Sci-fi author details how he saw an ‘enormous silver V-shaped UFO’ at age 14

It was an ordinary afternoon in 1970 when a 14-year-old Dan Harary looked through the windshield of his father’s car and saw a V-shaped UFO hovering above his New Jersey neighborhood in broad daylight. 

The Hollywood publicist-turned-sci-fi writer never forgot the incredible moment, but it wasn’t until decades later that he became convinced his military dad, Jack, knew more about the flying saucer than he had let on.  

Harary’s father worked as an electronics engineer with the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1996 and never discussed his top secret projects. 

It was not until Jack died in 2017, that his son remembered he had given him a knowing wink after their UFO sighting. ‘I thought, “Oh my God, I wonder if my dad knew what that was,”‘ Harary, 66, told DailyMail.com. 

The author’s growing conviction that his father knew about UFOs during his 45 years in the military inspired his new alien novel, After They Came, which tells the story of a man who is beamed up by extraterrestrials after trying to drown himself on his 70th birthday.

Harary was born and raised outside Asbury Park, New Jersey, where he developed a passion for rock music — not aliens. The existence of extraterrestrial life didn’t really cross his mind until his first UFO sighting as a teen.

He recalled how his father had been driving him home from Hebrew school around 4.30pm when he spotted something flying in the air. He yelled for his dad to pull over, and when they got out of the car, they saw an ‘enormous silver V-shaped UFO.’ 

‘It was maybe 200 feet in the air, completely silent, and it was just hovering. It just went very, very slowly over my neighborhood, and I could not believe what I was seeing,’ he said.  

‘So I was jumping up and down. “Dad, a UFO! Dad, a UFO! It’s so cool!” My father looked at it like he was thinking about what he had to buy at the grocery store the next day. He had no interest. Just the look on my father’s face was like he’d seen it a hundred times already.’

Before they left, his father looked at him and gave him a wink, something he had never done before. When they got home, Harary called his local newspaper and was told they were ‘getting a lot of phone calls about this sight,’ but nothing was ever published. 

The writer had asked his father what he thought about aliens and UFOs three or four times over the years, but his reaction was always the same. He would simply chuckle and say, ‘Well, I don’t know.’

He noted that his father’s ‘goal in life was to get his pension’ and would never risk losing it by sharing top secret information with anyone, even his family.

Harary said he had a second UFO sighting while visiting his two children at his ex-wife’s house in Lancaster, California, in 1994. 

After tucking his kids into bed, he went outside and saw a ‘white light shaped like an egg’ that traveled from one end of the sky to another and suddenly stopped.

It then reversed its course and returned to its original point of origin. 

‘Nothing manmade can do that,’ he thought to himself. 

However, Harary didn’t start researching UFOs and extraterrestrial life until he wandered into the paranormal section of a Los Angeles bookstore in 2007.

After buying and reading about a dozen books on the topic, he became a believer and joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), an international organization that investigates reported UFO sightings.

‘The things I heard and saw absolutely blew my mind,’ he said. 

‘I just could not believe all the history, all the evidence, all the testimony of so many people that have experienced things that I was never aware of… It just completely changed my worldview.’ 

In 2008, Harary saw his third UFO while spending a long weekend at Gilliland’s Ranch, an alleged UFO hotspot in Trout Lake, Washington.

James Gilliland, founder of the Enlightened Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ECETI), owns the property and has been hosting stargazing events since 1986. 

‘At night, we could go out into the field just at the base of Mount Adams. People would sing and dance, play guitars and tambourines, and dance around,’ Harary recalled. ‘We did that for three nights in a row hoping to summon up a UFO. That was the goal. 

‘I kept thinking, “No way while I’m here that something is gonna happen. There’s no chance.” First night, nothing. Second night, nothing. The third night, the last night we were there, people are singing and chanting, and then suddenly out of nowhere a bright green emerald-shaped craft appeared right above us.’

Harary said the light flashed on and off a few times before it sped off. They all looked at each other with amazement, and he started to cry. Of the three UFOs he has seen, he noted that ‘no two were even close to the same.’ 

After his father’s death, he asked his mother if he had ever mentioned UFOs or aliens. She told him that the first week he worked at Fort Monmouth, a former army installation in Monmouth County, New Jersey, he was taken down into the vaults and shown ‘something remarkable.’

‘He came home and said, “I saw something that I can never tell you about.” My mother said he looked pale and he was scared s******s,’ he explained. ‘He never discussed it with anyone. She even said he was never the same. We’ll never know what he saw.’ 

UFOs, or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) as the U.S. government now calls them, have long been the subject of fascination and skepticism. However, Harary is convinced that if people took the time to research UFOs and aliens, they would become believers too. 

He rattled off ancient cave paintings, the Nazca Lines in Peru, the Egyptian pyramids, and the deathbed confessions of military men who allegedly helped cover up the Roswell UFO crash as evidence that extraterrestrials exist. 

UFOs have been making headlines in recent weeks after three were shot down over U.S. and Canadian airspace in three days. A week prior, a Chinese spy balloon was shot down over South Carolina.

‘The other three objects have never been identified. They’ve not been recovered. They haven’t been shown on television,’ Harary noted, saying the focus has been on the Chinese balloon ‘because the other three were not manmade.’ 

‘Still to this day, they don’t want to reveal it to the public,’ he said of the government’s alleged knowledge of extraterrestrial life. ‘They think there will be a panic. That’s the thing.’

Harary knows that some people think he is a ‘lunatic,’ including his own doctor, who asked if he was going to ‘wear a tinfoil hat’ as a costume while promoting his book at Aliencon, which took place in Pasadena, California, this month. 

‘I’m trying to tell my friends and relatives, “Hey, this stuff is real, and when the day comes when it’s proven, don’t be too surprised because it’s all absolutely real,”‘ he said. ‘And my mother goes, “Enough with the aliens!”‘