The year & month is estimated above, but the exact date will coincide with sightings of lights all over the midwest.Radio reports the next day were calling the unknown lights in the sky everything from snow geese to northern lights. It should be easy to nail down this date from old records somwhere. The lights in the sky were reported from South Dakota to Kansas, and from Colorado to Iowa. It seemed to me the next day from the radio reports that we were in the center of things, and that what ever direction you went from our point of view most descriptions varied, but none were what we had seen or experienced.My story: I and a friend had been riding our motorcycles that evening and had returned to my home, a double wide along the Platte River between Columbus and Duncan Ne., shortly before midnight.I had been a long day ang we went inside for a short nightcap before my friend was going to head back home to Columbus.We had just had a different odd experience minutes before we reached my home.as we turned off hiway 30 onto the blacktop road that led to my place the road suddenly was alive literally thousands of glittering jhewl like things, actually covering the road. It was not long before we realized what we were onto. thousands upon thousands of small toads on the road. I was all we could do to keep from crashing as we mashed though them. We had to ride slowly with our legs extended to stay upright. Not to mention the sound and the splattering all over our bikes and ourselves. Nausiating to say the very least.I all my years living there, and all the other odd things I have seen and experienced in that area, I had never ever seen that many toads, & green frogs, at one time on the road like that. There could not have been a square foot of open space anywhere on that whole two mile run! Back to the main story: It was after we hosed off the bikes and ourselves that we went into the house for a nightcap. I had borrowed a clean pair of pants to my friend who was prolonging his trek home , in the hopes the mass of creatures would be dissipated by the time he left.We were seated in my dining area by the east window, which was open as were the rest of the windows in the house on that warm midsummer night. It had started to cool slightly but not to a chill as of yet.I had poured a Crown Royal on the rocks for each of us and had no more than taken the first sip,(This I want to make perfectly clear, we had not even had one drink when this happened!),when all went suddenly completly quiet. Till then all the usual night noises were going on as usual. Cows baying in the distance, frogs and crickets, chirping down in the slew. Night hawks, owls ,neibors dogs barking ect... .It was so sudden and so completely quiet that we locked eyes and and froze for a second or two. When we looked to the window there was a dull red light on the widow sill, and a dull red glow everywhere outside. I leaned over to the window and tryed to look up to see what was causing this but could not see anything.We got up and went to the bay windows to the south, facing the meadow betwen us and the the tree line along the river bank, about a half mile away. There in the sky, almost directly above us was a ring. It looked like a smoke ring actually. A fat smoke ring , bright white with a red fringe on the edges.We grabbed a matched pair of my 22 caliber rifles and headed out the door down the steps , across the yard , through the slew and about 75 to 100 yards out into the meadow. The hat had not yet been cut and we were knee to hip deep in grass.The ring was slowly getting larger and thinner directly above our heads. We were trying to figure out what this might possibly be, anthing from a exploded rocket,bomb, metorite,we just did not have a clue.We watched the ring slowly expand for several minutes. The brightness never dimmed as it got bigger and thinner. As it did this we became aware that although we could see the stars on the outside of the rings all round we could not see any in the black center area of the ring. It was a t this point that we were beginning to get a real creepy feeling about the whole thing.The moon was in plain sight to our southwest, at about a 45 deg. angle to the horizon. Half the horizon away from the ring above our heads.This whole time not a sound could be heard and it seemed that our words were falling on dead air as well, as if we could not have heard each other had we been only a few more yards apart. Hard to explain! About the time that the ring covered 1/4 or slightly less of the sky area red spears of light started arcing down from the rings outer edge. When these were mabey 1/4 of the way to the ground then white ones did the same spaced evenly between the red. At first we thought that the beams were very high and following the arc of the horizon but when the first ones came down far enough to the ground we could see that the beams were between us and the home place,(My fathers farm about 3/4 mile north of us.), and on the south side seemed to be within the 1/3 mile of tree line along the north river bank.We were in side what I have can only call a cereal bowl effect. Like beeing in a bird cage.We could see stars between the beams. then a sweet sickening smell was in the air.it was hard to breeth withthis putred sweet smell. First a pricking static like electricity in the air, then nothing.We both began regaining our senses some time later several tens of yards apart. wet laying in the wet grass,( sitting up actually.) disorientated, at least 2hrs had passed since we first walked outside. All was gone but a hint of the sickening sweet smell.We made our way back into the house and sat back down on at the table. The ice in our glasses had long melted. The clock read 2:20-somthing. After about an hour my friend left for home.The next morning on the way to work was the first I heard the radio talk of all the sightings for 500 miles around us in each direction. There were so many different versions, and experts versions all I could do was shake my head. My friend and I worked together, and discussed this only with a shrt list of friends after that.NOTE: I want absolutly no publicity over this!!! I am relaying this to you hoping mabey that you may have some other info relating to this for me, or some other similar event somwhere else. This is the only reason for any contact I will accept.The only contact with me is though my e-mail, thank you.p.s. I and my father had a sighting when I was about 10 yrs old at the farm.Since I have had three others, each different, one was simply spotting a oval shped object passing from a cloud though open blue sky and into or behind another cloud, only this this was reflecting the color of the sky behind it. It did not change from the white color to match the blue sky right away and that is how I caught sight of it.this was about two years ago heading east on hiway 33 west of Crete ne.The other was summer 2000,.I had taken my 12 year old daughter out with me to star gaze on the hill behind the lake community where we live. I have beendoing this periodically for years, yet had never seen anything. This was the first time I had let her stay up this late to go with me.We had been there for about 15-20 minutes, and she was already whining about going back when we saw two objects comming our direction from the northwest.There is a gravel road about 1/3 mile west of us. You can here the gravel crunching under a cars tires from where we were.The objects each had a bank of 5 lights in front of them. One was following the other just behind and to the west. They crossed the road west of us and the lights lit up the road like search lights. I thought they were helicopters untill they got that close and made no sound at all. All we could see was the lights because they were so bright. They passed us less than 1/4 mile away to the north and dipped down out of sight in the valley northof us. A few minutes later they popped up several miles north headed west this tim and then dipped down out of sight again. Even looking with binoculars at them as they were headed away we could not make out any shape of a craft. Just after they dipped out of sight the first time a car passed on the gravel road with the radio blairing and we could hear that well.This happened about 5 miles north of Crete ne. at about 10:30 pm on a wednsday night.That is all I have to report. Pardon any tyo's I am doing this fast as I am @ work.