Three of us had recently graduated from High School, the year was 1971 and we had a summer job together working at harvesting alfalfa hay during a 12 hour night shift. We worked 7 days a week, starting at 6 in the evening and ending 6 in the morning. Driving an open tractor (no cab, no windows) every night, we had complete vision of the night sky every night for 3 months in the summer. I had seen many things I could not explain, lots of green lights coming from the ground into the night sky like exploding electrical transformers, but they would come and go and not think much about them, sometimes we would see light rays like search lights, but again, unexplainable but no big deal, we also saw many, many meteorties. BUT this night was a real freak out deal. I was staning on top of a large piece of machinery (tall covered hay trailer) scooping off the hay that had blown onto the lid of this covered hay trailer, and as I was pitching the hay off the top onto the ground below and swinging the pitch fork up in the air, my eyes caught a bright large shimmering metallic object off to the north, maybe 25 degrees off the horizon from my viewpoint. It wasn't very high off the ground, maybe 1,000' I watched it momentarily then hollered at my 2 friends down on the ground. I was elevated on top of the trailer about 15' high. As I pointed at the object and hollered at them to "LOOK AT THAT", we all watched this cigar shaped shimmering object maybe only 1-2 miles away. Judging from the size of it, it was close enough to hear propulsion noise if it was a conventional manmade aircraft, but it made none. The sun was starting to light the sky from the east and the stars were growing dimmer and we could see the surface was shimmering like an aluminum jet airliner reflecting the early light of day, the object was so illuminated it seemed like it was 3 times as large as a jetliner fuselage with no wings or tail. It had blinking lights and darker areas that would seem like windows. The entire fuselage would change colors from greens to blues to silver. The spectacular thing was that it hovered for some time, but then when it started to move, it darted, then stopped, then changed direction in a completely different direction as if it was drawing the number "4" in the dark sky about as fast as Zorro would swipe his sword, then it sped off into the distance directly away from us at a speed so fast it merely vanished out of sight. We vowed nobody would believe us, and we weren't going to talk about it, but the next day the local newspaper was alive with headlines of stories of people seeing this exact same thing across the state across a distance of 200-300 miles. We know it was UFO, nothing else this large can move eradically across the sky, and speed away so fast. I have shared this story with all my believing friends. It burned a visual in my mind that will never be erased. Too unbelievable, but seeing is believing.