Sylvia, TN - Disk

Observed a saucer-shaped, metallic object hovering nearby in the middle of the night.

This sighting happened when I was a young boy and my family were living on a 200 acre farm outside Sylvia, Tennessee. I was about 11. My younger brother was the second witness – he was a year younger than me. The memory of this is still very distinct in my mind. I have always had a good memory and have been of a relatively scientific bent (Ph.D. in Chemistry). I have never witnessed anything even remotely like this before or after this one event, but the one event stands out as very real (not dream-like).

In my family's two story farmhouse, my brother and I slept in one ground floor bedroom, and my parents slept in the next room over. Both bedrooms had a window looking out to the east, where there was our gravel driveway, an area of grass/weeds about 10 – 15 feet wide, then a barbed wire fence and (at the time of this sighting) a field of sorghum. It was late summer, and the sorghum was nearly ripe, with big seed heads. I'm sure we had the windows open, because we had no active cooling.

One night I woke up and, glancing out the window, saw a saucer-shaped object hovering silently and motionless over the sorghum field, not too far out past the fence. I estimate it was 20 – 30 feet across, a classic “flying saucer” shape with a dome in the upper middle. It was about 20 feet off the ground, very visible, very solid-looking. There was some considerable moonlight, and I remember the object reflecting a good bit of light, so it had a fairly smooth, polished surface. Being a chemist, later in my life I had the opportunity to observe a lot of different materials, and the closest to the object's appearance that I have seen is the metal platinum. The object definitely looked metallic.

Needless to say, I was amazed. I woke my younger brother, and we both watched the object for a minute or two. The object did nothing. It did not move, was rock-steady, and we heard no sounds. My brother and I were starting to get a little spooked, and we went to get my mother and father up. By the time we had gotten them awake and looking out the window, the object was gone. My parents thought we had been dreaming or the like, reassured us, and put us back to bed. They probably thought we had talked ourselves into seeing it, or some such. But both my brother and I, discussing the event many years later, both strongly agreed that we had seen a real, very solid-looking metallic object that night.