Slicing Up Eyeballs

24th April 2012

Post with 2 notes

Hello from the wastes of commercial farming.

I’m sorry to inform there’ll be a lack of photos for…a while. I am currently sequestered within the gaping maw of commercial farming in the Canterbury region. I spend my days among fields of lettuce and broccoli as far as the eye can see, cutting, trimming, packing, cutting, trimming…average of 10 hours a day. I live in a house about a minute’s walk from the fields, a blocky, modern structure less than a year old that looks extremely out of place in this flat expanse of sheep and barbed wire fences. It has nice amenities including wifi (unusable by my phone), tv some books and I share it with 6 other people. Though it is strikingly flat in all directions save for the occasional copse of trees and the Southern Alps that extend across the West horizon as distant blue saw tooth, over which, the other night at twilight, I’m pretty sure I saw a UFO.

I use UFO in the most general sense: a flying object (point of blinking light, really) that I have been unable to rationally classify as something I am familiar with. It began just after the sun set, right before the stars came out. Low on the horizon, over the mountains, to the northwest, was a stationary (DEFINITELY completely stationary) bright point of white light blinking erratically. It was about the brightness of a gaseous planet like Venus or Jupiter reflecting light from the sun. Earlier in the summer I had learned that you can see Saturn like this to the west. So, naturally I assumed it was Saturn. The light made sense geometrically, and it was in the right position. But why the crazy blinking? Well, since it was so low on the horizon, I had to look through more atmosphere to see it, furthermore, Canterbury, especially near the mountains is notorious for its high speed winds that come down off the mountains. It made perfect sense, I was looking at Saturn, whose reflected light was flashing randomly through thick, heavily distorted atmosphere because of the angle and winds, respectively. Bam. Rational thinking prevails. Then, just as I sipped my beer triumphantly basking in the neat order my brain organized my world into, the light suddenly became very dim, now flashing red and white, and began to move. Fast. From my perspective, about an inch per second. It took me a second to realize it was moving until it accelerated. It continued north growing dimmer and dimmer, still blinking, mind you, until it disappeared. Now, there were a multitude of planes towards the north because I am about 45 minutes south of Christchurch international, as the sane driver drives, so could compare speed. And as far as I know, planes don’t just sit still for a minute shining a wildly blinking light to the world, then suddenly shooting off into the night at highly physically improbable speeds. So, clearly it was an alien. Or helicopter. Nah, fuck that, alien.