I had not planned on sharing this. But after seeing that others had mentioned "encounters" of an alien nature here, I will briefly relate the one event that still stands out as the single most extraordinary event I have yet personally witnessed. And while many of the other "paranormal" occurrences related here also happened late at night while most are arguably in or near a dream state, in my case I was most certainly not.
In early 1980 while living in a small mountain-jungle town in central Peru, I was up very late one night washing clothes on the flat roof of the two-story building in which I lived (my own fault for having procrastinated my laundry until I had nothing clean left for the next day!). As the village did not then have much in the way of electrical lighting, I was using two candles to see what I was doing, which was standard practice there.
As I washed my clothes in the big cement sink on the roof I suddenly became aware of a yellow light growing brighter and brighter behind me. Thinking it was one of my friends coming onto the roof with a candle, I turned... and instead saw a large, glowing, metallic saucer-shape craft overing only a 1/4-mile to the north of me and moving horizontally at only about 10-20 mph in a generally westwardly direction only about 40 feet above the ground and at about the same height that I was at atop the building. The UFO was approximately 100 feet in diameter, not that big in fact, and the golden glow it gave off was steady and emanated from the metallic craft itself and not from any lights on it. The metal of the ship appeared polished but not to a mirror finish, but instead had more of a burnished look to it. And... it did not make a sound! It was completely quiet!
As I watched, too astounded to utter a word, it continued to move in a straight line pretty much due west until it cleared the village and head at just above tree-top level at the same slow rate of speed, it's glow illuminating brightly everything around it. After it had proceeded over the jungle foliage and out of sight, the craft's golden glow could still be seen until eventually this too slowly faded away and the jungle was again evneloped in the clear black night as before. As slowly the night sounds of nocturnal insects, etc., returned, I suddenly realized that they, too, had noticed the presence of the craft and had gone as silent as had been its passage overhead.
The next day, I asked a few close Peruvian friends about UFOs in the area. Their reply was as immediate as it was matter-of-fact: "Oh sure... between 2 and 4 in the morning, they are as common around here as shooting stars!"
