Sorry for not responding earlier to your questions about Annie's and my sighting over Lake Michigan; I haven't been back to this page since I posted it. It was around 10 pm when we passed over Chicago and just a short time before we landed in Milwaukee; the cabin was generally dark, with only a few reading lights on where people were reading, as I was to Annie, so I don't know whether anyone else saw this object. Annie was looking out the passenger window over the right-hand wing of the plane and was stunned by the brightness of the object. She jostled my arm and pointed out the window to call my attention to it, and one or two seconds later I was looking out the window and saw it seeming to stand still in the air as we passed it by. Surely the pilots and crew noticed it and wondered if anyone else had, silently watching all the passengers' faces as we filed out of the plane.
The light was extremely bright, brilliantly clear or white, and, as I said, appeared to me to be encased behind a very thick (looked 2 to 3 inches thick) glass enclosure of some kind, squarish but rounded at the edges, like the shape of older tv screens but more rectangular. Nothing was visible beyond the edges of this shape or outlet. The light and its casing almost filled the entire cabin window we sat next to and appeared to be just off the tip of the wing, so part of the plane was visible. Anyone sitting up with their eyes open on that side the plane could not have failed to see it, but I remember no verbal exclamations. When we landed ten minutes later, however, no one spoke; the silence was thick as the passengers gathered their belongings and formed a line in the aisle to exit at the front left of the plane. The pilots and a third man (maybe the navigator) wearing the same kind of uniform, and several of the stewards and stewardesses stood together silently watching the faces of all of us as we passed by them to the exit door. No one said anything; no ordinary chit-chat with them as we all left the plane, and they didn't speak with any of us either.
At the time I had lamely thought that we might have passed very close to a lighthouse out in Lake Michigan off-shore of Racine or Kenosha. I asked friends who met us at the airport if any of them had ever seen a lighthouse while flying north of Chicago to Milwaukee. No one had. It was five years later that I described this event to the father of one of my daughter's school friends, when he was talking about ufos, and he said, "oh, you saw one." He had had sightings as well while working for NASA.
I didn't begin to do any research into the ufo subject until June of 1997 when USA Today carried a two-page spread of photos and text concerning the Phoenix Lights events, which had been widely observed there three months earlier. Annie was eleven years old then and I became riveted by those images and that information, wondering what it might mean in and for her future, and then I spent ten years reading everything I could find concerning the modern ufo wave that began in the early 1940s and continues to this day. I was frightened at first, but the more I learned of the history of it in the 2oth century, and the history of similar phenomena going back centuries and even represented in millenia-old cave art as well as in Medieval and Renaissance paintings, the more I became convinced that we have nothing to fear from advanced intelligences approaching and studying earth from elsewhere.
Hope that responds to your questions. I still remember this sighting in detail, as if it happened last night. Also had two other sightings from the ground in subsequent years.