Street lights, synchronicity and lights in the sky

Note: This is one of my more unusual articles. There’s nothing bad, and no bad language either. Just, umm, oddness.

I spot things.

I have an unusual attention to detail that means that means I see things most people miss. Whilst this often means humdrum things like trying to decipher personalised number plates on cars, or even what trim level the car is based on the pattern of the wheels, I occasionally see rather more unusual things. Sometimes strangely synchronous things have happened too. Things that are so unusual that they stick in my mind for years, in the way that normal events typically fail to do.

But are these unusual things of any consequence whatsoever, and are they the product of an over fertile imagination?  I’ll leave that to you to decide.

I grew up Yorkshire, about 20 miles away from Manchester airport, which for those of you outside the UK is one of the major regional hubs here. More than this, we were on one of the common approach ways, so as a child who was interested in paying attention to the detail around me, I knew the sights and sounds associated with aircraft overhead. I saw them every day, and I knew the directions they flew and the heights that they would be overhead depending on the wind direction. I had muy head in the clouds. When I was fifteen, and unusual ariel sight lead to The Mother Of All Special Interests in my mid teens, which I’ve written about before. I won’t cover that again here – I don’t need to, as there have been other unusual things I’ve seen in the sky too.

Firstly, there was the very odd bolt of lightening I saw one morning. I must have been around thirteen or fourteen at the time, and I was off school ill – perhaps with a bad cold. I was home alone, and bored. As I often did, I was sat on the back of the sofa looking out of the lounge window at the rolling Yorkshire hills around the house. I’d seen foxes out in the fields in the recent past, and wondered if I might see one again. Bam! My eyes darted in an instant towards a bright light that was towards the left of my vision. Somewhere behind the hill in the middle distance on the left, a bright white light shot upwards. It was bright like lightening, and lived for perhaps roughly the same amount of time, or maybe ever so slightly longer. In all other ways it was quite unlike lightening however. Firstly, as I said it clearly went upwards, disappearing into the cloud cover, which incidentally was not thunder cloud like in the least. Secondly, its appearance was that of an entirely straight line, and it didn’t touch the ground and clouds at the same time; it was like a bright white glowing rod appeared from behind the hill and shot up into the clouds. What was it? I have no idea.

In my final year of high school, having had the unusual sighting that lead to the mother of all special interests, I’d bravely told my closest school friend one morning on the bus on our way to school. ‘Friend’ just about fits here, incidentally, but this was more out luck than good judgement on my part, but that is another story. The bus dropped us at the bottom of a long steep hill which we had to climb to get to the school gates. We were still chatting about my sighting as we climbed the hill. I looked up at the sky, as I often do, and spotted something moving that didn’t look right. “Oh!” I said and pointed to the sky so my friend could see what I was looking at. He gasped in amazement – “What’s that?” he asked. I thought sceptically about how I’d read recently about many UFO sightings being attributed to planes being seen at odd angles. “It’s probably a plane at an odd angle”, I said. We both kept on looking. “That really is quite odd” I chipped in, and my friend agreed. It didn’t look like a plane, and he agreed about that too. It was’t flying on one of the usual flight paths either. We both tried to twist what we could see into a plane flying at an odd angle, or with the sun gleaming off it in a strange way. We couldn’t. To be honest, whatever it was was pretty high up – the sort of height that planes cruise at, and the looked like an odd mash of roughly three and four sided polygons, none of which looked remotely like wings . What was it? I have no idea.

My friend remembered this several years later, when the subject came up by chance. He was still genuinely enthralled that he’d seen something that neither of us could readily identify in the sky. What freaks me out more is the odd synchronicity that it happened on the very morning that we discussed my previous sighting. Coincidence? Probably. Plane at an odd angle and glinting strangly in the sun? Probably? But not definitely.

Another strange episode of synchronicity happened to my some years later, when I was living in London. It was summer, and I was on my fifteen minute walk to the tube, on my way to work. Suddenly, I wondered what had become of my first major girlfriend. This was the fantastically kind and gentle (but ultimately unfaithful) woman who I’d spent a solid two years of my life with from the age of around fifteen. I was in my mid twenties now, and I hadn’t been in touch with her since we slit up nearly ten years previously. I hadn’t thought about her for years. But there I was wondering where she was and what she was doing as I wandered down the road to the tube.

I trotted down the stairs to the platform, and walked along to the place I invariably stood to get on the train. Bam! There she was. about three or four people away, standing on the platform. I physically reeled and felt faint. This was just freakishly odd. Could it really be her, or was it just someone that looked a little like her? I spent the couple of minutes waiting for the train stealing surreptitious looks, whilst she was oblivious. The train came, and we all got on. She got on at the next door, and the train was packed, so that was it. It was her, I’m convinced of it. Once again, it is the synchronicity of things here that freaks me out.

