Witness Account

About 5:40 PM my 11-year-old son and I were driving on route 212 from Saugerties New York, to Woodstock, New York. It was twilight. Roughly halfway there, I saw something in the sky in front of me (south/southwest). It was in the distance. It was a perfectly straight column of opaque white smoke or vapor, with darker gray at the bottom. It looked perpendicular to the ground. To both my son and me, it looked like something was falling straight downward. It did not seem to be falling fast. We were able to see it for a couple of minutes before the road made a turn, and I lost sight of it. Neither of us saw it again, although we did see the empty sky where it should’ve been. A bright star or planet appeared there.
My son and I were both very struck by how strange it was, and how unlike anything we had seen before.
When I got home, I posted a description of the experience on Facebook. A friend who lives in the area mentioned that she had also seen it while driving and it looked the same to her.