A spooky story - your assessment, please

[SandyCaesar]

Well, there's the technical definition of a UFO: unidentified flying object. Any blip on an AWACS screen that hasn't been ID'd yet is technically a UFO. As we haven't figured these out yet, they're UFOs.

BtW, I noticed that on the second photo, the red dots are blurred--you attributed this to camera movement. However, interestingly enough, the blue dot is stationary, where in the first shot it was moving, too.

You said 2200 local time? The sky seems surprisingly bright for that--I assume the photos aren't retouched, since the overcast sky here (1600 local) looks exactly that color.

Random shot in the dark: maybe there are less light sources than what you saw, and a percentage of the lights are reflections/refractions or other optical phenomena. If so, it makes the hypothesis that these are afterburning aircraft very very far away at extreme altitude a little more plausible. The distance and perhaps atmospheric conditions might've mitigated the noise factor to the point that no one in the area would ID it as engine noise.