My father was looking out of the back window of his house, facing roughly south, and he looked up towards the SE and saw a huge cigar shaped craft with bright sections above and below it in the middle and ends which seemed to fade away. He watched this phenomena for about 1 min, after this time what he thought was a huge craft moved to the side, revealing itself as being a cloud infront of the moon, not so interesting is it?

Anyway, lets hypothesis for a moment (always fun). Lets say my father went downstairs to grab a camera or similar apparatus, he returns one minute later armed with his camera, looks up into the sky to the SE and sees that this huge craft has just disappeared, WOW, then he notices a small cloud scudding across the moon, the penny drops and he realises that what he'd seen was just an unusual cloud.

However, had he seen the craft, rushed downstairs, fetched his camera, and, on returning to the window, he looks up and sees his craft has disappeared. However, he does not see the moon because a huge thick band of cloud is covering it, now what does he think? He thinks hes seen a huge lit up craft flying through the night sky with no possible explaination.

I'm not a big fan of the 'UFOs are cloud formations' skeptics thoery (I'm not a skeptic), however at night, if certain events happen one could be mistaken, just a thought...