It happened a second time on a different camera. Not the crosswalk camera. A privately-operated camera I have been accessing via a neighbor who does not know what I use the feed for. The camera is pointed at the street from the second floor, covering approximately sixty meters of the block. The gap in this feed is at a different time on a different day, but the duration is the same: three minutes and seven seconds. Not three minutes exactly. Three minutes and seven seconds, identical to the gap in the crosswalk camera footage to the second.

The probability of two independent gaps in two independent camera feeds being the same duration to the second by coincidence is not a calculation I am interested in performing because the result would be a number I would dismiss anyway. The implication is that the gaps are not camera failures or recording artifacts. They are interventions of a fixed duration. Three minutes and seven seconds is how long the intervention takes. Whatever the intervention is, it runs on a timer.

I have documented both gaps in the notebook. The gap timestamps do not overlap. The cameras are not on the same network. The recording devices are different brands, different firmware, different storage methods. The only thing they have in common is the duration of their absence and the fact that I have access to both.

UPDATE 10/25:

I said the only thing the two cameras have in common is the gap and the fact that I have access to both. That was wrong, or it was incomplete, same thing at this point. Called my neighbor again about the second camera, not about the footage this time, about who installed it, because I never actually asked that back in March, I just asked for access and he gave it to me and I didnt think to go further back than that. Company that mounted his came out two years ago under a different name than whats on the truck now, same street number on the invoice though, he still had it, he keeps everything in a shoebox same as I do, which I did not expect from a man who wont even bring his trash cans in before dark.

Same street number as the maintenance contract on the crosswalk pole. I pulled that number myself back in January for a different reason I wont get into here, its linked below if anyone cares enough to go digging, I dont love revisiting January (and I didnt connect it to any of this until tonight, sitting at the kitchen table with two pieces of paper from two different years that both say the same four digits before the dash.

So. Not the same network. Same hands, maybe, at some point, on some invoice, which isnt the same claim and I know that, Im not saying its the same claim, Im saying I dont believe in two coincidences stacked on top of each other anymore, I stopped believing in the first one back in March and Im not walking that back now. Three minutes and seven seconds twice. Same four digits twice. I havent called the number yet.