On the subject of UFOs

[LSFL]

Let me first say that I am a skeptic about the extraterrestrial hypothesis. I believe a good amount of reports are just folks trying to glom onto the notoriety of the few reports that catch fire. High profile sightings that are widely disseminated by the media usually generate far more follow up reports than other sightings that recieve little publicity. But there many sightings that don't blow up, yet the people who experienced them never seek to gain from their stories nor do they retract them. This argues strongly that outside of the liars and publicity hounds that some people honestly believe that they saw something. I am not so much interested in what they saw as to why their brains interpreted it the way they did.
I know they are not all lying because I am one of the ones who saw something that I am unable to explain.
It was back in 1984. My friend, my future brother in law and myself were walking on country roads at night. It was a typical night coming home after a weekend of camping in a rockhouse (a cliff with a shallow cave at its base for all of you city slickers)it was a bright moonlit night which is why we were headed home. We were out of supplies and the fish werent biting and we decided that breakfast sounded better than maybe eating our remaining bait.
Anyway as we walked home, a shadow fell across the moon. We looked up and saw a very unconventional aircraft. It was diamond shaped elongated in the direction of travel. Think of a tall triangle with a squat triangle attached at the bases. Spear shaped I guess. There were several white lights spaced equidistantly around the perimeter and in the widest portion of the object there was a hazy irregular ring of red light. We watched it for awhile shining our flashlights at it, waving our shot guns and generally being scared adolescents trying to pretend we werent scared adolescents.

We lost sight of it behind some trees and when we saw it again in was parallel to us on the horizon and we got a side view of it. Sleek and thick in the rear and tapered to a point in the direction of travel. On the back third of the object there was a structure the strongly resembling the bridge of a battle ship or aircraft carrier.

So my question is what did I see that my brain interpreted as a Super Star Destroyer from the Star Wars universe? I had been hungry before and many times since and I have never hallucinated. Was my mind desperately trying to decipher a true enigma? Why a SSD?
Any thoughts? We all three saw it and agreed on the basic configuration. Also it was silent and moved slowly while in sight only seeming to be fast when we lost sight of it for a few seconds and it appeared much further away the its observed speed could account for.