4/3/2009 Update - NJ Hoaxers?

Two men have come forward and are claiming responsibility for these lights. Their story? Road flares attached to helium balloons. Since they recorded themselves on Youtube, they have now been identified and charged with disorderly conduct.

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Fox News Footage

"We didn't really know what they were. They were bright, red lights," Whippany resident Paul Hurley, a pilot who works at nearby Morristown Airport, told MyFoxNY TV. "They were just kind of floating along."

What Hurley, his family and dozens of others in Morris County saw were five flickering red lights, one as a pair and the other as a trio, moving across the sky.

"I've been in the aviation industry about 20 years, so I knew they weren't airplanes," added Hurley, who captured video footage of the strange lights.

"It was unsettling for sure," his wife Cindy Hurley told WCBS-TV. "It was something you've never seen before, and a very strange pattern."

The authorities, however, have a pretty good idea of what the UFOs might have been.

"We are reasonably certain, from what we were able to observe," Morristown Police Lt. James Cullen told the Bergen Record, "that they were red flares attached to a balloon."

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Sighting Footage

These are the lights I saw in New Jersey on Monday January 5, 2009. It was around 8:30 near Morristown. My friend and I initially thought it was an airplane, but after a few minutes we could clearly see it wasn't an airplane or anything we can explain. The entire formation was rising and dipping as well as making sharp turns which would rule out any floating object. It would hover for a few minutes then suddenly change direction. It did not drift with the wind. It was very high up and eventually took off into the distance. Did anyone else see this??????????? I also took some still shots.

Sighting Footage 2

"Driving home near interstate 287 northbound. pulled over to watch the lights. lights lasted about 15-20 minutes then shot off into distance. short video taken with camera. Both myself and the passenger experienced awe as we watch. Neither of us have seen anything remotely close to this before. The lights must have been visible for miles. Lights changed in pattern and shape throughout the 20 minutes or so."

Sighting Footage 3

"As an amateur astronomer of nearly 20 years experience, this is the second time I have seen something in the sky that is difficult to explain. I was on my apartment stoop smoking a cigarette when my neighbor, who was just coming home after parking his car in our complexs lot, called my attention to something around the corner of the building. I moved to share his line of sight and immediately saw an equilateral triangle composed of six red lights. The lights shone at approximately -2.5 magnitude and covered an area of roughly 9 square degrees in the sky. Three lights marked each of the triangles corners, and three others were arranged outside around them, forming a larger triangle, equal in proportion and orientation to the inner one. As I watched, the individual points were in motion with respect to each other, but the group appeared to hang motionless in the southwest sky. At this point, the approximate alt-az of the lights was 160?(SSE) by 35? elevation.

I ran inside and retrieved my 6x30 image stabilized binoculars to get a better look. The formation had shifted to an irregular lambda shape of five or six lights when I came back outside. Through the binoculars, the lights appeared as tiny points against a backdrop of clouds illuminated by nearby Morristown. They were clearly below the cloud deck compared to airplanes elsewhere in the sky at the time, and appeared to be separate objects in no way connected by a larger structure. They moved steadily in ascending, lateral, and descending directions in a manner that seemed to display deliberate coordination, but there was no noticeable sound of aircraft.

I returned inside again and readied my digital camera after waking my fianc?. By the time I started collecting video, the visible lights had been reduced to three or four and had moved to approximately 130?(SE) by 20? elevation and the formation covered less than the area of the full moon. By this time, eight minutes had passed from when I originally observed the lights. My fianc? and I watched them, with two of my neighbors, as they hung low in the southeast sky, flickering in a tiny triangle. They shifted into a straight line before the individual lights began to rapidly descend beyond tree line one by one. One or two could still be seen hovering near the horizon in the distance before they vanished, leaving only a solitary beacon remaining higher up until it abruptly faded.

If the lights had not ascended during this event, I would have been fairly certain they were some kind of aviation flares, but I cannot confirm, as I am not familiar with that sort of thing."

Sighting Footage 4

Close Encounters Of The Jersey Kind? - Cops, Residents Puzzled By Bizarre Lights Over Morris Co.; Flares? Balloons? Pilot Tells CBS 2 HD He's Baffled

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