In August 1986 a man had a remarkable experience while driving toward Great Neck, Long Island, on the Grand Central Parkway. It was 9:30 P.m., and the sky was overcast, with a three-thousand-foot ceiling. The man suddenly saw an enormous airplane coming toward him so low that it looked like it was about to land on the parkway. It had two bright lights in the nose, lights that seemed to shine beams directly into his eyes. There was a red light at the tip of one wing and a green one at the tip of the other As he passed under the plane he looked up and saw that there were rivets in the undersurface, which was streaked as if it had scraped along the ground. He saw four engine pods with whirling propellers. The nose of the plane was flat and there was no horizontal stabilizer. The man slowed down and leaned his head out the window, looking up at the bizarre Craft. It seemed almost to be standing still, and the propellers made no noise at all. Soon he was past it and taking the Great Neck exit, which makes a horseshoe around a small hill. Above this hill he saw what appeared to be an advertising sign made of many small lightbulbs. It had an angle in it, suggesting that it was attached to two sides of a building. It was flashing, but the symbols were incomprehensible.

As he rounded the horseshoe and saw the sign from another angle, he realized that there was no building there. Then he concluded that it must be a plane. But it suddenly shot off to the southwest, rising into the overcast with blinding speed.

What happened to this man? What did he see? It would be easy to dismiss his experiences as a pair of hallucinations. Easy to debunk this one.

There is, however, a problem. The problem is the man himself, and his extraordinarily apt qualifications. He is a leading perceptual psychologist with encyclopedic knowledge of just exactly how the brain perceives things, and what misperceptions mean. What's more, he has a near-photographic memory and eyes so superb that he can see the moons of Jupiter unaided.

He is also highly intelligent and exceptionally emotionally stable, having had many hundreds of hours of psychoanalysis as part of his clinical training.

Anybody can have a hallucination or a misperception. But this highly qualified man feels certain that what he saw was actually there. Interestingly, other drivers did not react to it at all. I wonder if that might not be because they believed an illusion that this man's mind was too highly trained to mistake. Most people saw a plane and, an advertising sign. But this acute, trained mind saw beyond the camouflage to what was really there — a device of unknown origin and purpose.