RIVER WATCH — Doucheclosure

Light 1 / 12 Correct calls 0 False positives 0 Missed anomalies 0

Review board

Field card — the seven signatures (real ones)

AIRLINER — steady heading, constant speed, red and green position lights either side of a white anticollision strobe. Sound arrives seconds late, or never, if it is high enough.
SATELLITE — a steady unblinking point. It carries no lights at all; you are seeing reflected sunlight. Straight, slow, and it fades out mid-sky when it enters Earth's shadow.
PLANET / STAR — does not move against the treeline, ever. Twinkles, because the atmosphere is moving even when it isn't. Stare at it in a dark field and it will seem to wander: the autokinetic effect. Use a reference — a branch, a post, a roofline.
DRONE — hovers, reverses, changes direction with no turn radius, blinks much faster than an airliner, and stays low and local.
BUG ZAPPER — low, fixed, at or below the treeline, warm orange, flickering when something flies into it. Check the ground before you check the sky.
METEOR — under a second, one direction, a trail, gone. Anything lasting more than a couple of seconds is not a meteor. That is the entire test.
UNEXPLAINED — the category you earn by emptying the other six first. No strobe, no engine, no fade, no arc, no signature of any kind. Log exactly what you saw and not one word more.

Take The Chair.

Twelve lights will cross this sky, one and sometimes two at a time. Watch each one all the way through — the tell is usually late. Then call it.

Ten of the twelve will have an ordinary explanation, and you are going to say so, in writing, with the time on it. The other two will not. Those two are only worth anything if the other ten are clean.

WING DOCTRINE: We do not doubt the river. Something has kept an eighteen-year appointment on that water and we take the man at his word. Our grievance is clerical: nobody ever built the control set. A sighting log with no airplanes in it is not a sighting log — it is a wish. This cabinet is the missing paperwork.