In answer to the question posed on Danielle Tuesday, I think I could commit to something for seventy-four years. It's easy to get into the habit of things, I think. Some things sort of become part of the fabric of your life after a while, and then it's easy to continue them.
I have a penpal, and, no kidding, I could write letters to that guy for seventy-four years. 'Bout 90% sure he has no way of finding this.

Alright. Weird happenings.
I was going to talk about this story I read on the interwebs about a family who just went missing. Poof. They found their car with new toys in it. No one in sight, and no evidence for where they might have gone.
But, internet citizens that you are, I'm sure that you can all find plenty of strange and inexplicable occurrences if that's what you're into. So, instead, I'm going to discuss some celestial oddities I've seen with my own eyes.

I'm no UFO fanatic, lets just make that clear, I'm quite sure there's a reasonable explanation, but what made this fun to see was that I didn't know what that reasonable explanation was. And neither did any one I was with either.

I spent the last week in the back arse of nowhere, which made for some enjoyable stargazing. You could see the Milky Way right across the sky, and when you can see it like that, it's easy to understand why people thought it was a river in the sky.

One night, my sister and I were lying on a lounger outside the little farmhouse we were staying in and we were looking at the stars. We saw plenty of shooting stars streaking across the night, gone almost before you realised they were there. We saw the few constellations that we can recognise between us, Orion, the Plough, The Little Bear. We saw planes, strangely ostentatious as they flashed brightly. We saw satellites moving slowly from horizon to horizon.

And that's where the strangeness happened. For those of you who have never stargazed, a satellite looks largely like just another star, except that it moves. It's an disconcerting sensation to look up into the sky and see to almost identical specks of light, separated only by the fact that one moves and the other doesn't, when you know the vast differences between the realities of what causes those lights. One, a man-made machine of metal orbiting a couple of thousand meters above my head, reflecting the suns light into my eyes, the other a huge ball of reacting gasses light years away producing inconceivable amounts of light and heat, only a tiny amount of which is reaching me.

It was in this rarefied frame of mind that we noticed what we had presumed was a satellite. It had been maybe a little brighter than your average star when we first spotted it. It wasn't very long before we realised that it's brightness wasn't constant. One minute it would be quite bright and very visible, the next it would fade until we could barely see it. We were perplexed. We had never seen anything like it.

Perhaps it was a satellite and was rotating in such a way that it was reflecting an inconsistent amount of light.
Perhaps small wisps of cloud were veiling it from our sight.
Perhaps it was a plane with un-regulation lights on it.

And...perhaps it was something stranger still.

- Orla