Flashing red light appeared a foot above my car then sped away at incredible speed.

While I was in college in 1976,I volunteered at a community radio station as a broadcast engineer and was driving to my shift early one evening. It was dark and I had gone approximately 1/2 mile from my house when I saw a flashing red light. Thinking that a local police officer was pulling me over,I checked my mirrors and was surprised to see nothing behind me. The flashing was pulsing on and off at at rate of about 1 Hz,1/2 second on and 1/2 second off.
When I looked around to see the light's point of origin,it was not visible. I saw that the hood of my white car was illuminated in this pulsing red light, and thought it unusual that the light source was directly above me as I was still driving down the road at 35 miles per hour. I needed to get a look at what ever was above me and pulled my head up in front of the steering wheel and looked up through the windshield. When I looked up,I saw a pulsing, translucent circular red light that measured approximately 10 inches in diameter and two inches thick. It seemed to attached to a large,flat surface that was so dark in color that it was barely discerable and did not reflect any of the light. It it difficult to tell how large the "craft" itself was. The light itself was very visible,and measureable since it was only a foot above the roof of my car! As soon as I looked at the light,it instantly accellerated down the road ahead of me at incredible speed and dissapeared over the tree line at the end of the road. I had experimented with lasers in my high school physics lab, and it was quite similar to flicking a laser pointer across the ceiling. The light flashed once and appeared as a streak over a distance of approximately 2 miles to the horizon, then dissapeared. There was no sound,or force felt as it departed from over the roof of my car.
The sighting was reported over the air immediatlely upon my arrival at the radio station, but I received no phone calls or feedback other than my fellow engineer who encouraged me to broadcast my sighting. I have never documented my experience until now,but have told many of my freinds. 8/19/2003
Date of incident is approximate.  PD