I very much enjoyed this short YouTube video uploaded by Mike Hawkins. It is a television documentary but is not attributed, which makes it even creepier — nothing I love more than UFO apocrypha. The video concerns the purported 1897 crash of a UFO in an (unnamed) Texas town. It has an anachronistic advanced metal, radiation that produces bizarre human ailments, angry xenophobic townspeople and, of course, a buried alien body that the authorities refuse to grant permission to exhume. It’s seven minutes, nine seconds of heaven.
CNN covered a series of UFO sightings in Stephenville, Erath County, Texas. One guy captured video on his mother’s digital camera; the footage has been incorporated into the CNN report and is viewable on YouTube here.
Apparently some F-16s were training in the area, but witnesses who did see the fighter jets saw them after they saw the lights.
I defy you to watch this footage and claim that, since it pretty much looks like some blurry lights in the sky. As far as I can tell, this could be somebody on a hillside waving a flashlight in the general direction of a cameraphone.
Tantalizing proof that the Air Force is chasing UFOs or dude with a 4-cell Maglite? Give me the creepy gnome any day.
This is a very sad and scary story about the death of two family dogs from an attack of swarming bees in Riviera Beach, Florida. However, it is considerably harder to take seriously when the Riviera Beach Fire Rescue Division Chief calls Animal Control "critter control", and when there’s an accompanying ad for online first-person shooter game S.W.A.T. Assault. I feel bad for the family and the poor dogs… what a horrible way for a pooch to die.
Animal Control (not "critter control") removed 50 pounds of honeycomb in this case, which simultaneously gives me the jitters and makes me want baklava.
I remember the Killer Bee scare of my childhood, in which murderous insects from South America were heading north at the rate of 300 miles per year. They were supposed to kill everyone in California by, like, "the year 2000." That did not occur, but the warnings did inspire a song by a capella group The Bobs and a recurring SNL skit that most people probably don’t realize was called "Killer Bees." There is an animated GIF at Wikipedia which, viewed without reading the article and informed solely by residual 1970s hysteria, is fairly terrifying. However, the article, as with many wildlife articles, is obtuse enough to bore the reader long before it gets around to how we’re all going to die from bee attack, which it never does because, apparently, we’re not. Apparently the killer bees are not coming to bring fear and terror to our land.
Teens in the Argentine town of Clodomira, in the province of Santiago del Estero, have shot videophone footage of a "petido orejudo," or "small person," aka a dwarf or creepy gnome.
Watch the video for yourself at The Sun; following some footage of the Argentine teenyboppers frolicking joyously, the pointy-headed beast, looking not unlike a shadowy hallucination of the roaming gnome, goes strolling across the street; terror ensues. "This little thing was barking like a dog – but running sideways on two legs," one of the teens said according to the Sun article.
This is far from the first time Argentines have been terrorized by the creepy gnome. Back in March is when The Sun first covered the phenomenon of a creepy gnome being videotaped in General Güemes, Salta, and thereafter hundreds of Argentines came forward with sightings of Señor Creepy. Reportedly, residents in the vicinity of sightings are afraid to leave the house.
A team of Japanese climbers claim to have discovered the footprint of the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, in the Himalayas. The above photo purports to be the Yeti footprint (left) and a human foot print (right) — apparently stepping in snow barefoot in the Himalayas is just the price of doing business in cryptozoology, people.
According to the Guardian:
‘The creature’s footprints were found on snow at an altitude of about 4,800 metres (15,748 feet) in the Dhaulagiri mountain range in west Nepal…. The team said they have become adept at recognising the various beasts such as bear and snow leopards and are adamant that the ‘footprint’ was ‘none of those.’
‘Although the climbers spent more than 40 days on Dhaulagiri IV – a 7,661 metre (25,135-foot) peak where they say they have seen traces of yetis in the past – they could not furnish the press with a single photograph of the Yeti. ‘If I don’t believe in Yeti I would never come,’ said Yagihara.
