The Carteret Lights

The lights came shortly after midnight going into Sunday morning. There were fifteen or sixteen of them by the accounts given, golden or orange, moving without sound over Carteret and the Arthur Kill. They held a V and then other formations. Traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike slowed and stopped as drivers got out to look. Seven Carteret police officers were on duty and reported watching it. The lights did not streak away at the end. They faded out one by one.

What is on the record

The archive resolves eleven named claimants. They include Patricia Ercolino, Dave Stisch, Mike Misko, Daniel Tarrant, John Pasyski, Nick Morandi, Joe Malvasia, Frank Tino and members of the Bagley family. The account itself describes hundreds of people seeing it. That larger figure is the source's claim and not the archive's count. All eleven reach the archive through a single reporting channel and one video, so the breadth here is in the witness pool rather than in the sourcing.

Amateur video was taken on the night. The archive does not hold it as authenticated footage, so it counts as a claim about a recording rather than as sensor evidence.

An ordinary explanation is live and belongs in the entry. Airports, military bases and the weather service are all reported to have had nothing to account for it. NASA later suggested airborne flares. Flares dropped in a line would fade out one at a time, which fits the ending the witnesses describe. The archive holds no paperwork from any of those bodies, so neither the denials nor the flare suggestion can be checked against a document here.

Why it sits where it does

Carteret grades L3, multiple independent claimants describing one connected event. It is a strong example of that tier on witness count alone. Police, motorists and residents unconnected to each other reported the same formation over the same stretch of night. Without documents or authenticated video it does not climb higher. What was over the Arthur Kill is not resolved here.