My wife and I were sitting on our porch in late afternoon. The weather was clear and the sky was blue. I noticed in front of me to my right(Southerly) what looked like 4 parachutes moving slowly in a North easterly direction. Looking closer I saw that they were not parachutes but round white orbs. I took 2 photos (852 & 853). The dark area on top is the roof of our porch. My wife then told me to look left and there were a bunch more of them (pic 854). That's when I went down to the driveway to get a clearer view of the sky. I took several more pics from here. This took place at 5:52pm local time. The camera timestamp is 6 hours behind as I did not adjust it for local time. Img858 shows what looks like a dark cylinder amongst the orbs. It also appears in Img860. The orbs were not moving much, not intermingling or anything like that. In fact they seemed to keep a relative position from each other. When the 4 that were in front of me and initially got my attention, caught up to the others(roughly North east of me), that's when most movement stopped. At that point I counted 18 of them, there might have been more. They then started to slowly dim as though they were gaining altitude and eventually I could no longer see them. The whole event lasted about 8-10 minutes. In this area of the pre Alps I have seen many para gliders and parachuters. This was definatley neither of those. AS they gathered and started to dim I viewed them with an 8x binocular. They appeared brighter as though lighted. I've seen many strange things in this area but this one was right up there.When I initially saw the first 4(pics 852 and 853) it was hard to estimate their altitude. I first thought they were paragliders which I have seen numerous times in this area. That would place them at about 500 - 2000 feet altitude. But not knowing the size of the objects, I can not say at what altitude they were.