[BattyMilk]

Since we're all giving our UFO encounters I'll chip in with mine.

About 25yrs ago as a teenager and utterly obsessed with the supernatural and the unexplained, my family were on a fly drive holiday on the west coast of the US.

One night in a roadside motel in the Nevada desert, I was woken up by a strange, loud, rythmic, droning sound outside. Absolutely convinced that it was a UFO landing and terrified that if I moved or made a noise I'd be abducted, I laid still, sweating with my heart racing for hours until the sun came up.

Turned out to be a dodgy air conditioning unit.

[alan_wade]

Similar story here. As a kid I was laying in bed staring at a bright disk floating in the sky at night. Totally sure it was a UFO. Turned out to be a reflection of a street light in the window.

[soylentcola]

Using this thread to add my own:

I was around 14 and also obsessed with aliens and the supernatural. I was living out in the boonies on a road that had just started to be developed (one long road with a smaller road splitting off down to a cul-de-sac with a few houses a mile or so off the main road).

I was walking the dog one evening, headed down the main road and turned off to walk down the side road to the cul-de-sac. It was dark and cold but as I turned down the side road, I could see a bright rectangular light floating above the ground down where the side road ended a mile away.

I was pretty freaked out and stood there squinting at it for a while, psyching myself up to go check it out. In the end, I decided that I would never forgive myself if I didn't go witness what was clearly an alien craft hovering over the road on my dark little street.

So, I walked down toward the end of the side road (with the dog to protect me of course) until about halfway down, I got one of those perspective shifts that made me laugh. In the dark (no street lights, only a few houses set a good way back from the road) I could only see the glowing light but as I got closer, I could clearly see that this was a small bus with the light from inside spilling out through the windshield.

It turns out, the local library had started a "Bookmobile" route out to our little country neighborhood so locals could check out books without driving into the city. The bus was so lit up inside and the surrounding area was so dark that from a mile away, all I could see was the bright glowing rectangle of the windshield.

Needless to say I stopped inside the bus and checked out a book or two. Probably some ridiculous fluff from Whitley Strieber or Stephen King ;)