Many years ago when I was young and lived in the northern part of Toronto, I was driving home from visiting friends in the downtown area, my younger brother was in the car with me, when we were some six or seven miles from home I noticed some people on the side walk staring up towards the sky.
Normally people in a large city do not stare at the sky, there are occasions when some large helicopter flies by that people will glance at it to see what is making the noise, but these people seemed to be transfixed and gazing upwards and there was no loud or unusual noise that I could discern. I was busy negotiating the traffic, so I shrugged the observation off as another curious thing that people in a big city do.

When we arrived home our parents were standing on the front yard looking up towards the sky, so naturally we turned our gaze in that direction.
What I saw was a round "orb", I describe it as an orb because it was as tall as it was wide, it could have been a disk that was being viewed directly from the bottom. It was white in color and it seemed to be glowing from the inside. It was stationary, just hanging there in the sky, I could not discern any detail to it, the effect was sort of like looking at a evenly illuminated light straight on, while standing in a dark room. Another curious thing about it was that the surface/edge of the thing was indistinct, it seemed somehow fuzzy, no detail at the edge or any other point on the surface.

I could not estimate the size or the distance of the object, but if I placed my outstretched hand at arms length between the object and myself, and then closed one eye, I could not see the object behind my hand.
As I looked at it for several minutes and wondered what it was, it started to move very slowly towards the west, I was determined to keep an eye on it as long as possible and as I watched, it started getting smaller at a faster rate, in my estimation it accelerated, then it rose higher in the sky before becoming too small for me to see it.

After it disappeared from my view, I noted that the sun was setting in the west and there was a slight breeze coming from the north.
I went inside and asked my parents how they became aware of the object in the sky, they responded that while they were watching TV the picture on the screen became "wavy" and then disappeared, so they went outside to see what was causing the problem, that is when they saw the object and assumed that it was the cause of the problem.

My mother said that when she first saw it, it was changing colors from red to green to white.
My thoughts went to; extraterrestrial maybe, but then logic kicked in and I started to think about the evidence that I had.

People were watching it miles away while we were coming towards home, meaning that it either traveled at the same speed, about 30 miles per hour, that we did, or that it was very high in the sky where it could be seen from a large area.
The wind at ground level was from the north but it could have been from a different direction at a higher level.
The TV was hooked up to an external roof top antenna and if the thing in the sky was large and metallic and in the right position between the receiver antenna and the transmitting antenna, then it would have interfered with the reception.

Next morning the newspapers covered the story saying that many people called in to report the strange looking object in the sky.
The official explanation was that it was an "escaped" weather balloon from a weather station in Buffalo, apparently (they reported) it had drifted north across Lake Ontario, over and across Toronto to the city's northern edge, then stopped there and drifted westward.

It seemed a little bit odd for a balloon to do such a thing, but I suppose if all conditions, such as wind speed and air density, were just right, then it would be possible for a balloon to do that.
No one ever explained where the balloon ended up, or if they were gathering weather information from it during its flight.

Balloon or something else? To this day, I still do not know for sure, because seeing is believing like they say. I observed it and was unable to identify any detail on its surface or see any science package attached to it..
I have seen many things flying in the sky, such as airplanes, hot air balloons, helicopters, meteors, bolide, satellites, helium filled party balloons, blimps and even a helium filled weather balloon, in all of these cases I was able to discern enough detail from the surface of the object or the flight characteristics to determine what it was. But this particular object was not identifiable by any visual detail. It seemed large enough, so that if it was a balloon I should have been able to discern some feature on it that would have given it away as a balloon. The behavior at certain times did match the flight characteristics of a balloon, at least to the extent that it was silent and was moving slowly.

But if it was a partially filled "escaped" balloon, then why did it not come down to the ground instead of floating at a certain distance from the ground, was the weight and buoyancy so carefully matched by accident that it could not rise any further. If it was a balloon so balanced with the atmospheric pressure that it could not go higher at a large portion of its flight path, then why did it accelerate an go upward and out of sight at another point in its travel.

If it was a balloon then the coincidences of the amount of buoyancy and wind speeds and direction changes were extraordinary.

If it was a "craft" that was under intelligent control, then such maneuvers would be simple decisions from the pilot or navigator.

As far as I'm concerned it was a UFO, the reasoning is that, I and many other people were not able to identify it, it was flying, and it was an object. Unidentified Flying Object.

Had the official version of the explanation included the name of the weather station and how the balloon managed to "escape" them, and then had they explained why their balloon was able to perform the observed speed and direction changes, then I would not be wondering about it anymore. I would simply accept the official explanation, even though I personally was unable to say that it was a balloon, based strictly on my observation of it.

My parents and my brother were unable to identify it either, I told my brother that it was a "flying saucer" and I would have to build one in order to prove that such things can be made.

Progress has been slow in that department :-)

Lately though, I have had some more time to think about the physical constraints and technical problems that would need to be overcome if such a machine was to be made.

First of all the imagined machine would need to have the following performance characteristics.
1) Very quiet, if not totally silent in operation.
2) Capable of hovering
3) Capable of accelerating very rapidly and in any direction from a hovering position.
4) Capable of flying very fast in the air.
5) Able to fly out of the atmosphere into space.
6) Able to return from space to the atmosphere without damage.

I'm sure that if any nation on Earth would posses such craft, they would be in a superior position militarily.
That is the nature of all technological advancements, they can be used for the benefit of humans or their destruction.

I wonder if there are people that would object to the construction of such a device.

If such devices existed, should they be mass produced in large quantity like cars or even smaller quantity like aircraft, or should their manufacture be controlled like the nuclear weapons.

Is there anyone on HZ that would like to know more about how such a device might be made to work?

I have some ideas in that area.

The explanation would start with a different perspective of flight in the atmosphere, then it would continue with imagination and then parts of that imagined device would be scrutinized with logic and mathematics.
The hoped for outcome would be to determine whether such a device could be made to work.

Waiting for intelligent comments.

Johannes

P.S. Check out this site. and
this site.
They contain interesting experiments with electrical propulsion.