‘Nepali Sherpas say the legend of the Yeti rests deep in the Himalayan psyche. Tales of wild hairy giants living in the snow are part of growing up in the mountains. These prompted many, including Sir Edmund Hillary, to carry out yeti hunts.
‘The Yeti is also considered more than a myth by the world of cryptozoology, the study of uncatalogued creatures, which takes seriously the idea that the alleged creature may be the last fragments of a race of giant man-apes that existed in central Asia more than 300,000 years ago.’
If you have never experienced An Engineer’s Guide to Cats, you are living in some sort of deprived agony and don’t even know it. I’m sorry to report that the brand spankin’ new An Engineer’s Guide to Voting does not tickle me to quite that degree, but it is still pretty amusing — and oh so topical. Plus, you can buy all their dorky T-shirts. Go. Now.
It always makes my day when I come across a headline that belongs in The Onion but is a real life news item. Because when a former Nebraska Senator launches a lawsuit against a god, that’s entertainment. I also like the concept that there’s no one that can be sued for the failures of natural selection. Personally, rather than a Permanent Injunction, I think he should have gone for a Preliminary Injunction to at least delay God’s wrath until the lawsuit was resolved. But then, I suppose God probably doesn’t settle. Snip from the BBC story:
A US judge has thrown out a case against God, ruling that because the defendant has no address, legal papers cannot be served.
The suit was launched by Nebraska state senator Ernie Chambers, who said he might appeal against the ruling.
He sought a permanent injunction to prevent the “death, destruction and terrorisation” caused by God.
Judge Marlon Polk said in his ruling that a plaintiff must have access to the defendant for a case to proceed.
“Given that this court finds that there can never be service effectuated on the named defendant this action will be dismissed with prejudice,” Judge Polk wrote in his ruling.
Mr Chambers cannot refile the suit but may appeal.
‘God knows everything’
Mr Chambers sued God last year. He said God had threatened him and the people of Nebraska and had inflicted “widespread death, destruction and terrorisation of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants”. (…read more.)
Interesting story about a new development in carbon nanofiber ‘paper,’ from Discovery.com:
It’s called “buckypaper” and looks a lot like ordinary carbon paper, but don’t be fooled by the cute name or flimsy appearance. It could revolutionize the way everything from airplanes to TVs are made.
Buckypaper is 10 times lighter but potentially 500 times stronger than steel when sheets of it are stacked and pressed together to form a composite. Unlike conventional composite materials, though, it conducts electricity like copper or silicon and disperses heat like steel or brass.
….[The] idea …that there is great future promise for buckypaper and other derivatives of the ultra-tiny cylinders known as carbon nanotubes — has been floated for years now. However, researchers at Florida State University say they have made important progress that may soon turn hype into reality.
Image from Sherrie Thai of Shaire Productions
InsideBayArea.com informs me that they’re thinking of using barn owls to fight the rat problem at People’s Park in Berkeley:
In an effort to reduce the number of grayish-brown rats that scamper
around People’s Park in the morning, eating scraps of food and hiding in the agave plants, the People’s Park Community Advisory Board will consider a proposal to install wooden owl boxes in the park to attract predator owls.Barns owls, which can eat at least a dozen or so rats a night, could
be nontoxic rodent controllers in the 2.8-acre UC Berkeley-owned and-run park off Telegraph Avenue, university officials said.
There is, floating around in the universe, a truly bizarre picture of yours truly holding a barn owl, published in the Sacramento Bee about 1980. As a child I volunteered at the Junior Museum and Science Center, where one of my favorite things to do was to display the raptors to Center visitors and give them a little talk on owl habits. The barn owl, inventively named “Barney,” was my favorite to use because he was friendly for a raptor and relatively placid. He was also of a size that made it reasonably comfortable for someone my size to hold him.
Holding the Great Horned Owl, on the other hand, was at best a grotesque misadventure. I remember one time when I was displaying him he lost interest in sitting on my gloved hand and figured it was an awesome time to take flight. Now that was a party — it was not unlike a lost scene from Harry Potter, I’m telling you.
Photo by Ian Michael Thomas.
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