I've only ever seen one thing that could be remotely considered a UFO or a formation of said UFOs. That was the notorious "Tinley Park Lights" that is posted on here as well.
I do not believe those were real. I did not see any of the things you mentioned in the above article. No shape, size, no colored "glows", no shadows, no stars being blocked. The lights I saw were three red dots on the underside of low clouds on Halloween night. If you connected the three dots, you'd have a triangle, and an equilateral triangle at that. I was unable to see anything they were attached to, I was unable to see anything through the clouds, and the lights I saw did not move. So it's quite possible I witnessed a copy-cat of the original lights. But I truly believe, balls to bones, that what I saw was a hoax.
And I was in public when I saw them. I saw them with nearly a hundred others. They were the ones that pointed them out, 'cause how often to you walk around looking up a low-hanging clouds on Halloween night? If anyone's wondering where I was when I saw them, I was in Tinley Park on Olcott Ave & 159th Place. To anyone who's lived in Tinley for a fairly long time, there's a family that ran a haunted house in the first house past St. Julie's church. The guy who was in charge of the whole haunted house thing, Louis, is/was a very close friend of my brother, so we went every year.
Due to the fact that I couldn't see airplanes traveling through the clouds (I remember actively looking for them after the lights were pointed out) I highly doubt it was a flying craft.
Again, maybe what I saw was a copy-cat trying to get his rocks off. But I'll put money on what I saw that night was not extraterrestrial in origin.
This doesn't mean I don't believe. On the contrary, I'm a firm believer in aliens and extraterrestrials. The odds are simply too astronomical not to figure there's more planets out there capable of sustaining life, that have a history longer and more advanced than ours. Our galaxy, which is considered to be "average" size, hosts in the neighborhood of 200 billion stars. The galaxy is 13.2 billion years old, while planet Earth is only 4.5 billion years old. So there's nearly 9 billion years of advancement that a location could potentially have. You can see the evolution of life during the past 4.5b years, from single-celled amoebas to the variety of life and technology as we know it. Imagine what another 4.5 billion years would give us, and imagine was another 4.5 billion on top of that would do...
Now, out of our galaxy alone, 200 billion stars gives you pretty good odds that there's other planets orbiting stars that are temperate enough to support life. And that's just by our definition. Perhaps other life has evolved needing different requirements. Keep that 200 billion stars number in the back of your head.
Now, according to Wikipedia, there are 70 sextillion (10^22nd power) stars in the observable universe (within range of telescopes). If you factor in the 200 billion listed above, that's 2.25 x 10^28th power, or 22.5 octillion stars.
It's a number that's nearly impossible to wrap our finite minds around, but it basically boils down to this... It's foolish to think that out of all the stars out there, there's no way another planet has life, regardless if you believe in Evolution or Creationism. For Evolutionists, it's fairly self-explanatory. The odds are astronomically in favor of there being other life, due to the size of the test subjects. For Creationists, why would God, who created everything out there in the first place, just give us the benefit of being the only ones to observe it?
Now that I've made your heads explode with painfully large numbers, I give you a kitten doing pushups!