From my journal archives. Every detail of this is completely true...
~~~
Huddle around the campfire and shine your flashlight, because this one might get a bit creepy....
There's a scene in The Sixth Sense where [trailer-level spoiler alert]
after the kid tells his mom that he sees ghosts (which she of course
refuses to believe), she looks at an old photo of him and sees a white
misty thing behind him in the photo. Stunned and perplexed, she
proceeds to look at more photos and realizes that every photo of her son
has a white misty thing around him that she's somehow missed until this
moment.
I felt a bit like that today when, while
organizing my photos in iPhoto into
albums, I came across one that had something I'd never noticed.... I
stared at it for a few beats trying to decide if I was seeing it
incorrectly and realized there was something there that definitely
doesn't make any sense. It's a photo of a sunset on a beach, facing
west. The sun is clearly
visible above the horizon. But also clearly visible is a bright green
glowing globe sitting right on the horizon. My first reaction was, "Oh,
it's the moon in an optical illusion." But if a moon, it's nearly a
full moon, and a full moon always rises in the east. It's physically
impossible for a full moon to rise right under a setting sun in the west.
Here is the photo (zoomed in and cropped and with sun and globe circled and labeled, but otherwise unedited):
I
looked at the other photos I'd taken within the same few minutes. The
next photo also had a green globe... except the globe was higher in the
sky and appeared further south from where it had been in the first
photo. I of course could tell the order in which I'd taken the photos,
but iPhoto wasn't displaying their time stamps, and every time I tried
to get the info for them to determine exactly how
close together they were taken, iPhoto crashed. When I finally was able
to see the photo information long enough to realize the first two
photos were taken a mere 24 seconds apart -- meaning the globe had moved very
quickly both up and to the south -- I e-mailed the photos to my
parents.
 |
| (24 seconds after 1st photo. Zoomed in, cropped, and labeled -- otherwise unedited. Difference in coloring and light from first photo is due to different camera settings) |
And then about ten minutes later, I got a phone call from my dad.
"I
got your e-mail about the glowing globe, and I read it," he told me.
"But then it disappeared. And it's really weird. It's not in my inbox
anymore. So I looked in my trash. Not only is it not in my trash, but
my trash is completely empty. I never emptied it."
So,
convinced I had stumbled my way into a horror film, I tried to resend
him the photos. Meanwhile, I had discovered that another photo from that
evening -- taken exactly 24 seconds after the second photo that showed
the globe -- also had the globe... but this time it appeared on the north side of the sun:
I e-mailed that photo to my dad, too, and after a while he called me back.
"I'm
completely flummoxed," he said. "It can't be the moon. It doesn't
look like any plane I've ever seen. It moves too much to be some sort
of weird reflection. It's not a sun spot on your camera. You can see
the clouds in front of it. I have no idea."
"And that third photo! It went all the way to the right of the sun!" I exclaimed.
"What third photo?" he asked.
"The third photo. The most recent one I sent you. Isn't that why you called?"
"I never got a third. I got the original two that you resent. But that was it. I'll check now."
I waited while he checked his e-mail, and then I heard him inhale sharply.
"Well,
this is really crazy. Not only is your third e-mail not here, but the
second one has disappeared, too. I don't have any of these anymore.
Wait, let me check something.... The response I sent you about it isn't
even in my sent folder."
"Wait, what response?" I asked. "I never got an e-mail response from you."
"..... Yeah... I e-mailed you back in response to the one you resent."
"Nuh-unh. I don't have anything from you about this."
Silence.
And then he swore.
"My screen just turned black!..... Jessica, my computer just shut off! WHAT DID YOU SEND ME?!"
We
laughed, but it was kind of the way you laugh at a horror film.... Like
if you don't laugh, you might just scream in terror instead.....
And
then as I tried to resend him the second e-mail that had disappeared,
along with the third photo.... my e-mail app on my phone crashed.
When his computer rebooted... he had one e-mail in his inbox. [I
realize as I'm re-reading this now that this is where it should say
that that one e-mail was from a ghost or something with a warning, but
the story's not that good. He never told me what the one e-mail was, so I assume it was insignificant......or was it....??]
So we decided the globe is the mothership from Independence Day. Seems like that's as logical a conclusion as any.
The three photos, without any zooming, cropping, or editing of any kind:
 | |
| 8:46:13 PM |
 | |
| 8:46:37 PM |
 | |
| 8:47:01 PM |
In
the time since then, I've not seen any more glowing globes.... but last
week, I did encounter another strange, unexplained oddity on the same
beach.... stay tuned for chapter two in the Curious Case of the Alien
Lake Mystery.
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