I was driving through the suburbs on my way home from my parents' house and glimpsed what looked like a luminous four-foot humanoid figure standing by the roadside. The illusion persisted for about a second: I was actually seeing a reflective stripe on the side of a newspaper vending machine. It must have had a design on it that suggested a tiny person standing in profile, and when my headlights played over it it seemed to materialize out of the dark. Acutely disappointing.