Weird Things reader Robin sends us this picture from a mall in Bangkok. It looks like an art installation. But is also attached to a t-shirt shop. Which conveniently sells shirts of Hitler Ronald McDonald.

Pretty bizarre.

Spotted at a Kroger.

[@ITJanitor]

P. Selvakumar was a man cursed. Being physically fit 15-years ago, the man had attacked and killed two dogs through stoning. This violence caused him, in the eyes of him and his family, to be stricken by the inability to move his limbs freely and loss of hearing. He tried salves and other such cures to make him better, but nothing would work. However, 3 years ago, he went to an astrologer.

This astrologer gave him some advice: marry a dog.

By marrying a dog, he would appease the spirits and show that he had atoned for his crimes. This is actually quite a common aspect of Indian culture, with many people marrying animals and sometimes objects to appease spirits. A famous example is actress Ashwarya Rai marrying a tree so that her engagement to another Bollywood actor wouldn’t have bad signs against it, as they would already be spent on the tree. However, this practice is actually illegal in India, as it practices the caste system, something that has been deemed illegal and taken out of the constitution.Rai has been taken to court about the matter.

The bride, named Selvi, who you see picture above was dressed in an orange sari, was taken to the temple where vows were exchanged, somehow, and the couple were married. The villagers cheered the newly-weds, and soon enough, Selvakumar alleges he was cured.

[Telegraph]

[The Occultist]

Ladies and gentleman, the Tailless Whip Scorpion otherwise known as the Whip Spider which is actually neither a scorpion nor spider. Discuss…

[Nat Geo]

Is it Music Monday up in this piece or what? This little ditty comes from Weird Things reader Joatmon who worked with band The Indoorfins to sing about the Tiktaalik, a fish that walked on its fins.

Read all about this awesome creature here.

It’s a mellow groove to an evolutionary link. Tik tik tik Tiktallik!

[Wikipedia]

The random opening could be related to an oil well abandoned in 1950 that’s close to the home. The only silver lining now is if the opening leads to a Goonies-style adventure.

But it probably won’t.

Unless it does.

[KTLA]

How did folks describe UFO phenomenon before we had the science fiction constructs to fill in the blanks of interstellar travelers from deep space? Probably a lot like 12-year-old George Campbell of Sherman, Texas in 1898.

“Last night papa and I were riding along the ‘Eighty-foot Road’, about two and a half miles [4km] north of town, when all at once everything got very bright. We saw a great ball of fire coming down toward the ground. It got within about three feet [90cm] of the ground and seemed to rest for a while and then it went back up until it got clear out of sight. There was a buzzing sound all the time.”

George described the ball as 10 feet wide and not emitting any heat.

[Fortean Times]

Marvel at the various life cycle of the fantastical Turritopsis nutricula, a jellyfish that is, for all practical purposes, immortal. This strange creature reaches adulthood, transforms itself back into a child, then lives through it’s life again. Think of it as Groundhog Day with a jellyfish.

While old age can’t kill it, the creature is still susceptible to disease and fatal injuries.  Read more about this fascinating forever-fish here.

Maybe it’s the summer time, but weird beach stories are just dominating the news lately. Yesterday we had a couple of Russian jackasses strapping a mule to a parachute for publicity and today we get news that 500 penguins washed ashore in Brazil, dead as Dillinger.

About 500 of the black-and-white birds have been found just in the last 10 days on Peruibe, Praia Grande and Itanhaem beaches in Sao Paulo state, said Thiago do Nascimento, a biologist at the Peruibe Aquarium.

Most were Magellan penguins migrating north from Argentina, Chile and the Falkland Islands in search of food in warmer waters.

Many are not finding it: Autopsies done on several birds revealed their stomachs were entirely empty — indicating they likely starved to death, Nascimento said.

Don’t you hate it when you leave the house to get something to eat and nothing you like is open? Thanks to Mike Beam for sending this in.

[MSNBC]

Real picture. Thanks to Weird Things reader Mike Beam.

[Telegraph]

Boom. How’s that for a Monday morning? That thing looks like the Yeti of cats.

