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There's a hot tub attached to my pool. Before I decided the whole thing was a 60,000 gallon hot tub, and too expensive for one person, I would occasionally sit out there in the warm water and watch the stars troop by.

"The Stars Like Dust," Isaac Asimov titled one of his books. Indeed! Indeed!

The best star view I ever had, tho, was when I still lived in Calgary, and was driving back from visiting a friend in Edmonton, 120 miles north. The Calgary Trail (as it is called when heading south) has no lights, and eventually all inhabited regions drop below the horizon. About halfway home, around midnight, I felt the call of Nature, and pulled over. I turned off the light on the car, and stepped into the drainage ditch by the side of the road. The darkness was absolute.

Then I looked up.

Damn near fell into the sky!!

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Most likely, it was your eyes playing tricks on you. The other night, during my stargazing, I was struck by how many of the stars seemed to be "moving." It's mostly about having no frame of reference. Your eyes/brain do the best they can to assemble an accurate picture, and sometimes they get it wrong.

Studies have been done on this phenomenon. Put people in a dark room with a fixed light, and after twenty minutes or so, ask them to report how far the light moved. All will report some movement, some will report quite a bit.

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Or so your eyes told your brain!

There are several factors at work here. First, the previously noted tendency in all humans to see motion where none exists. (This is a survival tool, in the wild. There may not be anything moving in the long grasses over there, but it's best to react as if there is, in case it's a sabretooth tiger!)

Second, there's that ol' debbil memory. Quite without our meaning it to, our brains enhance what we perceive. Again, a survival tool. But it also means details get skewed, every so slightly, over the years. And with accumulation of such skew, the reality can be lost.

In other words, your memory is sure and sound and unshakeable -- but it's also likely to be wrong. It happens. As I have mentioned before, because of everybody talking about it all around me when I was a child in England, I have "memories" of the Blitz -- which was over almost a decade before I was born.

As Homer Simpson has so aptly observed, stupid brain!

I was flying back to Calgary from a convention in Toronto, and looking out my window I saw a jet interceptor coming up fast below. "Where's he going in such a hurry?" I thought. I looked ahead on the jet's path and saw what appeared to be a large, silvery vehicle of some kind. It looked for all the world like those wooden mushrooms people used to use when darning socks. I fancied I could even see texturing in its surface, like spun aluminum.

I looked back to the jet, then looked back to the "mushroom" -- and it was gone. Don't know what it was, altho my best guess is a weather balloon, and the continued florward motion of my own plane took us to a spot where the "UFO" was no longer catching the sun.

(I leave a typo here, and ask a question. Why can I not type "sci-fi" without my spellchecker "correcting" it to "sic-fi," but the imps in my computer cannot tell "florward" is supposed to be "forward"?)