Edited 2/24/2016: Almost ten years later, I'm popping in to say that I later found out that these were Chinese lanterns. I had absolutely no knowledge of them until years later, so this was a complete mystery to me for a while. We see them regularly around here now and they're so beautiful. We haven't lit any ourselves yet, but we definitely plan to. I fully admit that I wanted this to be some type of UFO (not that I wanted some hopefully friendly alien spacecraft to burn up, though!). 😊
I wish "Fire in the Sky" was the title of a brand new poem I was posting for you, but no, I really mean fire in the sky. Literally. My girlfriend and I were leaving the house tonight around 9:30 PM to go to pick up some hair conditioner at CVS and exchange a DVD at Blockbuster. Exciting night. Ha ha. :) But anyway... I pulled out of the garage and into the street, and instinctively I looked up at the sky because I'm always looking at the moon at night.
My eyes fixed on what I thought was the moon, but then I realized it was on fire. I have no idea how far away this object was, but it looked like it was roughly a quarter of the size that a full moon would have been. It was big enough for me to see that it was clearly on fire. It was not a light on an aircraft--it was a fire. No doubt about it. My girlfriend saw it too. We parked the car so we could keep watching it, and I picked up my cell phone to dial up my mom, who was at my aunt's house in the next city over--I figured she could see it too.
As I was telling her about it, it seemed to burn out. The flames kept getting smaller, and after a couple of minutes it looked like nothing but an orange colored star. Then it started to descend. I'd say it started to fall, but it was slow. It looked deliberate. As it descended it got dimmer and dimmer until I thought it disappeared. A moment later the sky lit up with a flash near the horizon. It looked like it may have crashed and exploded.
It's almost 4 hours later now and I don't see anything on the local news sites about this. My girlfriend and I both saw this clearly! I'm not the kind of person to make up crazy stories about some UFO. When I say UFO I literally mean "unidentified flying object." I'm not saying it's an alien spacecraft or anything wild like that--all I'm saying is that there was an object burning in the sky--burning on fire--and it stayed there, hovered, while it was on fire. I don't know what can do that. I have no idea what this thing was. I just wanted to write about it here in case someone else in southeast Michigan saw this too. Please comment or email me if you did--I'd love to know that I'm not crazy!