As described by Gadopoder:

These little (big) guys are the oldest living relative of modern day cats. The Pallas’s Cat is the oldest living species of a clade of felids that includes the modern genus Felis. This feline, along with the extinct Martelli’s Cat, was probably one of the first two modern cats to evolve from Pseudaelurus approximately 12 million years ago.

Hit up their site for more pics.

[Gadopoder]

So you’re a cute little monkey, scampering about the Amazon. For the sake of this discussion, your name is Joe. All of a sudden you hear someone yell, “Hey Joe! Nice haircut!” You look around, but don’t see anyone. What anonymous stranger is shouting compliments through the thick underbrush of the rain forest? Do they really like my haircut, or was it one of those backhanded compliments?

Lost in thought you make a left through a bush only to find yourself face to face with a gigantic jungle cat. You’re paralyzed with fear. The cat repeats his haircut compliment in what you now realize is just an uncanny monkey impression.

“By the way,” Jungle Cat purrs in his natural brogue. “Your hair makes your face look fat.”

And with that, you’re devoured. Victim of a deadly impression.

[Live Science]

Well now…

The “King of Kings” statue, one of southwest Ohio’s most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati.

The lightning strike set the statue ablaze around 11:15 p.m., Monroe police dispatchers said.

The sculpture, 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised, similar to a referee signaling a touchdown. It was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame, which is all that remained early Tuesday.

After the blaze erupted, first respondents included local fire and police officers, as well as officials from the Department of Irony and Metaphorical Symbolism.

[MSNBC]

Weird Things Live: Hunting the Night Creeper from Andrew Mayne on Vimeo.

Last Monday night in front of a live internet audience we set out to solve the mystery of the Night Creeper. Ghost? Frogman? Or something else? Although we’re pretty sure we figured it out, we haven’t definitively proved our theory. The mystery continues…

Running time 55 minutes.

Check out our photos of the scene on Flickr.

A young Chinese boy who was born with a thick patch of skin on his back had a surgery to remove the reason he’s earned the nickname “Turtle Boy” by school bullies.

[News.Com.Au]

The crew invents a new form of inter-species prejudice, declares their willingness to do stupid things in the name of science and then goes metaphysical.

Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
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Download url:

http://itricks.com/upload/WT051410.mp3

Hundred-year-old woman grows horn in forehead . The horn began growing on the left side of the forehead of Zhang Ruifang last year. Now it measures 5-6 centimeters long but the elderly woman feels no pain in the horn.

Thanks to WT fan Brian for passing this along.

[Zuzutop]

[National Geographic via Boing Boing]

Pretty self-explanatory. Big ups to Atlas Obscura!

WARNING: The following post contains SPOILERS about the new film The Box. If you do not wish to read SPOILERS, do not read this post. For it does indeed contain SPOILERS. SPOILERS.

Everyone knows the scenario: a well-dressed stranger arrives at your door and presents you with a wood-paneled box, atop which is a glass dome containing a shiny, red button. He says something to the effect of, “if you press the button, someone that you don’t know will totally die and you’ll receive x amount of cash money. Aw yeahz.” What do you do?

This past weekend, Richard Kelly’s adaptation of the classic Richard Matheson story “Button, Button” arrived in theaters and answered the question in true Darko style, with a resounding “I’d… um… well… deformed mind control guy and water teleportation and some NSA experiments funded by lightning aliens and… what was the question?” More than anything, though, Kelly’s film turns the mind back to Matheson’s original philosophical conundrum and the true issues at hand.

What Does it Mean to “Know” Someone?

Matheson’s ending, which is wholly disregarded in the Twilight Zone’s adaptation, and only summarily addressed in Kelly’s film, turns the wording of the enigmatic button contract into its own philosophical dilemma – after the button is activated, the presser’s husband dies and the confused, despondent presser is told, in smirking, ironic-twist fashion, that she never really knew him. Yeah, it’s sort of annoying in that Philosophy 101 “do I really even know myself?!” BUH BUH BUM! kinda way, but it does add a new dimension to the initial problem. You know who I don’t know? RICHARD MATHESON! OHHHH! INSANITY! Statistically speaking, though, it would most likely kill a random Asian person.

What’s a Human Life Worth?

