For more than four decades, I've been waiting to see another unidentified flying object.

The sightings earlier this year near Stephenville, Texas, of an object "faster than a speeding bullet - and bigger than a Wal-Mart," have taken me back to that night on the Western Slope of Colorado where I saw something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand at attention.

What I saw that night in the winter of 1964-65 was neither as big or fast as the object in the Stephenville sightings, but for a 17-year-old boy and his date, it was memorable.

I had just picked up my date who lived about 25 miles from Montrose on a ranch in the mountains above Ridgway. It was dark and it had just began to snow.

We were traveling on an otherwise deserted mountain road when I noticed something strange in my rearview mirror.

I asked my date to look out the back window and tell me what she saw. "There's a big red light following us," she said, confirming what I had been watching for about a mile.

Surely there was an explanation, I thought. It might be Barney, the Ridgway town marshal who had a red light mounted on the roof of his car. But the red light was not blinking as it would have if it were Barney's.

Maybe it's some of the guys from Ridgway who didn't like the idea of us Montrose guys dating their girls.

I decided to stop in the middle of the road and wait for the red light to catch up. When we stopped, the red light also stopped about 200 yards away. I opened the door and stood on the floorboard with the intention of waiting to see if the light would approach.

Suddenly, a yellowish glowing sphere about the size of a softball came from the red light and flew over my head at what I estimated to be about 60 or 70 mph. It made a swooshing sound.

After the first, at least two more of the light balls flew past only a few inches above my head. At one point, I felt like I could reach up and catch one of them, but chickened out when I realized I didn't even know what I was dealing with.

"I think someone's shooting flares at us," I told my date.

Scared, but angry, I got back into the car, turned it around and sped back to where the red light was - or had been. While I was turning the car around, the light disappeared.

I figured whoever it might be was trying to get away. As I gave chase, I noticed that the only tire tracks in the fresh snow were my own. Even when we reached where the red light had stopped, there were no other tracks.

Whatever had followed us and sent the glowing spheres over our heads, had not left any tracks.

That realization shot a pang of fear through me and my date. She started to cry. We returned to the safety of her mother's home and canceled our date. I returned to town, searching the night sky for more unusual lights and any plausible explanation.

I remember the next week, a story appeared in the Montrose Daily Press that said there had been numerous sightings of UFOs and/or strange lights during the past weekend.

I've thought about the sighting many times over the years, but have never come up with a satisfactory explanation. There is a scene in the 1977 movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in which glowing balls similar to what I saw are depicted.

Probably because of the experience, I have had a lifelong fascination with reports of UFOs. I am a fan of George Noory, Art Bell and the late-night "Coast to Coast" radio show, which frequently has guests and callers who speak on the subject.

One of my favorite pastimes is to tune in "Coast to Coast" about midnight and park on a hill in the open prairies about 10 miles from town and wait for my UFO to come back.

Juan Espinosa is The Chieftain night city editor.