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204892 sightings reported...
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Morris, Illinois (United States)

Sighted on Saturday 27. August 2016
Reported on
Shape: Other | Duration: 07:00:00
Source:

My fiance & I were camping at White Pines Forest State Park in the Cedar Ridge campgrounds, at site 6. We had gone camping 2 weekends prior & I was eaten alive by mosquitoes resulting in over 400 bites. This time we came prepared. We circled our campsite with 4 tiki torches, 6 citronella bucket candles, tiki oil candles, the works. Once we built up the fire after coffee & dinner around 9:30PM Saturday night, our site looked almost tribal with a bright ring of little fires around us & the big fire in the middle.At 11:25PM, while sitting in a chair, my fiance took a series of photos on his phone of me moving the logs around in the fire. I love campfires & was happy to toss around the logs & make sparks while he got his shot. He accidentally took a few bursts of photos in the process, resulting in 86 photos over the course of a few minutes. We looked through them together once he was finished, & I immediately made him trash a number of them. Shortly after midnight, now early Sunday morning, we moved over to a blanket in the grass in front of the bushes between us & site #5 to look at the stars & stretch out. I commented on how wide awake I was, & that I could stay up to watch the sun rise. My fiance agreed that he could as well. We're both night owls so this wouldn't be unusual for us. It was a beautiful night. The rest of the campground had gone to bed, the air was still, the stars were out, & the crescent moon was beginning to peek up over the horizon through the trees in the north. There was thunder & lightning off in the distance, but the sky was so clear from our vantage point, so the threat of rain didn't seem possible. While sitting on the blanket, we realized we were hearing what we assumed to be acorns dropping from the tree into the bushes directly in front of us, & a number of times it sounded like there could have been an animal rustling around in there. This went on for what we now look back on to be over an hour & a half while we hung out on the blanket. Over the course of that time I began to get nervous & my jaw began to tense. After years of camping multiple time every summer, I'm not jumpy about animals, but the noises in the bushes continued for so long that it really started to put me on edge. My fiance was getting nervous too, both of us shining our flashlight into the bushes at every other noise that sounded suspicious. I moved candles to the edge of the bushes we're sitting 10 feet in front of, & added a couple citronella incense sticks for good measure, hoping to keep any animals away. After a little while, I went into the tent for pepper spray, which I then carried around with me looped to my wrist whenever I got up from the blanket. At some point, my fiance points out the fire has stopped burning, so I added more wood. Still feeling incredibly anxious, I walked around selecting the biggest pieces of gravel I could find from around the campfire, resulting in 2 large fistfuls of stones, which I piled on the blanket in front of us in case we needed to throw rocks at a coyote or something. By this point, my jaw is completely tight & I have been clenching my teeth. I have never in my life armed myself with weapons when I am camping. The last time I asked him to check his watch, he played the same game he always does, making me guess. I'm usually off by only 5-15 minutes. We had done this a few times earlier that day & after being close again the 3rd time, I commented on how I was like Father Time. This time I guessed it to be 1:15AM & was surprised that it was already 3:00AM. I make a comment about how nice it was that the noises in the bushes had finally stopped because it had really been making me anxious. The campground was incredibly quiet, & inside our fire cirle, I felt like we were completely alone, & told my fiance. Shortly after, he points out a bright star in the sky between two other stars above the horizon in the southwest, & asks me if the center star is moving. The center "star" kept wiggling around, and bouncing. The 3 "stars" appeared as a straight line parallel to the horizon, & when steady, the 3 points of light appeared to be equally spaced apart. We quickly decided it wasn't an airplane. None of the lights were flashing, & the dancing middle "star" made it appear as if the object were heading straight towards us at a fast pace. I guessed it was maybe a comet passing by Earth. We got up from the blanket & walked a little closer to the road for a while to watch the strange lights. After probably a half hour of him standing there watching the formation move closer to the horizon, the "stars" began to disappear from view behind the trees. We walked northwest down the street to