Obviously, the woman in Matheson’s story, who presses the button for a payout of $50,000, values a single human life to be worth, at most, $50,000. The question becomes, of the theoretical individuals who don’t press the button, how many are actually morally incorruptible and how many are merely waiting for a better offer. The button test, as designed, doesn’t assess whether people will compromise their morals and indirectly kill a stranger for money; it tests whether certain individuals will compromise their morals for a specific sum. On one hand, this reveals a major flaw in the well-dressed stranger’s test. On the other hand, it does make you pause to think how much money you’d have to receive to press the button. On a third hand, it makes you think that you’d probably be willing to go as low as $10,000.

Pressing a Button is Fun

Think about how much more money you’d want if you only got to flip a switch or pull on a rope.

Travelet.com has this fun tourist destination known as Rookund in the Himalayas. It’s a lake filled with skeletons:

Roopkund is better off known as “The skeleton lake” due to the presence of an enormous grave that holds about 300 to 600 skeletons. This discovery has revolutionized the world of ancient history ever since 1942, when a park ranger came across this mass deposition of bones. It probably is an in-accessible frozen lake that requires about four day travel to reach from the nearest locality. Recently, it has become an important spot for the visitors as they learn and conjecture this advent of science.

link: Roopkund – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
link: Roopkund The Mysterious Skeleton Lake | Travelet

Mark your calendars. August 31st, 2009 may have been the day the insects got the upper hand in their war against mankind.

Reportedly, a truck driver for the Minot Air Force Base 91st Missile Wing lost control of his vehicle when a “large insect” flew into the cab and (attacked) landed on his back.

When one solitary bug accomplishes what all of our enemies combined have been unable to do, it’s time to start buying Raid by the bulk.

‘Large insect’ sparked missile truck’s crash – Military- msnbc.com

Wither the reputation of poor Catherine O’Leary. A muckraking hack thinks it’d make a great read to libel your name by insinuating a cow under your control kicked a lantern, which ignited the surrounding hay, which torched the barn which started the Great Chicago Fire.

These tall tales were eventually revealed to be what they were, fibs told by a fibbing fibber.

So what was the real reason Chi Town burnt down? Meteor showers! At least according to a 2004 report from engineer and physicist Robert R. Wood.

On October 8, 1871, a fire started that burned much of Chicago, killing 300, and destroying $200,000,000 worth of property. Most people are unaware that within a few minutes, major fires started in upstate Wisconsin and Michigan, killing more than 2000 people in the farming country. Because of the poor communications with the upstate areas, the magnitude of the upstate horror was not known for weeks.

Biela’s Comet, with a solar orbital period of 6 years 9 months, had been disturbed by Jupiter on a previous passage and broke into two large comets. It has been hypothesized that one of them struck Earth and broke into several smaller pieces. These pieces, consisting of frozen comet gases would have likely included combustibles like methane CH4 and acetylene C2H2 that melted, vaporized and explosively ignited, causing impressive incendiary results upstate, consistent with surviving witness reports.

Blame that on a cow!

From New Scientist comes research that sleep is even weirder than we thought. Microsleep, hallucinations and sleepwalking murder are just some of the symptoms…

EARLIER this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.

link: Are you asleep? Exploring the mind’s twilight zone – life – 07 October 2009 – New Scientist via KurzweilAI

Aboriginal mythology tells of an aquatic demon called a “bunyip” that haunts Australia’s riverbeds and marshes, lurking silently beneath the water’s shimmering surface, waiting to devour or drown any careless passersby. At night, the bunyip’s fierce roaring call sounds out across the black, hollow veil of darkness, rousing children from slumber and echoing through the dreams of adults.

According to the traditional folklore of various tribes, the bunyip has a dog-like head, walrus tusks, seal flippers, a furred torso and a horse tail. Sometimes also feathers. Or scales. It has also been described as a giant snake with a wild, tattered mane and as a half-human monster with a long neck and the head of a bird. There isn’t much consensus.

