The Sky Holds Its Breath...

Just miles and miles of empty highway this far north.
No billboards. No service stations. Just a ribbon of road unspooling toward a horizon the colour of old steel.
I keep my eyes on the clouds. Always looking up.
Word came in just before dawn — another sighting.
What’s that, nine total now?
This time, an old farmer is finishing up his morning joe before another 14 hours in the trenches.
Claims “it didn’t shine on me — it looked at me.” Saw it over a quiet stretch of land where the nights are so inky black you can see the Milky Way split the sky in half.
By the time I get there, I know he’ll have retold his story so many times he’ll start to wonder if he imagined it.
But that’s how it works.

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This will be my fourth report in as many months.
The first was a long-hauler who had pulled off for the night. He said it was “circular, bright in a way that didn’t hurt to look at… like it belonged there.” No noise. Only a slight jumping movement, until it was gone.
The second was a fisherman on a fog-wrapped pier, who chain-smoked throughout the whole interview. Claimed it hovered over the bay for precisely three minutes, rotating as slow as the tide.
Said the glow it gave off wasn’t light so much as a nod to his presence there.
A week later, a couple hiking the ridge line swore it was following them. Every time they stopped, it stopped. They said the air felt different when it was near, heavier somehow, as if the day had paused to listen.

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None of these people knew each other.
None has any reason to lie.
And yet, the stories are all the same.

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I keep telling myself I’m chasing nothing — a trick of light, one of Elon’s satellites, the brain’s instinct to find patterns where there are none.
But there’s something convincing about the way each witness hesitates before speaking, as if the act of describing it might change their own memory.
There’s something else, too.
The reports are getting closer together.
Whatever it is, it’s coming.
And every description — no matter the witness, no matter the place — ends the same way:

“It wasn’t from here… but it knew I was.”

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- by Matt Black, field reporter