💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2023 › 202310 › 20231012-aerial-premonition.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:58:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-04)
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In 2015 I met a woman who was training to work as an air traffic controller. Given my love of aviation, we immediately connected and began to socialize quite frequently. She knew several recreational pilots based at the airport where she trained, and in December she helped arrange for me to go on a private flight with one of them.
Our flight plan took us north to fly over my parents' house. Along the route were several neighborhoods with which I was unfamiliar and in which had no interest. In my excitement about being in a private plane, I took dozens of photos anyway.
That year I was still living with my family, in no romantic relationship of any kind, and working part-time for spending money while finishing my last semester at university. Four years later in 2019, I was married, on a full-time IT career track, and buying a house of my own that was bigger than my parents'.
One day I began perusing my photos from 2015, including pictures from my private flight. It suddenly occurred to me that our route that day took me over the neighborhood we moved to in 2019. A careful analysis of the photos allowed me to determine the exact streets we passed over--and sure enough, one picture clearly showed our house. I had unwittingly taken an aerial photo of a house I would buy with my wife, four years before I bought it and a year before I even began dating her.
Incredibly, the same thing would happen seven years later. In 2022 I was given the opportunity to ride on B-29 Superfortress 44-69972 "Doc" from an airfield south of the city. The flight covered a much larger area than my private flight in 2015, and this time I was less focused on taking pictures of the countryside than pictures of the WW2-era bomber itself. Regardless, I captured several photos of the surrounding area.
This year my wife and I moved once again, this time to a small town even farther south than the airfield from which Doc flew out. The B-29's flight plan had taken me in the direction of the town, so I began to ponder if I had managed to take another inadvertent photo of our future house. I began the hunt through my camera roll yesterday afternoon.
After several minutes of searching and extensive consultation with Google Earth to check lines of sight, I eventually found a photo that contained our neighborhood. The picture was taken while the Superfortress was several miles away, and the camera on my smartphone had too low a resolution to make out individual houses. I did find where ours would be located, however, and that spot was indeed visible as a small blob in the very left side of the photo.
On two separate occasions, I have taken photos of neighborhoods from the air with no particular interest in them, and on two separate occasions I have later moved into houses explicitly visible in those photos. It's an awfully strange form of premonition.
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[Last updated: 2023-10-12]