You tell ME what they were

On a warm day in 1954, in Houston, TX., southwest of the downtown area, just outside a beautiful neighborhood called River Oaks, I had just awakened from my usual mandatory afternoon nap. I was ten years old. I wandered outside to find, up and down Elmen Street where we lived, little 'knots' of people standing in front yards and out in the street, looking up. Some people had stopped their cars-- right in the middle of the street. Some car doors stood ajar. Everyone was looking up. I wondered what was going on, so I wandered over to one of the groups of people and I too, looked up. Finally I saw what everyone was staring at. A small group of cylinder-shaped objects-- black on one side, and silver on the other side, rotating slowly along the long axis of the cylinders. They were otherwise motionless, and had no wings, no exhaust coming from them, and most importantly, no noise. No markings of any kind. They just sat there -- high in the sky, with the sunlight on them, slowly rotating---black, then silver, then black, then silver. As they rotated, the sunlight reflected off of the shiny, silver portions of the objects. As the hundreds of people stared straight up, the objects finally, with precision, and in a tight grouping, took off! They raced across the sky, disappearing from sight....again, with no noise and no exhaust. Then they raced back across the sky and sat up there again, slowly rotating like black and silver cigars. Every now and then they would take off and as they rapidly moved across the cloudless sky, they sometimes abruptly changed direction, and began moving sideways-- still in formation. They didn't inscribe a sweeping turn, as I now know that most aircraft would have to do when making a high speed change in direction. They just abruptly began moving in a different direction -- perpendicular to the direction they had been traveling. They moved at an incredible speed, often disappearing from sight within a few seconds. This went on all afternoon. People all over Houston, Texas saw the same spectacle. It was in the Houston Chronicle, of course, but there was never any explanation. I don't know what I saw. How do you explain the unexplainable? I saw it, but have no clue what tens of thousands of people saw that day. It doesn't fit into any frame of reference that I have, but I will never forget that day. Maybe YOU can tell ME what they were!