The creature’s tribe-to-tribe physiological variants underscore an interesting aspect of mythology – the biological attributes of legendary monsters are far less important to their existence than the socio-cultural service the beasties offer. The bunyip, for example, boasts as many physical variations as it does alleged sightings, but one detail remains consistent – its predilection toward dragging hapless Aborigines into streams, swamps and billabongs. The tale of the bunyip, then, has less to do with compiling a thorough dossier of Australia’s supernatural threats than with creatively imparting children with cautionary advice and containing the chaotic, imposing enigmas of the natural world within a comfortable, familiar narrative. Whether a bird-headed humanoid or a tusked snake, by keeping kids away from the crocodile-laden waters of Australia’s rivers, the bunyip helped prevent drownings and other gruesome deaths. It also, as evidenced by the many terrified descriptions of the animal’s nighttime vocalizations, offered tribes an explanation for the many unexplained sounds that issued out, distant and haunting, from wild dark glens and black lakes.

In the 1800s, the bunyip took on an entirely new cultural significance – as an example of the way Britain co-opted and Westernized the folklore and traditions of its colonies. In typical European fashion (as evidenced in America by the transmogrification of Native American mythology from symbolic representations of the aspects of nature to horror stories about colossal birds and sea serpents), the bunyip was immediately removed from its cultural context and literalized. The story promised more than ethnographic insight into an unfamiliar indigenous civilization – it promised a marvelous new animal.

Wednesday: The Great Victorian Bunyip Hunt

Special thanks to Sky News’ Viewers’ Editor Paul Bromley. We writes, what looks to be a pretty awesome blog.

In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how That ‘70s Show’s Donna and CSI: Miami’s Horatio Crane were both created by their respective networks in order to fulfill SAG-regulated ginger nut quotas. But with monsters. Enjoy.

Reaper, Episode 1×03, “All Mine”
AND
X-Files, Episode 9×05, “Lord of the Flies”

Fleas provide a wily vector for the bubonic plague and wipe out a third of the world’s population.

Killer bees buzz up against America’s borders, causing a prolonged nationwide freakout.

All kinds of weird bugs terrify Willie Scott and Indiana Jones almost dies.

Spread out across every continent and driven by a simplistic nervous system that puppeteers their segmented bodies towards only the most primal satisfactions, insects have alternately fascinated and terrified humans since the first time some blundering caveman saw a beehive and went all My Girl on it. Their ubiquity and instinctual persistence postures them as an ever-moving imagined boundary between nature and civilization that, for every two steps it’s forced back by poisons and zappers, advances one step forward into kitchens and bedrooms. Insects have proved such an enduring fixture of human experience that they’ve infested language itself, swarming the vernacular with a bevy of bug-related clichés, euphemisms and metaphors, ranging from “the birds and the bees” to “mad as a hornet” to “patience, young grasshopper.” It’s no surprise, then, that these perceived pests, and the swarm of associations they evoke, occupy their own cavernous burrow in the pantheon of pop culture, eating their way into the very foundation of American narrative.

Even beyond their aforementioned presence in spoken rhetoric, insects’ universality and relative biological simplicity allow them to play the cipher for a variety of basic human circumstances, relationships and emotions. For instance, both the episodes examined in today’s column employ bugs in exploring different dimensions of love, from the ardor and stewardship that shape and fortify it, to the gnawing jealousy and guilt that can hollow it out from the inside. One episode uses the fundamental disgust that bugs can instill to channel the gross desperation and jealousy that the jilting wake of lust- gone-awry can inflict, while the other, in a failed attempt to portray a good kid gone bad in the name of both love and a genetic disease, ends up utilizing the simple, beautiful biology of insects as a microscope through which to examine the exact point of impact in a collision between feelings and actions.

In “All Mine,” the devil sends Sam after an escaped soul who seems to be using a variety of insects as agents in the murders of several women. Assuming that the culprit is a local man named Harold who, decades before, disappeared after being accused of murdering his wife, the boys discover the man’s current address and stake out his house, which is teeming with creepy-crawlies. Later, however, Sam encounters Harold, who tells him that the bugs are actually inhabited by the soul of his former mistress, Gloria, who, in life, murdered his wife and, in death, has gained the ability to transmit her soul into bugs, allowing her to covertly stalk him and, in her jealous rage, murder any women he encounters. The boys crush the bug lady.

