UFO Expert On Tinley Park's 2004 Sightings: They Were Not A Hoax

TINLEY PARK, IL — Fifteen years ago, hundreds of people in Tinley Park and surrounding communities reported seeing a triangle of lights hovering over the area. No one — not even The History Channel — could explain them. That same year, a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet captured footage of a Tic Tac-like craft flying nearby. The Navy this month acknowledged that the craft and a few others like it are UFOs — or unidentified aerial phenomena, as Navy officials prefer to say. Could Tinley's lights have been the same objects that the Navy pilots saw?

Last week, we promised to talk to Sam Maranto, director of the Illinois Mutual UFO Network to learn more about the phenomena. Here's what he said.

A little background. In August and October 2004, people living in the village and the surrounding communities of Orland Park, Frankfort, Oak Forest, Mokena and Evergreen Park reported en masse seeing in the sky three lights in a triangular pattern. Those sightings became so famous they were dubbed "Tinley Park Lights." Scores of Patch readers said they can still remember where they were when they saw those lights and shared their experiences in a Facebook post.

In November of that year, the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was conducting drills ahead of Persian Gulf deployment off the coast of San Diego, according to The History Channel. During those exercises, a pilot on the F/A-18 Super Hornet recorded a Tic Tac-like object roughly the size of a plane nearby. Known as the Nimitz incident, it's one of three the Navy confirmed it has determined is an unidentified aerial phenomenon.

"What most folks are forgetful of," Maranto said, "is the fact that the mass sighting in Tinley Park on Oct. 31, 2004 was just days before the Nimitz encounters."

Here are excepts of Patch's conversation with Maranto, edited for space.

Why the Navy's acknowledgement of the Nimitz incident is important:

To me, the most important thing is the human element and the fact that they finally acknowledged the phenomenon is genuine and needs to be taken out of the gutter — that it should be researched and analyzed scientifically. And stop ridiculing people. Ridicule and sarcasm are the best form of censorship and very abusive. I am happy the Navy has developed a policy [about investigating] this.

What they're saying is the phenomenon is genuine.

Possible explanations for Nimitz:

We are pretty far advanced when it comes to this technology. It is our technology out there? Is it our technology flying over Tinley Park? Who is "our?" Is it just the military industrial complex with something so exotic it set aside and set aside far and for what purpose? Is there something else going on that we're completely in the dark about? One can speculate forever and ever. What we try to do is deal with the evidence at hand and make rational deductions and hypotheses based on that. People don't want to consider we aren't alone. We're not alone — at least I don't think so. And now are having visitors from someplace else? Who knows? We can't discount that. But don't hang out hats up on all of this, either. You have to keep an open, objective mind and evaluate information as it comes forth and that is it.

What made the Tinley Lights incident important:

Generally, people who see something, at best you get less than 1 percent of the reporting. But here you have a mass sighting and many people reporting it. They were saying "hey —my neighbor saw it." Groups of people — there was a block party during one of them — saw it. They were pretty grounded and doing the right thing in getting another person to look, too, to get that person's perspective.

Those weren't the only sightings that year. But here in Tinley Park, we had hundreds of people seeing these [two] events. People said multiple illuminations, red lights, unusual illuminations first in a triangle and then moving around.

Were the Tinley Park incidents a hoax?

It was not a hoax. We have analyzed this stuff. The History Channel...and many other people analyzed it. If it was a hoax, it was a really good one. But we discounted it.

So could the Tinley and Nimitz incidents be the same phenomena?

I can't make that statement. Isn't it peculiar that something unusual is happening there at maximum two weeks later? To consider the possibility there may be some sort of correlation is pretty good thinking. It's a logical consideration to think there may have been something, but we have no evidence to support that whatsoever.

Final thoughts:

I think the tide has changed and talking about this is not ridiculous. It is now being taken seriously. I think time has come to consider other possibilities and other forms of technology and that this could only advance things. It scares the heck out of people because it's a threat to a paradigm, the way things are. Any time there is change or deviation to a paradigm, it is perceived as a threat. And that is even in science. Science is supposed to be tentative, not a dogma.

I have a lot of faith in humanity, but what I see recently and the way the world is crumbling, I think about what Ronald Reagan said about what would we do or how would we react if our world was confronted by an extraterrestrial presence? What would we do?

Some notes and reading:

• Navy Confirms UFOs: Could The Tinley Park Lights Be Real?
• UFO Hunters (featuring Tinley Park)
• Project Blue Book
• The CIA's role in studying UFOs
• Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program
• Ronald Reagan's quote:“Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize the common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”