I woke up this morning to an unusual amount of neighbourly buzz on the street outside my home. I’d been sleeping like a log for the past eight and a half hours, and everything had been quite normal when I turned in last night, so I couldn’t imagine what the commotion could be about. I threw on a bathrobe (my yellow one with a duck beak on the hood, just in case the mood needed lightening) and went outside to see what was what.

It turns out there was a massive wind storm last night.Everyone’s bins, which had been put out last for garbage collection this morning,  had been overturned. Rubbish was strewn all over the street, some if it in quite comical ways – for example, the dirty nappy draped over the Pilkinson’s front fence, and the cracked teapot sitting decorously in the middle of the roundabout.

The real doozy, though, was the mysterious object perched atop Mrs. Jenkins’ garden shed. I managed to get a pretty good look and I have to tell you, it looked like a UFO to me. I’ve never seen anything like it. Bernard from number 24 reckons it’s a hyperbaric chamber, but I’m sceptical, mostly because I don’t know what that is. Gladys next door says it’s some kind of medical equipment item. Well, okay.

Regardless of the object’s provenance, there’s still an explanation lacking as to how it came to be perched on a garden shed in suburban Melbourne. Hyperbaric oxygen therapies might be an established thing, yes, and portable hyperbaric chambers may well exist as well. Fine. But how did this one get up there? Who sets up a medical device outside? Nobody: that’s who. I mean, somebody might, but it seems pretty unlikely. Maybe even less likely than a visit from outer space.

Maybe I’ve been watching too much Secure Scream… but I think not. Even if the mystery object is one of these oxygen chambers, it seems pretty likely to be that it was put on top of the shed by aliens. Granted, there was the wind and everything, but that was probably caused by aliens as well.