In “Lord of the Flies,” the mysterious death of a teenager whose head appears to have been hollowed out by flies draws the attention of agents Dogget and Reyes, who come to suspect that a loner named Dylan may have the ability to control bugs and a motive for the murder – a long-term crush on the victim’s girlfriend, Natalie. After a series of other strange entomological incidents occur around Dylan, who insists that he’s simply misunderstood, the agents discover that Dylan is part insect, a trait he inherited from his mother, and uses pheromones to manipulate bug life. Dylan claims he only acted out against people who he viewed as a threat to Natalie, but when he finally professes his love to her and they kiss, her lip is torn open by his insectoid tongue and she rejects him. As he and his mother flee the town, the agents explore Dylan’s house and discover the corpses of people Dylan’s mother had killed over the years in her futile attempt to deny her mutation.

Both shows use the threat of bugs – their size, their numbers and their relentlessness – to endow the clumsy brute force of human emotion with an oppressive and pestilent physical form. The fundamental difference is that, in one case, a person is using insects as controllable vessels of his emotion, while in the other case, a person has physically transformed into a living natural force, which is now imbued with her rage.

The X-Files goes out of its way to belabor the point that Dylan is a teenager, even explaining his growing power over bugs and changing internal biology as results of the hormonal dissonance of puberty. Following in this vein, the bugs, of course, are meant to represent the unchecked power of his feelings as they are subjected to these hormones – his love and desire for Natalie transmuted into a focused, but misdirected, force of nature. It’s this characterization – human emotion personified as natural threat – that becomes integral to understanding the core similarities between the episodes, and the moral implications of directing a force, versus becoming that force. Both Gloria and Dylan commit despicable acts in the name of love, but whereas Dylan exploits a natural power he has over a boundless, amoral force to commit pre-mediated crimes, Gloria has, herself, transformed into a force, her consciousness hijacked and consumed long ago by her jealousy, such that she has simply become the lobotomized host to a boundlessly powerful parasite that has bestowed upon her the smiting might of nature, but taken away the free will she would require to voluntarily end her rampage. In short, she’s become a physical manifestation of the emotion itself.

In terms of this comparison, it’s good that The X-Files is so desperate to harp on Dylan’s pubescence because it underscores the full impact of the comparison between him and Gloria – Gloria exists as jealousy embodied because of conscious moral decisions she made as a human, specifically, murdering Harold’s wife; Dylan is younger, and only just beginning to make those same decisions, turning his emotions into desperate, violent acts. At the same time, he is becoming physically more and more insect-like, a freakish chimera of his harmless, inevitable thoughts and ruthless, decisive actions – the transformation that befell Gloria. The show contends that Dylan is simply a victim of a biological mutation, unable to fit in with human society, regardless of his very real human emotions, because of his innate genetic incompatibility – his physical nature. The unfortunate truth is that Dylan’s condition is irrelevant. The point isn’t that he attacks people with bugs; the point is that he attacks people. It’s his psychological nature – his bad choices and inability to deal with emotions – that makes him, and Gloria, into monsters.

I accept that both shows make statements about human nature, but The X-Files is mistaken in portraying its message as one of unrequited love and cursed birth, with Dylan posed as a misunderstood object of pity, doomed to a solitary life (after all, Gloria was born a fully human girl and also became a horrific insectoid blight). The message is that, while every person feels, and then acts on those feelings, every person also chooses their method of action. It’s these decisions, and the deeds they beget, that shape what a person becomes. It’s a fundamental, almost biblical, moral. Reaper isn’t afraid to show Gloria as the monster she is. As for The X-Files, there’s no question that Dylan loves Natalie, but the way that he allows that love to manifest as physical acts of destruction – to take what’s in his brain and heart and twist it up as it moves through his hands into something monstrous and wholly antithetical to the shimmering light or the sonorous tone or whatever gloriously sublime manifestation that love took inside of him – to construct it an avatar from termites and roaches and death – is to turn himself into animal, mandibles poised and stinger at the ready, whether those organs are metaphorical or not.

After much speculation the bio blob spotting floating off the coast of Alaska has been identified as common marine algae.

