UFO sightings

OK, so I don't usually tell people about this, because it sounds weird, but I've seen a UFO. I'm not saying it was alien or anything; but it was flying, it was an object and I have no idea what it was. Before you think I'm making a lame joke about an unfamiliar species of bird, or some random thing someone threw at me, check this out:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/16
AR2008011604328.html

It seems UFOs like to frequent agricultural communities where there is a likelihood people will say, ""It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts." These people have described pretty much to a T exactly what my friend, Brenda, and I, and probably many other people, saw on our way home from an Iowa State University basketball game one night in Ames, Iowa.

But if you don't mind redundancy, here's our experience:

Brenda and I were driving across campus to our apartment after an ISU basketball game a few years ago (2002?). ISU is a Division I school (26,000 students), so the games are pretty big-time. So we were one car in a long line of cars leaving the stadium. We were about a half-mile from our apartment in this stop-and-go line of cars, when ahead of us and slightly to the right we noticed a line of lights shining down from the sky, all heading in one direction. The lights were funnel-shaped, and they looked like helicopter searchlights. We were like, "Whoa, what's going on?" so we turned the radio down and rolled the windows down, expecting to hear helicopters since they were so close to us. But we couldn't hear anything outside of the normal noise of cars. Which was really odd. So they didn't seem like helicopters after all. Then we noticed the light source was slowly moving forward but the lights were pointing down and slightly behind (you would expect helicopter searchlights to generally point forward). Also, although the light source was close to the ground and the lights were bright, the lights didn't descend all the way to the ground, so it didn't really look like searchlights after all. Then we realized that ALL of the searchlights were heading in the same direction TOGETHER, like a line of helicopters with lights pointing down and in the opposite direction from where they were moving. That's when we realized that it wasn't a row of helicopters, but lights along the edge of one HUGE saucer-shaped (I know) flying/hovering thing. Calculating that the light source was over our neighboring apt. complex and about a half-mile from us, that would make this object about a half-mile or more in diameter. We were really blown away, and I remember consciously looking at the clock to make sure it wasn't going to be an hour later the next time I looked at it, like we were abducted or something, because this was clearly a textbook UFO sighting. The lights, part of one big UFO, hovered for a few seconds and then, all together, they darted up and to the right and then up and to the left SO FAST it was like the whole thing was pitched to one of these steroid-pumping baseball players and hit out of the park; you could see it zoom off into the distance and it was GONE.

I looked at the clock, and no unaccounted time had elapsed. In fact, the whole thing only lasted about a minute. It was so crazy. Brenda and I were groaning that "Oh my gosh, we seriously just saw a UFO, how lame!" because although it might sound kind of cool, what do you do with that? I mean, what's the point of seeing a UFO? Over the next few days we told our parents and friends and looked in the news and talked to our Air Force ROTC friend, but there was nothing in the area that night that would have explained what we, and probably anyone else in the line of cars leaving the game, saw.

The article I linked above is funny because I think there must just be a standard coping pattern that people go through, trying to explain a UFO sighting like this. For me it comes down to this: I don't think it was Martians or weird aliens, but I do know it was something we can't identify, it was flying and it was one object. I think there are probably all kinds of things the military doesn't tell us about, and I am satisfied thinking it was some crazy concept thing they are working on and testing. For what, who knows, and I don't care. I don't have explanations, I just know what I saw.