the next campsite to see if there we could get a better view through the trees somewhere else. While we walked, I could see more stars above the tree lines to the northwest. Giving my eyes a double-check, I looked at the brightest star, noticed a dimmer star on either side of it, & realized the center star was wiggling all over the place exactly like the other formation was. This second formation was also dropping closer to the horizon. We started asking ourselves if we were seeing UFOs. Neither of us had experienced anything like this before. We went back to the blanket for our flashlights so we could walk to the darker area of the campground & get a better view of the formation. Following the direction the "stars" were located, we found ourselves at the gated off road leading to the Spring Creek Youth Group Campground. We decided to continue back around the loop & check back with the first formation. As we walked toward site 22, we saw a large (8'-0" in diameter) flashing bright blue orb of light. The orb stayed in roughly the same spot, but the brightest spot within the orb constantly jumping locations with each flash, every second. We walked closer & I jokingly asked if we were seeing aliens right now. Up until now, we had been walking in the dark & he turned his flashlight on, & maybe 20 feet in front of us was a car with a dimly flashing blue light alerting that the car had an alarm. He turned the flashlight off & we watched the interior of the car gently light up with the dim blue light softly illuminating the dashboard & windows. It was not the same big circular burst of light we were seeing before, but we quickly dismissed it because we were more focused on the lights in the sky. A while after seeing these first two strange trio of lights, the sky began to slowly fill with triangular formations of "stars." Upon focusing on the triangular formations, their disguise would disappear. The 3 "stars" hovered slowly in unison (like a bird floating in the air making mild adjustments to stay balanced), which allowed us to focus on the gently backlit shape of the black triangle ship the "stars" were camouflaging. We counted up to maybe 6 triangles moving high in the sky, & we were mesmerized.More & more triangle ships appeared in the sky, some big, some small. We stood on the street in front of site 15, & I pointed each formation out & counted up to 18, & then I stopped. Looking around at every bright "star" I found in the sky, I could then locate the 2 dimmer "stars" creating the equilateral & isosceles triangle shapes. The sky was full & everything was moving. At this point, we turned our attention back to our bright campsite. Backlit by the crescent moon, three large triangle ships hovered in the air arced around our campsite, as if curious about the giant circle of fire set up in our site. One of the three ships was directly over the tree & bushes in front of the blanket in the grass we had been sitting on earlier. It wasn't much higher than the top of the tree. The biggest of the 3 hovered in the sky maybe 200-300 feet above site #5.The rest of the ships seemed to radiate in a giant arc around those ships covering our entire campground's skies. Most of the ships appeared to hover in their position. High in the sky, some triangles were corner to corner with each other. A few others had red or blue lights on them, but all the other ships were camouflaged as white stars, always with the center star as the brightest of the 3.Over the course of the evening, we watched probably a dozen comets leave long streaks across the sky. We noticed single "stars" moving slowly across the length of the sky above us, & then stop at a triangle of "stars" high up in the sky. This happened maybe 3 or 4 times. What we first thought was a white comet flew through the sky leaving a long tail & then zigzagged up & down real fast like an EKG wave for a few seconds leaving an impression of the wiggle in the sky for a few more seconds. The ships lower to the ground were at the height of the tops of the trees and the bottoms of their triangles had more "stars" that appeared as a square. While focusing on those squares, I realized the size of the "star" formations on the bottom of the ships were getting bigger and bigger, which drew my attention to the overall larger shape of the triangle and the fact that the ship was dropping in elevation & heading straight towards us. The ship was as high as the top of the trees & descending, & this happened to us 3 different times before the sun rose.We ran to hide by the bathrooms but a man came out of the building & we were now nervous to talk to anyone. He walked to the edge of the sidewalk & stood on the curb & looked out toward the northwest. We tried to hide behind the men's bathrooms, but it was so dark back there that it made me more nervous. When we walked back to the front of the building, the man had left, so we looked for shadows & ran to