Here’s the official wording:

“We got the results back from the lab today,” said Ed Meggert of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation in Fairbanks on Thursday. “It was marine algae.”

Miles of the thick, dark gunk had been spotted floating between Barrow and Wainwright, prompting North Slope Borough officials and the Coast Guard to investigate last week. A sample was sent to a DEC lab in Anchorage, where workers looked at it under a microscope and declared it some kind of simple plant — an algae, Meggert said.

Everyone consult your office pool and notify the winners to collect from the treasurer.

Tear Up The Town is a weekly column investigating the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

For two warm spring nights in 1977, a monster trolled the quiet streets of Dover, Delaware, haunting passersby with its large, almost-featureless head and glowing, empty stare.

When one considers that none of the witnesses to the so-called “Dover Demon” (dubbed as such by the press) were in direct contact immediately before or after the alleged sightings, and all of their descriptions of the creature varied slightly (orange eyes versus green eyes, etc.), an orchestrated hoax seems unlikely. But a microcosmic case of teenage mass hysteria built around a confused infant moose and a pop cultural zeitgeist that piled a brand-new sensationalist Leonard Nimoy television program onto known UFO tracking at a local airforce base, a rampaging serial killer and an imminent star war?

Many skeptics believe it isn’t a coincidence that all three witnesses (Bill Bartlett, age 17; John Baxter, age 15; and Abby Brabham, age 15) to the spindly, large-eyed, four-foot-tall, melon-headed creature, which was witnessed clambering along Dover roadsides on April 21st and 22nd, 1977, were adolescents; even after disregarding the high school prank theory, some experts believe the Dover Demon, a veritable celebrity among American cryptids, was probably a woefully misidentified baby moose. Others admit the possibility that it could have been the product of a covert genetic engineering experiment. Sure, certain spirit hunters and cryptophiles with a new-age bent believe that the witnesses’ age demographic suggests that the alleged creature was related to a poltergeist, appearing only to those whose hormones and bio-rythyms were in continuous flux, and phrases like “extra-terrestrial” and “inter-dimensional being” have been tossed around, but the same trixy pubescence that collectively robs the witnesses of credibility also helps explain how a demon was born.

Though the Hollywood extra-terrestrial boom that began in 1977 with the May release of Star Wars (followed almost immediately by the November release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind) was still a month away when 17-year-old Bill Bartlett saw the bulbous head and shining eyes of an unearthly quadruped reflected in his headlights as he drove home through Dover on April 21st, a cultural obsession with UFOs and the paranormal was already a fixture of American life. Starting with the release of the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage in 1967 and the publicized discontinuation of the U.S. Air Force’s UFO research division, Project Blue Book, in 1969, and bolstered by a sudden spike in reported UFO sightings in 1973 (The fact that the government was no longer searching for the truth about flying saucers clearly put the perceived responsibility back into the hands of the public), the culture was in the throes of an obsession.

Meanwhile, New York City, just three hours north of Dover, was caught in a media frenzy as the .44 Caliber Killer, later identified as David Berkowitz, roamed through the city committing a mounting series of violent shootings. More than half of his, as of that time, 11 victims were teenagers, one of whom had been killed on April 17th, just four days before the first Dover Demon sighting. With news of the seemingly random killings and the ensuing investigation garnering play-by-play national coverage, it’s not unreasonable to imagine a country of teenagers, suddenly confronted with the truth of their own mortality, feeling, understandably, on edge.

And that’s not even taking into account that Dover Air Force Base, which tracked and verified several local UFO sightings throughout the early ‘70s, is located just southeast of the city. Local teenagers who were already exposed to, and demographically poised to take the brunt of, a burgeoning cultural interest in the paranormal would have certainly been aware that within the corporate limits of their hometown existed a government facility that was on record as having monitored unexplained phenomena.

