Back in 2018 I was living in a loft in an old highrise in downtown Los Angeles. This image was shot in March of that year from the sidewalk next to the building. Evidently it had rained earlier in the evening, and once the rain was over I had decided to step out into the fresh night air and shoot some street views.
What is that colorful gleaming circle at top center right? My first thought was it's an unusual lens flare, possibly caused by a drop of water on the camera lens. This was an entirely reasonable suspicion, given that the air must still have been damp from the rain. But then I looked up images of lens flares and raindrops on lenses, and they were not close matches at all; the complexity of colorful internal detail present in the "flare" in my photograph was lacking in all of the internet images I found, and also the absence of any other similar artifacts in the photograph is suspicious, as misty wet air would naturally be full of water droplets, but all of the images I found on the internet search were of groups of water drops, not isolated lone drops.
Of course, a flare doesn't have to be caused by water on the lens, but compare the first photograph with this other one from the same set. Very different, are they not?
Actually, all of the foregoing is just a lead-in to what I really wanted to talk about; that it reminds me of the fictitious creatures known as "Vitons" in the novel Sinister Barrier by British writer Eric Frank Russell. Vitons were described as living beings made of energy that resemble large floating spheres. They share the earthly environment with humans, but normally they are invisible and imperceptible to human senses. They are conceived as the true masters of this world, who raise humans as livestock, just as ranchers raise cattle, vampirizing humans by feeding on the electrochemical energy of human emotion. Well, in the novel this discovery of their existence was supposedly made in 2015, and that year came and went without any such startling announcements, so I guess the novel was not meant to be prophetic and we're safe^.
[Eric Frank Russell was (1905-1978) a "Fortean" writer who took the words of Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932), the American writer, ant-establishment-science iconoclast and cult favorite, fairly seriously when the latter said "I think we're property", half seriously, one-quarter tongue-in-cheek, as was his style. Russell's novel was originally serialized in the magazine Unknown in 1939 and published in book form in 1948]
(I do suspect that the light circle in the first shot really is an especially fancy sort of flare, despite its significant difference in appearance from the flares in the second shot -- due in no small part to its suspicious proximity to the same street light. But still, who knows -- maybe the camera really did capture something that was invisible to the naked eye)
Related post: Mysterious Floating/Flying Object
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