a very brillant blue-white object coming towards us lowering above us and hovering over us a few minutes before shooting straight up

A few days after we returned from attending my Grandmother's funeral in North Carolina, my husband and I decided to walk down the dirt road leading to my parents home near the Allegheny River.
The road cut through nearly thirteen acres of corn and vegetables owned by an elderly couple who raised produced for sale. About half way down the road was a little shanty they called their "gardenhouse" where they cleaned and prepared their produce for market.
As we approached the shanty, we met the elderly woman coming up the road, heading for her home on the edge of town. We stopped to talk, she wanted to express her sympathies ad to ask about the funeral.
My husband and I were facing north, the woman facing us, as we talked. We noticed a small bright light coming toward us out of the north. It was moving very slowly, but coming down, growing larger and brighter as it decended. The old woman saw the look on our faces, so she turned and looked up. By this time it was very large and a very brilliant blue-white. The old woman fell to her knees, muttering something in her native tongue, Italian, and "crossing" herself. We were paralyzed with fear! Suddenly, after hovering for a few minutes, motionless, it began to go around in wide circles, then shot straight up into the sky and disappeared.
The woman ran up the road to her home. My husband and I ran to my parents' home, where my husband called the Observatory in Pittsburgh to ask what this "thing" was. They could not give an explanation, but that it "could not have been a plane or weather balloon, nor any invention existing at that time that could have done what this object did."
A few weeks later, reports started coming in on radio news about people in the west seeing strange things in the sky. Some were calling them "flying saucers" and "UFO's," and some were wondering if some other country had invented some kind of new scientific weapon.
We never completely got over our fright and have watched the sky ever since. My husband had been in the Navy in the war. We have see many natural things, such as meteorites, northern lights and man- made objects, but never have seen anything to compare to what we saw that evening.
Note: The week before we saw the strange object, we were on our way to North Carolina to attend my Grandmother's funeral, traveling Route 11 through the Shenandoah Valley. We were traveling staight through, without stopping for the night. During the night we had a flat tire. Th five of us, my parents, my brother, and my husband and I got out of the car while the tire was fixed. While we were standing on the dark road, a very bright meteorite sailed across the sky, leaving a greenish trail and a "swishing" sound.
The object we saw in Pennsylvania a week later did not resemble this meteorite in any way. It traveled slower, at first, then much faster than the meteorite, was a different color, and made no sound even though it got much closer than the meteorite did. The meteorite streaked across the sky, but the strange object moved slowly and then hovered over us before shooting straight up, lightening fast!
Date is approximate.  We have invited the witness to attempt to determine the date more accurately.  PD