It looked like a cloud but had absolutely nothing to do with the background.
He was 18 at the time, sitting on the porch at his girlfriend's family home in Stoenești, a village in Romania. It was late summer, about 11 at night, and it had been raining, so the sky was one solid sheet of dark cloud. He was facing the house and she was facing him, with her back to it.
Mid-conversation her eyes went wide and she started pointing at the sky behind him. He turned around and froze. Hanging there was an object shaped exactly like the classic flying saucer: two plates stacked rim to rim. At a glance it looked a bit like a cloud, but it had nothing to do with the clouds behind it. The shape was too perfect, and it just sat there.
It didn't go anywhere. He thinks it stayed put for well over 30 minutes. His girlfriend ran inside and woke her dad, who came out onto the porch, looked up and said right away that it looked like a flying saucer. There was enough time for the young man to phone his own father and describe what he was looking at. Then a second one showed up, this time directly above them. Neither made a sound. They just hovered.
After a while both of them simply vanished.
He lived about a ten-minute walk away, and he was scared the whole way home, his head full of every abduction story he had ever heard. On the way he ran into two friends coming back from the bar and blurted out what had just happened. They laughed and told him to quit lying. That hit him hard. If friends who knew he wasn't a liar wouldn't believe him, who would? He ran the rest of the way and told his cousin and his sister. To this day his sister is the only one who believed him from the start. His girlfriend's father, the other adult who saw it, passed away a few years later.
He mentions that there's a military airfield near the village where American troops are stationed, and that people there do see lights in the sky now and then. He has seen those too: a light crossing the sky, getting brighter, then gone. Those could be anything, he says. What he saw from the porch that night was something else, and he has never heard of anyone else in the village seeing it.
For years he tried not to think about it, since most people assumed he was crazy. Now 38, he finally made a simple animation to show what the two discs looked like, hoping someone, somewhere, has seen the same thing.