It was only an "experience" because of things I discovered later, otherwise I'd call it a "sighting".
I respectfully disagree here Todd. At the very least, we need some agreed upon vocabulary. A "sighting" means seeing or perceiving something, an "experience" means there is a whole lot more than just seeing something.
Here is my UFO "sighting":
"We were driving back from a Christmas get together at the neighbors in our open air Side x Side (an off road buggy) on a cool December evening. We live in the rural foothills, and were headed down our small, dark, unlit private road when my wife saw something in the distance. A glowing orb in the sky, to the south, out in the valley. Seemed too low to be a large aircraft with landing lights and not in the real vicinity of Sacramento International (SMF). We stopped and I filmed it."
I saw a light(s) in the sky. I can provide the date and time via the video, and figure out the direction. Enough information, even without the video to maybe identify it. At NO point, did any of our physical surroundings change or become strange. We were isolated because there's only 3 houses on our street, but even then, as can be heard in the video, the other neighbors were returning from the same get together and drove by.
In contrast, your "sighting" begins with the normal traffic receding or disappearing:
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I watched the car in front of me disappear into the distance --as if I had somehow slowed down.
Then you describe what seems normal for Northern Oregon, before it sounds like you looked out the right (passenger in the US) and saw the lights:
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Everything was lush and green, and as I drove past a grove of trees on the right, I turned to look out to the distance, and.. I was confronted with five bright glowing objects. They appeared to be round and were in a straight line, evenly spaced, slanted about 15° from horizontal. Stationary.
You're on I5, meaning you're doing near 65mph, right about a mile a minute. If you look out the right side window, all you're going to see is the countryside whizzing by. If the lights are stationary, you'd drive right by them. If you're looking at an angle of some sort, like out the right side of the windshield, they're still going to go by pretty fast.
In fact, you had time to make more observations, again while driving along a busy interstate:
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They each appeared visually to be the size of a dime held at arm's length, and evenly spaced, with the space between each about 1.5 the diameter of one of the objects. The objects were initially extremely bright (like arc lamps or burning magnesium), but I could still look directly at them, and they had distinct edges. The objects were perhaps 30' in diameter, but hard to say.
As I looked, I could see that the tops seemed to be slightly reflecting the blue sky, and I thought they might be metallic spheres, or at least had a metallic object within the glow, but that was just an impression. As I watched, shocked out of my mind, they seemed to slowly become more level and I worried they would approach my car.
Then once again, as you've noted up-thread, your were isolated on a busy interstate:
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There they were. I looked around to see if there were other people seeing this; though I could see distant buildings and fields, there was an eerie silence and no one was around. I was alone on that highway for I think the first time in my life and that was equally strange..
And felt as if you were being watched:
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I became worried and I was in awe, but I couldn't say I was afraid. I had the uncanny feeling that I was being watched by them; I've never felt anything like it before or since. I kept driving very slowly ahead and then lost them as I passed another grove of trees. Suddenly they reappeared ahead of me on I-5 (further south) in an echelon formation (now glowing a dull orange-red), and hanging in the sky, hovering, stationary. Clearly in the atmosphere from my perspective, then.
And then a hint of lost time:
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Later, arriving at my parents house, it was much later in the day than I think it should have been (almost evening). I think I must have been driving slowly after seeing the objects.
You may have slowed down, but it's an interstate, you can only go so slow.
From the beginning, you didn't just see some lights while driving along. Those lights were part of a overall experience, that included a sense of isolation, of being watched of possible lost time. This encounter is then followed up by:
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Then things were to get very strange indeed.
You go to explain that the McMinnville UFO festival was beginning that evening and your office mate lived by the Trents, the people that took the UFO photo that inspired the festival and you saw the UFO 60 years after they took the photo and this is all related some how:
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It turns out that the objects I saw were coming from directly over the area of the Trent farm, as the crow flies...
This interchange at I5 and HW214 is exit 271. So, if your encounter happened around mile 268-270, it's along this stretch of I5 as one approaches the St. Louis Fish Ponds:
With the Trent farm being about 20 miles to the west:
So, from that stretch of road looking towards the Trent farm might look something like this:
But what you described is nothing like the Trent photo. That photo is clearly a product of its time, it's literally a flying saucer. Completely consistent with the UFO zeitgeist of the time. It's not a black triangle from the '90s or a glowing orb or TicTak from the '00s. The festival was just an excuse for McMenamins to sell cocktails.
All of this, is much, much more than a "sighting". It's not just some lights in the sky, it's almost its own narrative and as such is likely to never be explained.
