Still no word from Nash, but I might have another possible breakthrough.

I was just sent a photo from a reader who claims to have been hiking along a park trail about 20 miles outside of Piedmont two weekends ago, when she got this picture on her cell phone.

At the time, she thought it was just a comet or a falling star… but when she heard about what I’ve been going through, she started to wonder if it was something more.

I’ve been getting so many odd conspiratorial messages lately that I was tempted to write it off as a random snapshot. But then I realized that several of you have written or posted comments to report seeing flashes of light in the sky around the same time, and I checked the metadata in the photo to see when it was taken.

April 11, 2008, at 10:43 PM

The night before Sam left me the voicemail that started all of this.

So I’m trying to figure out what this means. It’s starting to seem as though whatever happened in Piedmont had something to do with whatever it was that fell from the sky. But I’m not sure what it could have been, and if it were something bigger, like a meteor, there’s no way it wouldn’t have been in the news. Plus, there’s the military, and their attempt — for reasons I can’t yet figure out — to keep the whole thing quiet.

But at least this gives me another possible direction to explore.