It’s a pyramid. In China.

Wait, it gets weirder.

It’s on top of a mountain and is not (as far as researchers can tell) a burial tomb for a royal dynasty. In fact, local legend has it that the elevated platform has been used as a UFO launching ground.

Nine scientists form the team that will travel to the western province of Qinghai and the mouth of this 165-198 foot tall structure known as the “ET Relics.”

“The pyramid has three caves with openings shaped like triangles on its façade and is filled with red-hued pipes leading into the mountain and a nearby salt water lake,” says China’s state-run Xinhua agency.

To add to the mystery, iron debris and unusually shaped stones are scattered about the desolate area.

“The theory that the pyramid was created by extra terrestrials is “understandable and worth looking into…but scientific means must be employed to prove whether or not it is true,” says Yang Ji, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

More information on the pyramids of China can be found in this handy YouTube clip.

[Weird Asia News via Derren Brown blog]

Listen to the WeirdThings Podcast gang talk about this story as well!

No words.

Sure, let’s invent a robot that utilizes the sophisticated technology necessary to artfully carve up a soft meat like a ham. Great idea.

When the streets are littered with the cleanly picked skeletons of the resistance, let me know how much you enjoyed your dinner.

[Geekologie]

They are coming. They don’t like being filmed. They are the otters who will one day govern Boca Raton, FL.

[Sun-Sentinel]

That cute little star that you’ve pointed out to your son/daughter/neice/ward you’re training to fight crime? It could be an insanely badass wormhole big enough to fit a human or spaceship.

So the next time you’re telling the story of the sky make sure not to skip the part where we could all be sucked in a sweet wormhole and battle beings from another dimension. And stuff.

[Wired]

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange spoke with The Guardian including this awesome tidbit:

Many weirdos email us about UFOs or how they discovered that they were the anti-christ whilst talking with their ex-wife at a garden party over a pot-plant. However, as yet they have not satisfied two of our publishing rules.
1) that the documents not be self-authored;
2) that they be original.
However, it is worth noting that in yet-to-be-published parts of the cablegate archive there are indeed references to UFOs.

So causing an international kerfuffle revealing covert forces for freedom and democracy in the regions most in need of it, putting in danger deep cover assets and confirming Moammar Gadhafi as a cold pimp is totally within bounds, but UFO cable is a little too dicey to reveal?

[Alley Insider]

This news report on a Jamaican Ghost was sent to us today. Our question to you the reader, was this set up from the start or did the news crew genuinely stumble upon an afflicted family? Thanks to Nathan for sending this in.

Vote in the comments!

Scientific American takes a good long look at the crossroads between moss and animal: the bryozoan. To celebrate, we are reposting one of the most disgusting bryozoan videos we’ve ever posted. Hooray!

[Scientific American]

via Pharyngula

*probably not

But still, they did release this totally ominous press advisory:

NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2

WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

I, for one, welcome our new overlords!

We are nearly positive that this super creepy infomercial for the Synthetic Somatology program of Gemini Somatics is viral marketing for some upcoming video game / movie. Still, it’s pretty well done and represents a fun mystery for you, the readers of this fine blog.

Even if there isn’t a real program soliciting your DNA so you can be the Jango Fett to the Clone Troopers of the future, it’s a fun hypothetical to kick around. Would you do it?

Thanks to Weird Things reader Lisa for passing this along.

Seriously though… dude…

Just like solids, liquids and gases, this recently discovered condition represents a state of matter. Called a Bose-Einstein condensate, it was created in 1995 with super-cold atoms of a gas, but scientists had thought it could not be done with photons, which are basic units of light. However, physicists Jan Klärs, Julian Schmitt, Frank Vewinger and Martin Weitz of the University of Bonn in Germany reported accomplishing it. They have dubbed the new particles “super photons.”

The discovery has created a mad rush for the creation of a new strain of weed to fully appreciate the splendor. In other news: dude…

[Live Science]

Well, humanity had a pretty good run. Snakes have learned to fly and now we are on borrowed time.

Five related species of tree-dwelling snakes found in Southeast and South Asia may just be the worst nightmares of ophidiophobes (people who have abnormal fears of snakes). Not only are they snakes, but they can “fly” — flinging themselves off their perches, flattening their bodies, and gliding from tree to tree or to the ground.

…Socha says, “the snake is pushed upward — even though it is moving downward — because the upward component of the aerodynamic force is greater than the snake’s weight.”

“Hypothetically, this means that if the snake continued on like this, it would eventually be moving upward in the air — quite an impressive feat for a snake,” he says. But our modeling suggests that the effect is only temporary, and eventually “the snake hits the ground to end the glide.”

See what hell you have wrought Samuel L. Jackson. You’ve ridden the beasts from your plane only to force their evolution here on Earth.

[Science Daily]