My sister and I, one other high school girl, and our pastor were traveling home from a church youth meeting in Valley City, N.D., and headed toward Litchville, N.D. It was a clear, crisp night. It was either late fall or early spring because my mother, who was waiting for us by the church when we arrived in Litchville, had the heater on in her car and complained about having to run her heater while she waited for us. I also remember that there were no leaves on the trees. Based on my memory of the weather, I believe it was fall. It was a crisp, crystal clear night. I remember the blackness of the sky and the stars shining in the sky. My sister and I were seated in the back seat, she on the left, I on the right. The other girl was in the passenger seat in the front. The pastor was driving. We were near Hastings, N.D., on Highway 1 when I glanced out the left passenger window and saw a silver metallic disk rise noiselessly from behind a small grove of deciduous trees. I could see lights through the trees, and suddenly the lights began to rise. Then, there it was, a UFO hovering just above the trees, which were not very tall, as many North Dakota trees are. The disc hung there, not moving, silent. I exclaimed, "There's a UFO!" My sister and I observed it with great excitement. The other girl refused to look or to acknowledge in any way what was happening. She continued to stare straight ahead through the windshield. As we watched, the disc moved laterally, stopping over the car, no more than 30 feet above us, to our left and a little ahead of us. It was shiny and metallic, but more of a dull shine, not like silver. The bottom half looked like a shallow bowl. The top half looked like an inverted shallow bowl, but there was a higher dome in the middle. There were red and green flashing lights alternating around the edge of the rim, where the "bowls" met. My recollection is that there also were white flashing lights, but at this date, 40 years later, I cannot recall the exact configuration of these. There also were windows visible in the higher raised dome, and there was a glow of light from inside the UFO's interior. As we traveled along the highway, it kept perfect pace with us, and my sister and I crowded together in her window and craned our necks to watch it. I could see the clear silhouettes of figures backlit in some windows. In one window, it appeared like several figures were standing together, as though they were trying to get a good look at us. "They're watching us," I said. I also remember saying to my sister that the figures were shorter than us (I am 5'4") because the dome was low. The figures looked grayish, and their their heads looked big compared to their bodies and arms. The windows were tall enough that I could see their heads, their torsos, and part of their legs. I remember saying, "Look at how short they are!" At that time, I had read the book, "The Interrupted Journey," and I was very interested in UFOs. I could not believe that I was actually seeing one so close. I remember saying, "Maybe they want to make contact with us." This was a very exciting thought to me. I remember saying that I wanted to open the window and acknowledge them in some way. The pastor, who had not commented at all while my sister and I were watching the UFO and exclaiming over it, sharply ordered, "Don't you dare!" He said he was just going to keep going the same speed, that we should ignore it, and we were to do nothing to attract attention. Despite his warning, my sister and I continued to huddle at her window, staring up at the UFO and the figures in the windows. It followed us for several miles, with the pastor driving at a steady speed and staring straight ahead. As we neared the tiny town of Hastings, N.D., the UFO suddenly rose up and sped off at an angle to our right and accelerated at an astonishingly high rate of speed, disappearing to a small distant light in the sky in mere seconds. I remember exclaiming over how amazingly quickly it flew away. I was very excited about the experience and kept talking about how I couldn't believe we had just seen what we did. I pointedly asked the girl in the front, "_________, can you believe we saw that?!" She replied, without turning around, "I didn't see anything." My sister and I just looked at each other and rolled our eyes. When we arrived in Litchville and stopped at the church, my sister and I could hardly wait to get out of the car and talk to our mother, who was waiting for us. The pastor sharply ordered us not to get out until he talked to us. He ordered us not to speak one word of what had just happened. He specifically told us we were not to tell our parents about it. I argued with him a little, and said we should be able to tell the truth. He said that people would think he was crazy if anyone heard about this and that if we told anyone what we had seen and that he was with us, "I will deny it." Even though this happened 40 years ago, it is still vivid in my memory. At that time, in the late 1960s, few people talked about seeing UFOs. Of course, my sister and I immediately told our mother the whole story. She believed us and told us she had often wondered about lights she had seen in the sky near a farm about 1/4 mile away from ours. As for the other girl, I do not think I ever talked to her about it again, and I certainly did not talk to the pastor about it. I will never forget being that close to a UFO and seeing it so clearly. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.