It was a summer afternoon, August 1964, a storm has finished and the three persons were driving in a station wagon, conversing together happily. All three were very respectable people, intellectuals but with a sense of reality, and they did not expect anything out of the ordinary when they had left the house two of them owned in Truro, to attend a cocktail party in Provincetown at the home of Hudson Walker, a rich art collector, the future renowned owner of the Walker Art Institude in Minneapolis.
When they arrived at the top of a small crest, all three stopped talking as they simultaneously saw something ahead in the sky.
Nobody wanted to say something first, but eventually the woman asked the two men: "Are you guys looking what I'm looking at?"
The two men who were sitting at either side of her on he broad front seat of the station wagon said that they did. In fact, all three could not take their eyes off an oval shaped object hanging in the air at a distance they felt to be of one mile, at a height of some thousand feet up, ahead of them and slightly on the left.
This object appeared small and motionless and had a distinct shape and an appearance of dull metal slightly shining in the afternoon sunlight.
They were now driving down the gentle slope of Massachusetts State Route Nr 6 going towards Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod.
All three exchanged speculation on what the object could have been. After all, it could be some tethered weather balloon, or a blimp, they said to each other, although not being totally convinced by the attempts of commonplace explanation they tried, because the object really seemed odd, hanging there in the still cloudy sky. None of them has seen an ovoid shaped weather balloon so far, and they felt a weather balloons should be round, and shine less, and go up in the sky rather than stay at low altitude.
In the meantime as they continued towards Provincetown discussing the object, they realized that their visual angle towards the object had increased so that they had to bend more and more to the dashboard to see it. The object now seemed now more circular, as seen from underneath.
They were still wondering about a commonplace identification, imagining that the military was using this odd balloon, possibly tethered, for some aerial measurements, when something happened which ruined the balloon theory:
As they left Route 6 to enter the road to the Walker's house, the object suddenly started moving and moved at a tremendous speed against the wind and was lost from sight in the distance.
They arrived at the party still under shock of what they had witnessed, told about it and the cocktail party would take an odd turn as many there started to discuss UFOs and sightings they heard of. A few days later, moreover, local newspapers mentioned a rash of UFO sightings in the Cape Cod area. However it is only years later that one of the three witnesses started to get really involved in the matter. For now, all they knew is that there are flying saucers after all, something they had not expected to discover as it had not been in their preoccupation.
The three witnesses did not make a lot of fuss of their sighting, however, they did not remain anonymous. The woman's firstname was Joan, the friend was Ted, and Joan's husband, an already praised and very successful abstract painter who has exposed in galleries such as Poindexter, Tanager, Davida, Marino, Zabriskie, Parke Bernet in New York, to name a few, and sold to many collectors and already one museum, who would become a renowned artist soon, and became later renowned for a completely different matter, bore the name of Edward "Budd" Hopkins.
