This is an odd story, so bear with me.

In "Life of Pi" you are promised a story that proves the existence of God. This is a bit like that, except we are talking about an unidentified flying object.

So....

A few weeks ago I was walking my dogs at night. I usually follow the same path. Its easier, the dogs know the routine, and the path I choose avoids accidentally bumping into sheep or cattle at night. (When we do its not usually a problem, but I prefer not to disturb them.)This night I did a different walk. I went east to the perimeter fence, then followed it north until I hit the top fence, then west following that fence. In the distance you can see through three neighbours' paddocks, with the view terminating at the truck yard.

The truck yard is a recent innovation. Evidently a truck yard is appropriate use of farmland from a town planning point of view. As its not a direct neighbour to us it was all approved by the Shire without any notification to us. When I finally heard about it I was pretty annoyed, but its been a few months now and really doesn't make as much noise as I expected. We are in the middle of a farming zone, and there is often tractors droning away at odd hours. We are only a kilometre from the Great Alpine Road, so the background noise is already elevated. ( And, having said all that, its worth noting the land is like the worst paddocks in my place, useless farmland destroyed by gold dredging. Completely unviable as actual famland unless you were growing, say, hydroponics off the ground. Or fish in tanks....something detached from the soil.)

So on my walk I was looking, eventually, at the truck yard. Dark, nighttime, I was surprised to see a forklift operating in the truck yard, moving back and forth. Surprised in that they don't usually do much at night, most of the loading and moving happens in the daytime. And as I was thinking that I realized, "It's not a forklift. Forklifts have orange flashing lights, not red." More interested now, I kept walking towards it. The distance is maybe 2 kilometres, across flat paddocks, so its a clear view. But pitch black. If it was the trucking yard operating they would have their outside floodlights on, I thought. "Am I seeing something dodgy?"

I picked up the pace and moved closer.

Then something odd happened. The lights of the forklift lifted higher into the sky. Hard to estimate the actual height in the dark, but they rose until they were above the height of the shed. "What am I looking at?"

I was walking fast now, and as I walked the lights started moving towards the Great Alpine Road, rising all the time. There are some big gums along there, and along the Great Alpine Road. The lights were now higher than the gum trees, and moving really fast. They came along the Great Alpine Road at high speed, faster than cars travel that section ( which has a 100km limit) I was gobsmacked. And then.....

You know those threeD images that require you to unfocus your eyes so you can see a merged 3D image? What I was looking at was the red flashing light of the energizer of the cattle fence. Which was quite close to me. But because I was thinking it was 2 km away, every move I was making was distorting, in my mind, the perspective of the view. As I abruptly twigged what was going on my vision recalibrated with a jolt. It wasn't an alien spaceship travelling at high speed, it was me looking at a light a metre and a bit off the ground, and as I moved closer and around it its relative position in my view was changing.

User error. Or UFO.

Which version do you prefer to believe?