The strange aerial object was spotted by a group of friends from the balcony of a house on Langdon Street, Alton, Illinois.
Local resident Ian Whitmore said he and his friends saw the object after midnight on Tuesday. The UFO appeared in the southeastern part of the sky.
An eyewitness reported that out of the corner of his eye he noticed the light much earlier, but ignored it for about half an hour, before realizing that it did not look like an airplane, star or other natural phenomenon.
Whitmore and his friends watched the UFO flare red and blue very intensely for about 20 minutes. It looked like a police car in the sky. At times, the object seemed shapeless, and then took the shape of a circle.
Witnesses of the incident, being skeptics, began to investigate astronomical and meteorological phenomena in order to find the source of light. After examining several sources that provided data from the Hubble / NASA Telescope, they concluded that the object was not currently identified as a planet or a star.
The duration of the object's stationary hover also dispelled Whitmore's friend's theory that the object was a drone. Most commercial drones need to recharge their batteries to fly for such a long time.
After all these attempts to deal with what they saw, the young people turned to the UFO Research Organization (MUFON) in Illinois.
As it became known, not only Whitmore and his friends noticed the strange lights that night. UFO researchers received three more similar messages from different parts of Illinois.
Promotional video:
An appeal to NASA with a request for possible reasons for this phenomenon did not receive a response.