Today’s Weird Things chat is a probing look at the oddest interstellar kidnapping stories ever told. Spark up that fire in the sky, we’re looking for the weirdest Alien Abduction Stories in the world.

Here are the ground rules:

• They have to have been reported somewhere else first. No making things up out of whole cloth.

• PLEASE keep them as short as possible.

Email all submissions to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail. I’ll see you kids right here at the front page at 5:30 p.m. EST where we will hash out the ultimate champion.

Here is our baseline, as provided by Three Cheers.org:

The abductee is often told they were chosen to either help continue the alien race or that they are going through this to aid in salvaging humanity.

They are then often escorted to rooms containing humanoid babies or youngsters which are half alien – half human hybrids, they are then informed that some of these children are theirs and are enthusiastically encouraged to personally interact with them.

The truth is out there, we find it today at 5:30 p.m. EST.

Here is the trailer for a new documentary entitled I Know What I Saw, which attempts to gather the most decorated, credible panel of people who claim to have seen UFOs. Among those interviewed are military men and government officials from the US and abroad.

Thanks to John Houdi for the tip.

Please follow the cues for this YouTube playlist throughout the post.

In the sewers of North Carolina lies a strange creature. Pulsating and wiggling in the first video on this playlist. Could it be of alien origin? CHUD? A metaphor of a chemical society gone too far?

Apparently none of the above. According to the How Stuff Works blog this thing is called Bryozoa. It’s a 350-million year old primitive animal life form comprised of smaller, ickier life forms. Which brings us to video number two, as it happens, down on the Bayou they don’t take to kindly to 350-million year old primitive animal life forms. Watch as a pair of Bryozoa are blown to bits by way of a M1 Springfield 30.06 rifle. And Rage Against The Machine.

But just when things have come to a shocking conclusion, we get the cliff hanger. Those gun nuts got the wrong guy/thing. The inquisitive minds at Deep Sea News consulted an expert on Bryozoa and he claims the sewer video features a pulsating look at Tubifex (video number three, please) a collection of worms that normally are found at the edge of polutted streams. In the NC sewer video, he claims that they’ve gathered around each other and the movements are caused by one worm contracting, which stimulated all the others to move.

Credit to Brian Brushwood and Dodd Vickers for digging through this mess on Twitter last night.

“Smoke usually looks smoky”, truer words were never spoken. Has Ms. Deana Smith never heard of smoke rings? Though Ms. Smith thinks it’s a sign from god and the UFO expert thinks it’s an extraterrestrial visitation, it is probably just a special effect smoke from the volcano ride at King’s Dominion, pictured below.

It’s funny how the media reporters didn’t bother do go check if this was a daily occurrence at the park, if they had bothered to film the volcano ride itself, they would have debunked this mystery much sooner, but it’s more fun to say the ring was made by aliens….or god.

Volcano Roller Coaster at King's Dominion

Here is a full length video of the mysterious smoke ring sans annoying nine second commercial and newscasters:

The Gray Brothers were filming their latest documentary called “Supernatural Investigator : The White Mountain Abduction” when they became the luckiest film crew in the world.

They were interviewing relatives of Betty and Barney Hill, the first couple ever to come forward claiming alien abduction, when the lights appeared in the sky. Perfect timing, and even more perfect timing to promote the documentary.

Penn Bullock reports:

Look at these silver pinpricks soaring through the sky. The videos were reportedly recorded on June 4 and 7 over Kariong, New South Wales, Australia. Are they spaceships? One of the videos, kindly brought to light by Phantoms and Monsters, seems to be shot from the beach; the other from an airplane or even a military jet.

These pictures were purportedly taken by a Hungarian military pilot of a clearly-outlined white disc hovering in the clouds. Whether the videos and pictures are authentic or not, we at Weirdthings can’t verify.

Penn Bullock reports:

photo credit: Markusram

Last week an Air France flight disappeared over the ocean on its way to Brazil, while flying into an electrical storm.

UFOlogist Michael Cohen believes that the plane may have vanished into one of two UFO vortex exits over Brazil. Following this line of reasoning, the plane’s disappearance into the vortex portends much worse in humanity’s near future. Rumblings in the ether indicate that the aliens are planning an imminent invasion. Phantoms and Monsters reports:

It appears a race in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy has ‘discovered’ us. These ‘unmanned’ surveillance discs have made their way home at some point and reported back on our existence. The floodgate has opened.

South-West China as well as Siberia are areas where the vortex is tipped to move to shortly.

Let me predict: Sightings of UFOs by will be unprecedented over the next few weeks. We are at a minute to midnight in terms of ending our isolation. Open unilateral contact is months, weeks, days or even hours away.

We are about to meet our universal brethren: are you ready?

And when Michael Cohen provides the “highly credible sources” he claims confirms any of his theory, then set your phasers to kill.

An Oxfordshire farmer woke up one morning to find this epic jellyfish crop circle in his field (or so he claims). The farmer, R. Spence, has submitted that no one has access to his land, leading us to speculate that a race of alien Jellyfish are trying to make a bold political statement. Notice how the aliens have been getting far more ornate with their crop circles since the first ones started popping up in the sixties, we wonder why that is?

Since the dawn of civilization man has been asking the big questions: Why are we here? How did we come to be here? Is there a god? Is Bigfoot an alien?

Chris Noel, Bigfoot enthusiast, author and investigator may not be able to shed much light on the first three, but in an interview with the Tampa Examiner he tackles the big question of Bigfoot’s origins.

-For more great drawings and caricatures by Nick Worthey, check out his website.

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

In an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation called the “The Chase” a long running problem in Star Trek was finally solved – Why do all the aliens in Star Trek look humanoid. The answer was not “budget”. It was that a race that lived 4.5 billion years ago seeded the galaxy with its DNA. Humans, Vulcans, klingons etc., all got their imprint from them. We kind of look like each other because we all look like some alien race from 4.5 billion years ago. Problem solved. But is Intelligent Design really a satisfying answer?

If we find aliens that look like us, what other explanations could account for them?

Kidnapping
Having to deal with a slightly more sophisticated audience that grew up watching Star Trek, the producers of Stargate and the producers of the television series had to come up with a simple explanation for there being humans all over the galaxy in present day time. Their solution was a popular one in sci-fi literature: We were kidnapped. Over the last 100,000 years humans have been relocated to the distant corners of our universe. Once there, they go about their business. Building monuments to their gods (Star Trek and Stargate) or becoming thriving interstellar civilizations more advanced than us on earth (Iain Banks’s The Culture).

(more…)

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

An important part of the Star Trek mythos is the idea of mind-to-mind contact. Spock uses this to probe other people’s minds and even transplant his entire consciousness. Counselor Troi used it to read the feelings of other species. It’s a wonderful concept that has fascinated people since at least the 1800’s. Unfortunately, we’re no closer to it being real now then we were back then.

We can imagine all sorts of technology assisted ways to make this real, but there’s nothing sexy about your Vulcan girlfriend asking you to step into an fMRI so she can read your voxels (okay, maybe a little sexy). What we need are some organic solutions or explanations for brain to brain transmission that make the concept a little more plausible. (more…)

What you see above is The Devil’s Millhopper, a genuine hellmouth (according to local legend) which has been the centuries-old site of sacrifice and kidnapping for Beelzebub’s benefit. It also looks like a Northwest Florida hole in the ground.

Weird Things investigated the sinkhole for itself this weekend. What we found were tales of princesses, lavender people, tears and glory-thieving aliens.

Read it all… AFTER THE JUMP.

(more…)