I have an aunt who lives by the sea. There is very little ambient light, so on a clear night, if you allow your eyes to adjust, you can see millions of stars.
One summer night, I was lying in a deckchair, alone in the dark, staring up at the most incredible sky. I can do this thing, if I switch my brain off, and go into a kind of reverie, I can ‘see’ the slow movement of the stars across the heavens, and ‘feel’ the planet turning underneath me, and myself as a tiny speck on the surface. Which is weird enough, I know. However...
It became apparent that one of the stars was not behaving like the others. While the rest of the stars were moving verrry slowly across my field of vision on a smooth path from bottom left to top right, one of them was...lagging. Like it was being left behind, and then doing a quick zig-zag to catch up. And not any random star, a bright one that was part of a constellation I recognised. It moved jerkily, like a fly, and when I looked directly at it, it seemed perfectly normal, but when I let my field of vision widen, after a moment of stillness, it would it would do a quick zig-zag into position.
FYI, this was before the advent of drones, or camera phones, and I was stone cold sober. I was trying not to lose my mood, so I tried to observe this without thinking about it, but when it became apparent that either a) a flaming ball of gas a trillion miles away was having a laugh with me (unlikely), b) I was going mental (possible, but if so this was an oddly specific way for my brain to go about it), or c) something was hovering in the sky, pretending to be a star, and not doing a very good job of it. At this point, I decided enough was enough and went to put the kettle on. Alien invasion? Tea.
I mentioned it to my aunt, pointed out the twitchy star, and left her and my cousin (also sane and sober) in the garden, gazing at the sky with furrowed brows.
I went back out with a tray of tea. Not only had my aunt seen the zig-zag movement, she told me, but the star had pulsed brightly three times, and then half a dozen tiny weeny sparks had flown off it, and were flying around nearby.
You are having a chuffing laugh, said I. But once my eyes had readjusted to the dark, there they were - tiny, barely perceptible sparks of light, wheeling among the stars in wide, slow arcs.
We watched them for a bit, and drank our tea. Then we went indoors to watch telly. There’s only so much a brain can process.