But What If It’s a Shapeshifting Duck?

Photograph by Kendra Maurer. To the best of our knowledge, this duck does not, in fact, shift shapes.

On our first podcast, I believe I stated that if something looks like a duck, it is probably a duck. To which my mother made the reply “But what if it’s a shapeshifting duck?” 

Well damn, Mom, how am I supposed to know? 

I firmly suspect that all the odd things that go on in the world are related somehow, but I don’t know how.

This is annoying, because humans like to put things in neat little boxes.

I am not immune to this. I like categories, I like pigeonholes, I like things to make sense.

However, I am also capable of going “Well, we can throw that right out the window when it comes to High Strangeness, because sense doesn’t exist here.”

But-and this is a BIG but-I also think that there are some differences in phenomena happening. These aren’t hard and fast rules or boundaries, but in my personal experience, different things seem to act differently. 

Let’s look at a few examples.

First-let’s take the lights in the sky.

I’ve seen more than a few: some big, some small, some closer than I’d like—especially recently.

These lights seem to just.... Be There, at a reasonable distance, going wherever they are going, and I just happen to be outside at the right time.

They don’t look the same as the little fairy lights I see. For one thing, they are up high in the sky, not down near the ground in the trees or in a field. They are brighter than the fairy lights, and don’t tend to dance around,

They either zip past in a straight line, or hover before suddenly zooming away or going out. When they go out, they pull into themselves, contracting to a central point before disappearing. Or, in the case of three large orbs, they look like they go into an invisible slit in the sky, passing out of view gradually as if they are passing behind something in stages.

I don’t get a feeling from them, except excitement or in the case of the recent red ones, nervousness because they were pretty low in the sky and awfully near my house. That’s all they do, they appear, move around in abnormal ways, disappear, and that’s it. 

The fairy lights tend to appear in specific locations, for days at a time, are smaller, multicolored little globes or points of light. They dance around, blink on and off, get closer or farther away from me, and seem to “live” in patches of woodland or fields. They occasionally are accompanied by larger orbs (ranging in size from a shooter marble to a tennis ball) that meander closer to me and my deck.

They typically start showing up in spring, peak for a week or so, then calm down a bit. Then, they flare back up around October. They don’t wander over to my deck until the garden is planted, but once it is they will drift right up to it.

They come in blue, red, silver, green, purple, and  yellow/gold. They make me a little nervous if I’m outside, but not too much, since I’m used to them. They are a soft glow, not the bright hard glow I have seen from the lights in the sky. Before anyone goes “Fireflies!” , I know what those look like, and I have seen these little guys in November long after the fireflies are finished in Ohio. They don’t blink in a set pattern, hold steady light if they want to, and are bigger than a firefly. 

Fireflies also don’t come in blue, red, silver and purple. Or emerald green.

If I see lots of the fairy lights, I will tend to have a few days where small things in my house go missing and then reappear.

If I see lots of UFO type lights, I start to have issues with my computer or phone and the smoke alarm will go off for no reason. Both make me a little nervous, and also excited that I have seen them.

The only time I’ve ever kept forgetting I’ve seen something strange was when my friend and I both saw the three large golden orange orbs in the sky that disappeared into nothingness. We both forgot about it several times, only remembering it hours or days later until we finally told someone else.

I have never forgotten a fairy light or experience, only a UFO type one. 

To me, these things—fairy lights and UFOs--are probably related somehow.

But they each appear, act, and cause a different effect on me and my house. So why should I act like they are the same thing, when I can see that they are not?

This is why I hesitate to call the duck a goose.

Rather, I like to say, this is possibly a duck, and it is related to the goose.

I’ll always keep an open mind, but for me, it is easier to conceive of these things possibly having a common source,  while still noting the differences. Because, when I experience them, I experience similarities and differences, and I cannot remove what I am experiencing from my conceptions of the phenomena as a whole.

Perhaps that makes me a less than perfect researcher, but I don’t quite know another way to be.