Dear Mr. Davenport The short article below is a response I wrote to a local boating publication regarding UFO sightings. I never did submit it, but I'm sending it to you now.

Editor:  Waterline  The article in last months Waterline about the Lake Michigan Triangle and UFO sightings along the lakefront caught my attention.  It brought to mind a boat ride I had taken years ago.
 It was 1968 and at that time I was working for a company called Tech Center in Morton Grove, Illinois.  Tech Center was a research and development house for the Armed Forces, the aerospace industry and NASA.  There was Tech Center equipment aboard the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules, we had even designed and built our own satellites, O.A.O. II is still in orbit and operational to this day.  The people who worked at Tech Center would be considered geeks by today’s standards, we all wore plastic pocket protectors and had slide rules (pre-calculator days) strapped to our belts.  But geeks or not, one thing we did know at Tech Center, was what the military did and didn’t have in the nineteen sixty’s.
 Back then I had a small Thompson cabin cruiser (remember the wooden boats with the lap strake hulls) and once every year I’d take the guys from work out fishing.  That morning in 1968 we got an early start.  We pulled out of Diversey Harbor around 3:30 a.m. and started heading north.  It was still dark.
 An hour before sunrise we were trolling north, paralleling the shoreline, six miles out and twenty miles north of Chicago when the most extraordinary thing happened.  A craft flew directly over our heads.  I mean - RIGHT OVER OUR HEADS!  What first caught our attention was a mechanical humming sound behind us. All four of us in the boat simultaneously turned and looked above and behind to see what was causing it.  What we saw, was a craft in the air, 150 yards behind and slightly to port, perhaps 400 feet off the water and coming straight at us.  The craft was rapidly overtaking us, but at a very leisurely pace for an aircraft.  It was quiet, but loud enough to be heard (or perhaps felt) above the boats motor.  The craft didn’t sound like an airplane.  It didn’t whine like a jet, didn’t thump like a helicopter and it sure didn’t have propellers.
 What we saw had no wings, tail or struts.  It’s fuselage was elliptical in shape with a blunted nose and tail.  It was large (but not huge), perhaps 150 feet long, 75 feet wide and 30 feet thick (like a skinny football which had been flattened out).  There were no windows or anything that resembled a cockpit.  The craft which appeared to be gray in color did not have any lights or visible markings.  It seemed to be dimly illuminated, or at least it was not as dark as the surrounding sky.  This may have been moonlight reflecting off the water.
 I remember feeling the great mass of the craft as it passed above us.  Although the craft was not large in dimensions, it just felt a lot bigger than it was.  I’ve stood next to B52’s, 747’s and large Air Force cargo plans, all bigger aircraft, but without the same feeling of massiveness.  This thing above us felt as if it weighed hundreds of tons.  Although Spartan in appearance one sensed that this was some very serious machinery.
 This craft had come up behind us from the south-south-west and passed directly overhead at a height of no more than 400 feet.  Without pausing, changing speed or making any correction in course it just continued on a leisurely northward heading at a speed of about fifty miles per hour until it disappeared.  And that, was that.
 The four of us were just dumbfounded.  We watched it slowly disappear into the night sky, and then it was gone and we were just left staring at each other in silence.  The entire incident had lasted less than four minutes.  There wasn’t one of us who could explain what we had just seen.  Remember, we were the four geeks from Tech Center.  My friend ((name deleted)) was the first to speak what we had all been thinking,  "If there is such a thing as flying saucers, I think we just saw one."  No one argued with ((name deleted)).  Then we went back to fishing.
 Surprisingly, we never spoke afterwards about what happened that night. You would think that we would have, but we didn’t.  I believe each of us had our own thoughts about what we had seen and we were all keeping those thoughts to ourselves.  To this day I’ve only told the story to a very few people.  Believe what you will, or call me a nut job, I know what I saw that night.  It’s been thirty five years now and even with all of our great modern technology I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.