I am 57 and have always been a doubter of UFO stories, though still liked to hear them. I live in the area of the Stephenville lights though did not witness them, only the jets afterwards. However, since that happened, I have had TWO sightings in my area.
I was driving from Comanche to Dublin after dark and had noticed what I thought was two planes that seemed odd in that they were flying parallel to each other. I continued to watch them. They were almost becoming imperceptable to the eye, when suddenly, in the same area of the sky, two huge lights just came on. In comparison to the planes, or whatever the first lights were, these were enormous! It was almost like two moons side by side. Both came on at the same time, and I had long enough to look closely, assure myself they were there and were not glare, and then at the same time.
During the next sighting, I was driving from Stephenville with my daughter, on US 377 going towards Dublin when we both saw it at the same time. Directly ahead in line with the highway we saw a line of lights, evenly spaced, but not very bright. . What struck us most was the size of it. There are very few planes flying in our rural area, but this would have been vastly larger than even a commercial plane & much, much lower. It looked to be directly over Dublin and the lights were on for several seconds, then went off, on once more for several seconds, then off again. We never saw them afterwards, and in what daylight there was left we were unable to see the body of any aircraft, only the huge string of lights, but from the first pulse to the second one it was apparent that whatever it is was making a slow, stationary turn towards the East. It would have had to be the size of several city blocks.
What you saw sounds a lot like what we saw and your reaction sounds the same. When I first saw it on Wednesday night my brain just couldn’t process what I was seeing. It just appeared as this blob of bright orange light. It was so strange that I just kept asking myself if I was really seeing what I was seeing. I don’t blame people for suggesting things like afterburners and military flares but if they had seen it those things wouldn’t even enter their minds. It is something that shouldn’t be there but it is and it is doing things it shouldn’t be able to do.
I know what you mean about the size. The last time I saw it it was just over the tops of the mountains but I could tell it was behind them because one corner was obscured by a jagged peak. I don’t know how far it was behind it but even if it was right up against it would have been huge. That mountain is 40 miles away as the crow flies. Yesterday in daylight I looked over there and tried to judge the size of what I had seen and I figured that a 747 placed on that peak would almost disappear. That thing had to have been at least 3 times as long.