You don’t need to have a keen attention to detail to have seen the next thing. But was it a cruel trick from within the family, perpetrated for some still unknown reason? Probably. But definitely?

These incidents happen back when I was in my mid teens again, perhaps a year or two after the unusual sightings. Both had one thing in common – they happened on Saturday mornings, whilst I was out of the family home working behind the counter in our local newsagents. I got up early on Saturdays to open up the shop and get the newspapers sorted into the various rounds for the boys and girls to take and deliver. The job was my first real job, and was offered after I’d been a conscientious paper boy for several years.

The other thing going on in my life at this time was fairly severe depression. I’d recently split from the long term girlfriend mentioned above, and I was a mess, who wasn’t coping with life very well at all. The bpttom had fallen out of my world.

I’d work at the newsagents until lunchtime when the local daily paper arrived, and then, having seen these out on their deliveries, I’d lock up the shop and head home. On this day, I got home, headed up to my room, and Bam! (hope you are not getting too tired of my use of Bam! yet, but it does seem to sum up my feelings each time).

My room was, umm, well different. Nothing big, you understand, but different none the less. The first time this happened, the mattress on my bed had been pushed askew from the bottom of the bed, so that it was hanging off the bed. The mattress was big and heavy, so it wasn’t the sort of thing you could do by accident, say whilst hoovering. Under the mattress was also where I kept my stash of porn (these of course being the pre-internet days when porn was actually printed on paper, and working in a newsagents made it easy to get hold of). I immediately suspected my younger brother, who would have been fifteen or sixteen at the time, so I went and asked him. “Have you been in my room this morning? I’m not going to be angry if you have, I’d just like to know.”, I asked in an annoyed voice. “No”, he said, looking genuinely taken aback and confused. I asked my parents the same question, and drew the same response. How odd. A few months later I returned from my morning selling sweets and crisps  and the odd magazine to find my wardrobe doors open. Once more, all very subtle, but not only had I not left them open that morning, but I never left them open. Again, plausible denials from everyone who had been in the house over the course of the morning. Odd, odd, odd.

The final thing I’d like to write about is something subtle that I’ve noticed for a great many years. Even I suspect there is some mundane explanation – most likely coincidence – at play, but it does seem to happen an awful lot.

Street lights. They are, of course just about everywhere. And being a bright source of light, my eyes tend to get drawn to them, even if only out of the corner of my eye. And what happens to street lights when the bulb starts to reach the end of it’s life? Well the bulb goes out, and then comes back on. Sometimes this is a flicker, but very often, it is an extended random period of the light being off and then it being on for a while, before it goes off again. How do I know? well I’ve observed it, of course. A lot. None of this is odd, however.

What is odd, is how frequently I approach a street light, either on foot or in my car, and the light changes state as I approach. I’m not talking randomness here. My eyes pick out changes in lights from a great distance – I suspect that the more I’ve noticed this effect, the more I’ve become atuned to look for it. But in all seriousness, I will frequently drive down a road where you can maybe see the lights for a good several hundred yards. No flickering or state changing. Suddenly, as I approach a light, it will change state. If it was on, it’ll go off. If it was off, it’ll come on. But for as long as I’ve been able to see it – sometimes several minutes if I’m walking, it won’t have changed state. Sometimes this will happen to me on my commute, and I’ll pay special attention as to where the light was. I’m interested to see if it does the same thing again in following days. What’s surprising is perhaps how frequently it does repeat. Over the course of a week, say, some lights have repeated their apparent behaviour two or three times.

One autumn, when I worked in London, and had to walk over London Bridge each evening towards the tube, I had a light that scored perhaps even a little better than this. It’s state changed more often than not as I approached it, for several weeks.

There’s a strangely similar effect that sometimes happen to me on spring mornings as I drive to work. Time it just right, and the street lamps are starting to switch off in the dawn light. It’s amazing though, how for a few weeks I find myself driving along with lights switching off as I approach them. Not just one set in quick succession, but often several sets over some distance.

Coincidence and an over active imagination? Probably. Yet these oddities really do happen a lot. It feels more than coincidence.

All of the odd things I’ve described above mess with my head, because I prefer to deal in logic and in certainties. Yet here are things that I have experienced that seem to defy the logic that I hold so dear.

The world feels like an odd place. But that oddness is ever so slightly magical too.

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