The object seen was saucer shaped with a dome, emitting dotted or tracer type lights from the top and bottom.The encounter took place as we were traveling eastbound on Interstate 43 between Beloit and Milwaukee, Wisconsin on February 8, 2003 At approximately 5:20 to 5:30 a.m., I noticed a round shaped light in the southern sky that seemed unusual, as it did not resemble a star. Just east of Beloit, the light became larger and seemed to be moving from the distant south toward us. The light gradually became larger and started paralleling us as we traveled eastbound. As the light approached, I saw a saucer shaped object with what appeared to be "light showers" coming from the object. I then pointed out the object to my husband (who was driving)and my daughter and we all observed the same scene. The object was still very distant, but had gradually become more visible. As we continued to travel, the object continued to parallel us, while gradually becoming larger in size. As it became larger, we could see more and more light showers coming from the top and bottom. The light showers coming from the top of the object were white light colored and projected from the top in a spraying pattern similar to dotted lines or machine gun tracers. However, the lights were abbreviated in length and did not project a great distance. From the bottom of the object, similar lights projected at 45 to 75 degree angles, but were red, green, and purple or "tracer" lights. As we watched the object, we could gradually begin to see a shape. It looked like an oblong saucer shape with a lighted dome above it. For a while it traveled horizontally in the same direction we were traveling and we could see what appeared to be flashing light patterns criss-crossing the body of the object similar to static electricity experiments. The lights were flashing in diagonals criss-crossing from both directions. The object appeared to stop and hover (paralleling us, but still far south of us) and drop behind our position as we continued traveling eastbound. However, on several occasions, the object appeared to suddenly move eastbound to a! positio n ahead of our direction, and then hover for awhile. On a couple of occasions, the object seemed to turn. On one of these occasions, it appeared to look like a full saucer-shape, and we saw it out-lined completely as red and green lights lit up across the saucer-shape, blinking on and off as they came across the saucer. We watched this phenonenon for over a hour. As we came into Milwaukee, the object was still paralleling us. We saw a plane circling from the northeast, taking off from the airport and believe that someone from that plane surely had to see this object also. At this time, it became dawn, approximately 6:30a.m., and the object suddenly began to climb rapidly southeastward at a 70 degree angle until it was once again just a small dot in the sky and disappeared into a bank of dark clouds. My husband, daughter, and I all watched the object and concluded it was definitely neither a plane nor a helicopter.