I work for an organization that recovers surveillance footage. I’m not supposed to talk about this.

I’ve been doing this job for three years. I’m not going to tell you which organization, or which city, or what my actual title is. What I can tell you is that the footage is real, and what we’ve been finding for the past fourteen months has stopped being something I can explain away.

The job is simple on paper. Recovered drives, decommissioned security systems, footage from locations that have been condemned, demolished, or abandoned. We archive it. We log it. We flag anything that requires further review.

Fourteen months ago, a drive came in from a commercial office building. The building had been empty for eight months. The security system had no reason to still be running. The drive had no reason to still be recording.

But it was.

I was the one who reviewed the footage. Standard procedure — fast forward through the empty hallways, flag anything anomalous, submit the timestamp log. I was forty minutes into a twelve hour file when I saw the first one.

02:17 AM.

The lights in the corridor shut off. Not a power cut — everything else stayed on. Just the corridor lights. For exactly sixty seconds.

When they came back on, the chair at the end of the hall had moved.

I flagged it. Submitted it. Didn’t think about it again for three weeks.

Then the next drive came in. Different building. Different city. Different year on the timestamp. I was running the footage at 4x speed when something made me slow down.

02:17 AM.

Corridor lights off. Sixty seconds. A door that had been closed was open.

I pulled the first file back up. Compared the timestamps frame by frame. The sixty second gap was identical. Not approximately identical. Identical to the frame.

I didn’t submit that one straight away.

Over the next four months I went back through every drive we had processed in the previous two years. I found the timestamp in eleven separate files. Eleven different locations. Eleven different camera systems. Some of the buildings had no connection to each other. Different owners. Different cities. One of them was in a different country.

02:17 AM. Every time. Sixty seconds of darkness. Something different when the lights came back.

I started keeping my own copies.

My supervisor noticed I was pulling old files. I told him I was cross-referencing anomaly logs. He accepted that. I don’t think he’s looked at the footage himself in a long time.

Last month we received a drive from a location I recognised. I hadn’t been there in years but I knew the layout. The corridor. The door at the end.

I reviewed the footage alone.

02:17 AM. Lights off.

When they came back on there was something at the end of the corridor that wasn’t there before. It didn’t move during the remaining six hours of footage. It was still there when the recording ended.

I’ve submitted the timestamp log. I didn’t flag the anomaly.

I don’t know what the right thing to do is anymore. What I know is that there are twelve files now, and whatever is happening at 02:17 AM has been happening across locations that have no business being connected.

If you’ve seen something you can’t explain on a security feed — a timestamp that doesn’t make sense, a gap in the recording, something in the frame that shouldn’t be there — I need to know.

We’re still trying to piece this together.