the dark entrance of the women's bathroom so we could hide & have our backs to the wall. We stood there maybe 20 seconds & the light turns on. I checked later during the day & this light is on at all hours. In the beginning, all of the triangles were equilaterals. As the sky began to fill, we saw isosceles triangle ships, and one ship had a triangular body & a long extension off the center point, like a guitar neck. At one point, I looked to see all the stars in the sky moving. I pointed it out to my fiance, both of us focusing on the edge of the trees, to see all of the stars slowly sliding out of view behind the trees. An enormous ship was passing over us, while all the triangles of ships beneath it were still visible at all different elevations.We are in full survival mode & hiding in the shadows & whenever we felt safe enough, we headed back to the road between site #15 & #18 because it had the best tree cover & shadow for us to hide in, with the best view of the sky & our campsite, which I kept watching to see if anything was walking around in. A man woke up around 5:00, went into his car by site 15 & we saw him again a very short time later. We may have woken him up with our panicked whispering outside his campsite. It's getting later & later, & my fiance now is talking about how we should just go to bed, & how if they had wanted us, they could have taken us by now. I refused to go back to the campsite until the sun rose, & couldn't understand how he could want to go back. Closer to sunrise, I had him put my glasses on instead of his, & he was able to make out more shapes deeper in the sky, so he was not getting the full experience I was with clearer vision. As the sky finally started to get bright, the number of triangles diminished until the sky was empty. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep, & at this point my jaw is so tight & in pain, I have developed a mild tick, & I am taking short panicked breaths only through my mouth. To calm down, I suggest a walk.We went down the gated off road to Spring Creek Youth Group Campground that we found ourselves on when we were checking out the 2nd formation & decided to see what was down there. The ground in both this campground & Fox Canyon Youth Group Campground appear to have large symmetrical faint impressions in the dewy grass. The outer shape looked symmetrical, while the shapes within did not. There were some larger circles with smaller swirled circles contained within. The impressions are soft in the grass, but the dew helped make them stand out. Unsure, I stood on picnic tables, & kept changing my height & perspective, & I was beginning to feel crazy because of the last few hours we had just had. My fiance was exhausted & cranky, & wasn't seeing what I was seeing, & it was making me begin to feel silly for looking for crop circles like a fanatic. So I didn't ask to borrow his phone to take pictures. Nor did we ever even think to capture an image when we were seeing everything in the sky. Which just blows my mind. We slept for 2 hours & then packed up to drive home. On the drive, we found a MUFON post from 6/11/16, a month and a half ago, from someone reporting a light orb at White Pines Forest State Park, at the Cedar Ridge Campground, at our exact same site... When we were home looking at the photos of me in front of the fire from late Saturday night, I started looking for anything in the dark shadows of the trees behind me. Flipping through the shots like a movie, we started following this red glow that seemed to move differently from the fire or smoke. It appeared to follow me. Upon closer examination, the head, eyes, outline of the chest & arm appear faintly behind the smoke in one shot, appearing & disappearing in the surrounding photos. I had my fiance recover all the photos from this series that I had trashed, & we separated all the burts so we could see everything that happened. Following that red ight again starting with the first shot, my fiance realized the 2 red circles with the green between them was actually a face & eyes standing directly in front of him while he was taking the photos. In the photos, I turn from the fire & talk to my fiance & the red eye shapes turn toward my direction & disappear leaving a symmetrical green shape (the back of the head). The shape then appears to follow me around the fire as if it's studying me (that is the point when it is most visible), then it walks back up to my fiance, face to face, & behind it's head, a finger points at the sky for a few shots.We saw the first UFO around 3AM Sunday morning, but the photos were taken at 11:25PM Saturday night, which meant we weren't alone that whole time. And all the noises we heard in the bushes... they probably weren't just acorns. We thought the whole thing lasted 3-1/2 hours until we found the pictures & realized it was actually a 7 hour experience.

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