COLONIE — Steve Smith saw Jesus beyond his taxicab's dashboard lights.

He had been driving passengers to and from Albany International Airport on his late-night runs for years without a hint of divine intervention.

But late one night five years ago, when the headlights of a vehicle traveling along Albany Shaker Road struck the front of a clear plastic greenhouse at Engel's Farm at just the right angle, an ethereal glow appeared.

Smith peered at the pyramid-shaped illumination. He did a double-take.

He pulled his yellow Dodge Caravan minivan taxi to a stop and began snapping pictures with a small digital camera. The apparition came into focus and Smith saw the head of a robed figure with its arms outstretched near the waist. He was mesmerized. Was it Jesus Christ? The Virgin Mary? An angel?

Smith is not fluent in Roman Catholic iconography. "I'm Jewish," he said.

"It doesn't matter if you're a religious person or not. No matter how you look at it, the image is there. It's amazing. It's a spectral entity. Different people see different things in it," he said.

Smith felt he had captured something unique — and perhaps marketable — in a tabloid-obsessed nation, where the image of Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich or the visage of Jesus on a pancake makes national news and generates bids on eBay.

"I thought the pictures would be perfect for the Weekly World News," recalled the Brooklyn-born taxi driver.

Smith returned to Engel's Farm during the daytime and was taking pictures when sixth-generation farmer Ed Engel asked what he was doing. Smith showed him the nighttime photos.

Engel didn't like where this was heading. He envisioned gawkers pulling over on the busy road, traipsing around his fields and creating a nuisance. The farmer longed for a homegrown shrine about as much as he wanted crows stealing his sweet corn. He asked Smith not to publish the photos. The cabdriver gave Engel his word.

"I'm a respectful and honest person," said Smith, 58, of Albany, a Navy veteran twice divorced. "I didn't want to cause trouble for Mr. Engel. I had to respect the man's privacy."

Smith put away the photos and kept quiet about the apparition for five years.

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But now that the greenhouse has been torn down, the farmland is for sale and Engel has relocated to Brunswick where he farms Engel's Acres, the cabdriver and the farmer are fine with making the vision public.

"I never saw it before, but after I saw the pictures I sat out there at night and when a certain-sized car or truck came along and the headlights shined on it, the image appeared," Engel recalled.

Engel is a pragmatist who is generally skeptical about supernatural claims. He recalled as a boy hearing his grandfather spin yarns about a local legend. Ghosts of pirates supposedly lighted fires in the woods when they were burying treasure near the Shaker cemetery out past the airport.

His grandfather tramped through the woods to investigate one night beneath a full moon.

"It turned out to be a rotten stump with mold growing on the top that turned phospshorescent in the moonlight so that it appeared to be ablaze," Engel recalled.

Smith has been an independent cabbie for the past 18 years who battles insomnia because he goes to work whenever he gets a call. He ends up working erratic hours and often drives deserted roads in the wee hours.

He once spotted spooky red eyes peering out from the shoulder beside a closed rest stop near Exit 12 of I-90. "I took a picture and I guess my hand was shaking because it looked really demonic," Smith said. Upon further investigation in the daylight, the eyes turned out to be roadway reflectors.

He has seen what might or might not be the face of Christ in the swirl of grain on wood paneling. "Other people said they saw Jesus, but I saw a guy with a beard. It could be Santa Claus or the guitarist from ZZ Top. You make what you want of this stuff."

Still, Smith believes he saw a powerful spiritual image in the glow of headlights on the former greenhouse at the old Engel's Farm.

And for skeptics, the cabdriver adds one more snippet of information: Engel means angel in German.

pgrondahl@timesunion.com • 518-454-5623 • @PaulGrondahl