Mysterious Object at Night (Patreon)

We interrupt our semi-regularly scheduled film reviews for an ancillary rant about a completely non-cinematic phenomenon that's currently driving me nuts. Normally this is the kind of thing I'd tweet about, but when I started mentally drafting the thread it became clear that it'd be ridiculously long, so here are some proper paragraphs.

First, important context: I am not even remotely a believer in the paranormal. Used to read Skeptic magazine, in fact. Many such subjects fascinate me (particularly cryptozoology; there's not much I don't know about the Patterson-Gimlin film, for example), but only in the sense that I'm intensely curious about what perfectly ordinary explanation might account for overly credulous reports. My mantra: Just because we don't currently know the answer doesn't mean that the answer is unknown to science.

That's Ed, I am regularly turning a streetlamp near my house on and off by walking toward it.

This is not the first time I've experienced that. Nor am I alone, by any means—so many people think they possess such an "ability" that there's a Wikipedia page devoted to it. While I hadn't previously seen that, I had done some research, many years ago, and concluded then that it was probably just selective perception. (The Wikipedia article mistakenly calls this "confirmation bias," which is not the same thing.) Seemed totally plausible. You notice when it happens, because it's kinda spooky, and just ignore the zillion times that it doesn't happen. 

This is different, though. For one thing, it's always the same streetlamp—none of the dozen-plus others I pass on my walk ever so much as flickers. For another, it happens virtually every time, whether I take said walk at 8pm or at 2am (and it varies that widely, depending upon when I feel like it). Plus, I know pretty much the exact point at which it will happen, which is roughly 10 steps before I reach the lamp. Interestingly, sometimes the lamp is off when I arrive, in which case it turns on when I reach that location. More often, it's already on and turns off. About 15% of the time, I'd estimate, nothing happens—it just stays on or off. But that's still way too frequent for random chance to be plausible, given that I'm out there at a different time almost every night. 

Just for the hell of it, last night I recorded the light going out, using my phone camera. Video's not super clear, because there are trees blocking my view of the lamp from the sidewalk, plus an iPhone can't register much more than a glob of light in any case. But you can in fact see it extinguish at almost the exact moment that I start to predict it'll do so. (Forgive my raspy voice. I live alone and only leave my house once a week to grocery shop at the moment, so that was probably the first time I'd spoken aloud in a day or two. Maybe even longer.) Again, this happens every night at that exact spot. Sometimes I do two circuits around my neighborhood—each takes me about 25 minutes—and it'll usually happen both times, with the light having re-illuminated in the interim. 

I find it remarkable that so many people have apparently reported this phenomenon, and yet there's no explanation that fits my own circumstances. I'm definitely not just noticing when a light happens to go out near me and ignoring all the times that doesn't happen—it's always the same light and it almost always goes out (or goes on). The other common hypothesis is that the bulb is starting to fail and thus cycling on and off regularly, but were that the case then the light should sometimes cycle when I'm directly beneath it, or a few steps past it, rather than occurring 100% of the time when I'm ~10 steps away on the approach. Something about a person walking there (not just me, I feel confident; can't emphasize enough that I make no claim to, I dunno, psychic energies or whatever the fuck) is triggering this, even if I have no clue what that could be and nobody else who's looked into "street light interference" seems to know, either. Theories welcome. Mostly I just had to vent about this to somebody, 'cause it's making me a little goofy.