SkyNight

The Midnight Article “Augmented Reality: The Mysterious Appearance/Disappearance” was written by u/Floppyweiners and posted to r/MidnightPaper.

The text of the Article was as follows:

AUGMENTED REALITY: THE MYSTERIOUS APPEARANCE/DISAPPEARANCE Augmented reality is changing people’s lives. New applications utilizing augmented reality technology have been adopted rapidly by sky watchers all over the world. The application SkyNight, reached three million downloads last month as it released its new augmented reality feature. However, since the feature released, there have been a string of disappearances involving its users.

We interviewed the wife of amateur astronomer, Jonathan Dorsey, who lives in Essex County, “…one night, he came back all frantic. He told me the night sky makes no sense. He tried to show me some things on an app holding his phone against the night sky, but I couldn’t understand it for the life of me. I thought maybe he’d just had a few too many. A few nights ago, he set off on foot with a hiking backpack and I haven’t heard from him since…”

Police have searched around the estate and nearby hiking trails but have found no sign of Dorsey, or his belongings. His mobile phone is unreachable, but no foul play is suspected at this time.

Another similar story surfaced last week, involving a group of university students camping out in a Belgian national park. One student, Tomas Findler, recalls his friend being obsessed with navigation using stars, “I remember Hans forwarded me a documentary a few months ago about how Arabian sailors a long time ago used to navigate the seas using star maps. He was really interested in learning the technique himself and he spent many nights camping in the countryside learning how to use the stars to navigate. He convinced us to come out to Hoge National park to check out a new phenomenon he’d seen through this SkyNight app. However, the first night there, he kept holding his phone up to the sky and muttering that everything was wrong.” The group noticed in the morning that Hans was no longer with them. They waited there for 6 hours and after a short search, they contacted local rangers. Hans has been missing for 11 days.

This is only 2 of 29 such disappearances reported in the last month involving this app. At this time authorities have urged people not to download the app “SkyNight” and to be aware of your surroundings while using Augmented Reality applications.

It is still unclear what is causing these disappearances and what the relation is to the popular sky watching application. Stay tuned for updates on this story as we investigate the application in our next edition.

Description:

"SkyNight" is an Object-Type Oddity that takes the form of a smart phone application of the same name. It has the anomalous quality of causing it's users to disappear after using it. There have been 29 disappearances, most of them avid watchers of the night sky.

An interesting aspect to SkyNight's anomalous qualities is that one of the disappearance victims, Jonathan Dorsey, claimed that "the sky night makes no sense." It can be speculated, then, that SkyNight makes its users see the night sky in a distorted or strange manner.

It is unknown specifically how NightSky's users perceive the night sky after using it, how long it takes for them to see the sky in this way, or how long specifically it takes for the users to disappear.