Last night, driving home at about midnight, the moon was so huge and orange and *pendulous* that I nearly pulled over just to make sure it wasn't trying to follow me home. (Harvest Moon coming, yay! I'm sitting here eating feral tomatoes for lunch, mmm.)

Or maybe it was because yesterday evening I was rereading Jim Macdonald's account on re-tracing the route of Betty and Barney Hill's UFO abduction - and encountering the same UFO they did! (The Betty and Barney Hill case was one of the first, and definitely the most famous, alien abduction case, chronicled in the book The Interrupted Journey, which MacDonald uses as his guide.)

If there's one thing that I love more than a truly unexplained paranormal mystery, it's a previously unexplained mystery getting an actual, inarguable explanation. Because a real true scientific explanation means that the results are *reproducible* at will, and how cool is that? (Anybody want to go up to New Hampshire and take a UFO tour sometime? :D If I do end up moving up there, I will totally be trying it.)

The other reason I love them so, though, is that they tend to make the skeptics look almost as silly as the true believers. After all - if the skeptics had known what they were talking about, it would've stopped being a mystery a lot longer ago, right? Nearly every time something gets explained, it reveals that the methods of the skeptics are quite as bad as the methods of the believers.

For example, with Macdonald's post - nobody, on either side, in *fifty years*, had bothered to actually re-trace the route. The believers took them at their word, and the skeptics assumed that their memories were too inaccurate for it to matter. But according to what Macdonald did, the Hills were actually *amazingly* accurate in their account of the original experience. If you do exactly what they said they did, then you will see and experience *exactly* what they saw and experienced (minus minor perceptual differences.)

If the Hills' account of the light they saw in the sky was perfectly, reproducibly accurate ... what about all those other yet-unidentified lights-in-the-sky stories that we've been chalking up to distorted after-the-fact accounts?

(PS: OMG IS IT DEROS OR IS IT THETANS? (OMG, THETANS. I never made the connection before. I now officially blame Scientology on the Doctor. d-: ))

Oh Jack, how I have missed you!

Also: Why did nobody *tell* me that the Master was *CADFAEL*?

More importantly, why is nobody writing lots and lots of excellent fanfic about Cadfael!Master??
If everybody can pretend Simm!Master aten't dead, I don't see why we can't do the same for Cadfael. Just change the timing a teeny, tiny bit and nobody has to die. D:

Or, y'know, he has a whole *lifetime* there to play in. And since the chameleon circuit makes false memories, who's to say he stayed human the whole time? There's endless places you could go with that, and by Rassilon, I want to know what grandfatherly!Master would've been like.

Oh, oh, oh, you know what would be the most excellent thing ever? Cadfael!Master/Hartnell!Doctor. Mmmmmmmmm. There's got to be some way to work that.

(note: I have somehow managed to stay unspoiled as to how Jack and Martha & etcetera escape from the end of time with no Tardis. So I might as well stay unspoiled 'till next week, please.)