it took him an hour or so to be willing to recount exactly what he had seen (so we could compare it to what i saw), and i learned from his recounting that prior to my seeing the object, he in fact saw the object "materialize" or "decloak" out of nowhere.

This is all lower case. Can you fix that?
It took him an hour or so to be willing to recount exactly what he had seen (so we could compare it to what I saw), and I learned from his recounting that prior to my seeing the object, he in fact saw the object "materialize" or "decloak" out of nowhere.