Certainly after the release of Star Wars (and well after the Dover sightings), a rash of alien-themed narrative television shows and films appeared, including Battlestar Galactica, Mork and Mindy, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Alien, etc. (1978 even saw a short-lived television adaptation of Project Blue Book, entitled “Project UFO”). Based on these dates, one might draw the faulty conclusion that the Dover Demon sightings seem to hold more water as legitimate evidence of an undeniably ridiculous looking cryptid stalking The Blue Hen State, given that they occurred before the start of the pop cultural science fiction renaissance, but I would argue that it actually makes more sense, and verges on unsurprising, that sightings like those reported in Dover happened prior to the debut of the above popular entertainments.

Pop culture isn’t a proactive phenomenon. It simply reacts to the wider cultural milieu, absorbing current social, political and scientific thought trends and translating those into the narrative structures that humans seem to require to bring already-present ideas into the sphere of general consciousness. This description, of course, is a gross oversimplication, but the point is that by the time TV and media started addressing instances of paranormal phenomena, the country was already deeply concerned with, and afraid of, all things unearthly.

Next, I’d like to posit that, in assimilating national fears and then reproducing visions of them, pop culture goes through two stages: addressing the fear and answering the fear. For example, in the late ‘60s, supposed Bigfoot footage landed all over the news and the government stopped officially researching UFOs. These and other events (the promise of continued manned space exploration, a sudden spate of books about The Bermuda Triangle, the continuing growth of the new age movement, etc.) led to a growing, unarticulated fear of the paranormal and the supernatural in America. As in every instance of irrational national fear or obsession, the first things the entertainment industry begins to produce are documentaries and dramatizations of actual events. 1975 saw the airing of a made for TV movie called The UFO Incident, which portrayed the supposedly true story of an East Coast couple who, years after a strange experience on a mountain road, discover, through hypnosis, that they were abducted by, and experimented on, by aliens. Even more telling, on April 17th, 1977, just four days before the first Dover Demon sighting (and on the night of the fifth and sixth Berkowitz murders), “In Search Of…”, a Leanord Nimoy-hosted television documentary series that investigated all corners of pseudo-science and sensationalist natural anomalies, ranging from UFOs to Atlantis to The Elephant Man, premiered with an episode about communicating with plants and, more importantly, an opening title sequence that featured a laundry list of topics to come, including extraterrestrials, witchcraft and monsters.

It’s only after a fear is addressed through such documentaries and dramatizations, like those stated above, which simply reduce and collate the most striking and mysterious aspects of the terrorizer in question into a comprehensive consumable piece, that people begin to create answers to the fear by constructing fictions that both put a face to the unknown and present a clear resolution in which, generally, the physical manifestation of our terror is either destroyed or robbed of its power over us. For example, after “realistically” re-enacting the nation’s collective UFO fear in “The UFO Incident,” Close Encounters of the Third Kind presented a fictionalized version of an alien encounter in which the aliens abducting humans and staging high-speed flyovers are reveled to be friendly explorers reaching out to humanity through a simple, delightful tune. Fear momentarily allayed.

The Dover Demon sightings took place in the middle of a cultural shift wherein all of the country’s supernatural curiosity and fear was out in the open, being actively documented and dramatized, but few contemporary fictions had been created to soothe the American psyche. On a spring night, in a quiet town, as the cultural climate around the adolescent witnesses erupted with teen murders, supernatural documentaries, UFO sightings and commercials for film after film about cosmic misadventure, who knows what the hormonal, pubescent mind will do when confronted by something as atypical as a newborn moose, much less some disgusting genetic experiment gone awry. Add Fleetwood Mac’s then-top-selling album Rumours into the mix, and it’s a shock that there wasn’t significant property damage.

Matt Finley is a regular contributor to Weird Things and is currently based in Cleveland. His works can be found at Finfizzler.wordpress.com.

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.

Elmo doesn’t really love you, in fact, he wants to kill you. Or so found out a Florida two-year old named James when his talking Elmo doll started making death threats. Elmo was behaving well enough, until one day the adorable toddler’s mother changed the batteries and the doll’s language took a Chuckiesque turn. It stated saying “Kill James”. How creeped out would you be, if the doll you had bought for your toddler started ordering his demise?

After the family made a media stink about the incident last year, Fisher-Price, makers of the foul mouthed doll, promised to launch an investigation and replaced the offending, lovable, red mop-head.

-To hear an audio recording of the doll saying “Kill James” click here.