background context for the experience: i had driven to florida for the first time in april of 2018 to bring a veteran see his dad, and along the way i was intently focusing on asking for an observable event i could capture on my phone; i had recently come to accept that i had been encountering et craft my entire childhood and most of my adult life, and i was clearly focused on two things. one, that i wanted photographic or video evidence of what i knew to be true; two, that i would in no way utilize this information to attempt to show the world what had happened or what the truth is. this encounter happened in two parts, the moment i arrived early in the morning when i failed to realize what was going on, and the evening of the same day when i captured said evidence of things i find myself unable to explain via man-made objects. i arrived at our hotel, the best western in daytona beach, around 3am. i wanted to watch the sun rise over the atlantic for the first time, so i wandered down to the beach and enjoyed the warmth and the feeling of the water on my feet. at this point, i clearly hear a rumble that sounded like a dual-motor boat out on the water; i remember thinking to myself that it sounded like a boat with a pair of large race motors, and observed a white light about half the size of my pinkie nail traversing across the exact horizon of the ocean. at the time, i noted but failed to find it odd that there was no evidence of vertical movement or jerkiness to the way the light was moving across the water; i thought it was a large enough boat it wasn't being bounced up and down. however, it was traversing approximately 5 degrees of arc every few seconds, indicating it was moving extremely quickly. it stopped in place, with no evident slowdown, after traveling from about 45 degrees off to my left to around 5 degrees past me to my right, then reversed course about 15 degrees until it was directly in front of me. again, it stopped in place with no evident slow down, and again i failed to comprehend this was unusual for a boat that must be that big moving that fast. the rumble continued, and i glanced down to find my phone to take a video; at this point the rumble cut off and when i looked up, the light was gone. i thought nothing more of this experience, went to bed after watching the sunrise, and the experience continued the night of that same day. that evening, around 10pm, i decided to walk down the beach with a storm rolling past on the horizon. as i walked, i was struck by the odd shape of the lightning in the clouds. there were consistent flashes of lightning from behind only a single thunderhead, forming an illuminated sphere the shape and appearance of a full moon when they arced in the clouds. furthermore, that thunderhead was stationary and all the rest of the clouds were farther east of it, moving behind it, with no evidence of lightning among those clouds. locals on the beach dismissed it as ball lightning, but having been an avid storm watcher most of my childhood, i knew this was unusual behavior for the lighting and was definitely not ball lightning. again, i noticed but failed to comprehend there was a bright light between myself and the rear clouds; despite the cloud cover, i kept dismissing it as merely a star. in the photos i took while stationary and supported, the light is seen streaking around and is clearly reflected in the ocean mere hundreds of yards away, but again at the time i initially dismissed it as simple camera shake. i took video of the thunderhead just to be able to review it (and the process of taking the pictures took dozens of attempts to time it right with the lightning flashes), and initially, again, failed to realize anything was odd in the videos. i did notice immediately after taking the video the white light on the left hand side of the thunderhead had disappeared, and i attributed it to clouds obscuring the star. when i returned home and reviewed the video, i was shocked to realize the light on the left side couldn't be explained by a simple star; as well, in the video a triangular craft is clearly visible on the right hand side. these are the craft i've noticed both as a child and an adult, and i was blown away by how quickly they responded to me. i excitedly showed my son's, and my youngest one casually informed me he'd seen the same thing in 2016 when he was 8 years old. this startled me, and my son was in no way trying to impress or bond with me over the event; he was merely relaying the information about something he had seen. he proceeded to sit down and draw out a map of his school, as well as a triangular craft that had flown over it during his recess, to scale. he was clear, matter of fact, and descriptive with his explanation; he said there were lights and designs on the underside, like a christmas tree wrapped around pipes. googling other images, he insisted none of them were quite right, but showed different parts of pictures to explain how it all looked to him. the most important part, he kept insisting, was the hole in the middle of it. here he became extremely insistent that it wasn't a hole you could see, it was a hole you could feel, and you could feel it better with your eyes closed. as well, most of his friends couldn't perceive this hole; he ended the story with "dad, this hole was the most important part of the ship, and i don't know why." he said it had appeared to float over his school during recess, was longer but slightly narrower than the school, and then just disappeared without any evidence of movement.