Some friends and myself were staying at a friends apartment for the weekend which overlooks Lake Shore Drive and therefore Lake Michigan. We were on the balcony having a conversation when I happened to notice a bright orange orb ascending from the lake. I quickly alerted the two other people who were with me to the object and none of us could identify it. When we first noticed it it was perhaps a mile out onto the lake and a couple hundred feet in the air. It was rising diagonally upwards at a slow yet steady velocity. Once it reached a certain altitude, it appeared to stop and head East, at which point the brightness of the object quickly diminished. Once the object disappeared we resumed our conversation, only to be interrupted by an identical object rising from the lake which followed the same flight path as the last object. Once this object disappeared we continued to watch the lake to see if another object would appear and if we could pinpoint its origin. Sure enough, about a minute later it looked as if someone lit a fire beneath the surface of the lake or on the surface of the lake from which another orange orb rose, once again following the same flight path until it faded away in the distance. This happened 4 more times over the course of the next 5 minutes, with one orb in particular seeming significantly closer and faster than the rest. My initial thought was that someone was on the lake lighting chinese lanterns, but I was forced to dismiss this idea for several reasons. Each object followed the EXACT same flight path, and seemed much too large be a chinese lantern. There were also no lights from a boat on the lake where somebody could be lighting them off, which from our vantage point we would have most likely been able to see. Finally, who would be on the lake after midnight lighting chinese lanterns? After the event we all went inside and prepared to go to sleep, all of us still wondering what we had just witnessed.