◆ PARALLAX

Title says it and I mean it kindly. Four years on this board and I can take apart ninety-five of every hundred things posted here before my coffee is cold -- swamp gas, a lens flare, Venus low and bright, sleep paralysis, a buck cracking a sapling, a moth six inches off a trail-cam lens reading as a hunched giant.

I do not do it to be cruel. I do it because the 5% that SURVIVES me is the only part worth anyone's evening, and you cannot find the 5% without binning the 95 first. This is the thread where I do it, on request, in public. Bring me your best one. Your strongest case, the one you think is unbreakable.

I want to lose. I almost never do. That is the whole tragedy and the whole point.

@Occams_Razorback Fine, strongest folder on top. Banner County, NE, 17 Nov 1979, 01:40, three ranchers report a blue-white thing pacing the section road while the night freight crew calls in the same light from four miles south. I have photocopies of the sheriff blotter and dispatcher sheet, no photos, and yes I am annoyed because you usually wreck these in under five minutes.

@Clem_Lockley Blue-white and pacing are where I start looking for headlamps on a ridge, temperature inversion, or a train light being seen twice by people who do not know they share a sightline. Not calling it solved, just saying shiny lights travel farther than dignity.

@Occams_Razorback I have a boring one I hope is boring. Last night, Spruce Hill, about 22:30, three white points in a huge triangle, silent and slow. Please tell me this is birds because I slept with the hall light on.

@SkyTired_Mel That one is almost certainly birds, especially if the points flexed or winked one at a time. Geese and gulls catch city light from underneath and look like a single black triangle because your brain kindly draws the missing edges for free. @Clem_Lockley Your Banner file is better than the usual porch-light ballet, but Lou is right about the first suspects. I need exact road, train direction, weather, and whether the sheriff entry was made before or after the railroad call.

@Clem_Lockley Give me accession numbers or at least the box labels. Banner County sheriff logs for 1979 should be on county microfilm if they were not weeded, and the weekly paper would have run police notes the following Thursday.

@Occams_Razorback Since Clem brought paperwork: Ashford schoolyard, May 1968, teacher plus kids see a silver disc over the baseball backstop, then a ring in the grass Monday. I want this one to be a shiny disc so bad it makes me stupid, but the local paper only says "balloon prank?"

@Simon_99 The Ashford one smells like a rawinsonde balloon plus a mower or fertilizer ring added by Monday. Kids amplify each other, teachers try to be kind, newspapers love punctuation marks. Keep it in the binder if you want, but it is not your champion.

@ArchiveMoth and @Clem_Lockley, Banner is more irritating. If Clem's copies are accurate, the railroad dispatcher logged "light holding beside westbound local" at 01:37, while the sheriff blotter has the rancher call at 01:41 and a deputy note at 02:18 saying he saw a white light over the south pasture from a different road. Cattle spooked means nothing, magnetized fence means less than nothing, and "blue-white" is every bad distant light ever. But the timing is clean enough that I cannot fold it into Venus, aircraft, or one set of headlights without inventing a witness mistake I do not yet have. So: tiny survivor, not proof, pending the boring joy of records.