It was the evening of June 15, 1954, a calm and pleasant night in Orchard Park, NY. After dinner, my mother asked me, then just a 14-year-old boy, to hoe her flower garden. Our garden sat roughly 120 feet back from the house, on a modest lot. As I turned around from facing north, my eyes caught something extraordinary — a small, disk-shaped object resting silently just beyond our rear property line.
The disk was about 15 inches in diameter and hovered approximately eight feet above the ground. It was about 120 feet from where I stood, and its dull gray color made it blend subtly with the twilight sky. But it was its stillness, its utter silence, that gripped me. No markings, no lights, no sound — just a mysterious gray disk calmly suspended in the evening air.
For nearly five minutes, I stood in awe, watching this strange craft slowly recede into the distance. It didn’t dart or fly erratically; rather, it drifted gently away until it became too small to see. In total, the encounter lasted about ten minutes, etching itself vividly in my memory.
That evening, under a clear sky and in peaceful surroundings, a quiet enigma hovered in Orchard Park — a glimpse into the unexplained that has stayed with me all my life.