs! My wife: what are those?! Me: They're everywhere. Wife: smells like fire outside. Me: You can't see most from here, but there are like a dozen in a straight line from the horizon on up. Me: Two just disappeared. Wife: Are you almost home?! By that point, I actually was home and was standing in the driveway, doing my best to film the last 2-3 remaining lights with my iPad. Each followed the same path, ascending at what appeared, from my vantage point, to be at approximately a 60˚ angle, until they reached a certain point in the sky. At that same point, each light would begin to twinkle and slowly dim. After about a minute of dimming at that specific, stationary point, it would disappear completely. Finally, I know this sounds ridiculous, but I was about to upload the video I took and discovered that it is missing from my iPad. There are three photos from the same evening, plus 76 photos and two videos from the next day (when my two-year-old went to town with it). But for some reason, the video in question is just gone. I even ran recovery software on it; it found over 600 deleted photos dating back to the first of the year, but my video from Saturday night is conspicuously missing. Hmm"