A sudden bright spot in the night changed colors from blue to orange before streaking across the sky and disappearing has caused hysteria amongst residents in California, Arizona and beyond.

While many scientists are pegging the light show as the result of a basketball sized piece of interplanetary debris burning up through our atmosphere, we are not so quick to agree. While a spaceship seems unlikely, a secret military satellite being blown out of orbit (as posited in the beginning of Andrew Mayne’s debut novel Public Enemy Zero) and crashing down to Earth could work. From the picture posted above, we also can’t rule out that dozens of sitcom stars had simultaneous given a poignant piece of advice and the resulting streak was simply a The More You Know punctuation.

Do you have a conspiracy theory? Post it below.

[CBS 2]

On August 27, around 6:40 PM, Xie Yexin was found dead in his office with ten stab wounds.  Xie was a cadre for the Gongan County Disciplinary Committee in Hubei province, and anti-corruption office.  The next day, medical examiners from several different public security bureaus came to look at the body.  As a result, the death was ruled a suicide.

Immediately the Chinese Internet erupted.  It seems that nobody is willing to believe the official story, with thousands of comments flooding in on the story, at least one commenter even going so far as to warn others of “being suicided”.  And of course, it wasn’t just the Internet that was upset — the family of the deceased interrupted the press conference announcing the findings to protest what they (and many others) feel is an obvious coverup.

[chinaSMACK]

So, yeah. 71 49 19.73n 29 33 06.53w in Google Mars if you want to see it yourself. What do you think it is?

[Sighting UFO]

It is very likely a combination of pre-2012 posturing by the White House and a fiscal hardline amongst the Republican party could cause our United States government to shut down this weekend. This is disappointing and annoying.

The silver lining? Conspiracy theorists can start spinning into overdrive. Break out the tin foil hats, check on your emergency seed garden and text your militia buddys. Here is a smattering of our favorites:

• China has ordered the shut down. They will use their opportunity to call in the debt we owe them and invade US soil [GodLikeProductions]

• Shut down means that non-essential entities like the EPA would cease opporation. That would mean radiation monitoring from Japan would be affected giving the Government leeway to fudge results [ConspiracyCom]

• Shutdown will only be avoided with assistance from Obama-friendly alien P’lod [Weekly World News]

It left a vapor trail as it soared into the sky but the questions have lingered far longer as we ponder “what was that California mystery missle after all?”

Predictably, conspiracy theories abound:

• We launched an ICBM from a submarine while Obama was out to town to show we’re still hardcore: this comes from Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Ellsworth in the video above although he cautioned that we should wait for official confirmation from the military.

• It’s a mobile launcher from the USS Ronald Reagan: Despite the defense department denying it was a scheduled launch, some are speculating that the missile came from the general area of the USS Ronald Reagan. Two problems, the size of the weapon is off from what is equipped on the ship and the USS RR was supposed to be en route to help a stranded Carnival Cruise ship.

• It’s a jet contrail: According to a Harvard professor the direction and shape of the vapor looks consistent with a jet contrail illuminated by the low angel of a setting sun. This of course leaves the option for chemtrail open.

• Batman has finally banished Mr. Freeze to space: On the unofficial Twitter @God_Damn_Batman, the Dark Knight offered a tacit explanation…

Not saying I had anything to do with that missile off the coast of CA. But I hope the vacuum of space is cold enough for you, Mr. Freeze.

We are down with all of these.

Conspiracy nuts, on your mark! The top-secret X-37B space plane has already gone missing once this year (proving the craft to be far more agile than amateur military tech experts predicted) and now it has again disappeared. Many now suggest that the plane is preparing to land or has landed already.

The Air Force is not saying anything, because after all it is a top-secret military space plane.

Our guess? Invisibility shield. But then again, we run a blog about Nazi-fighting bears.

[Fox News]

Is the secret X-37B space plane going rogue? Or is this part of the plan for the Air Force’s mystery vessel?

Either way, amateur sky watchers found the reusable space plane had boosted itself into a different orbit last week. This might be because it will now come into contact with a few Air Force Satellite Control Network facilities it would not have otherwise. Or because someone got bored. Since the military is disclosing any details, we have no way of knowing.

No landing date for the X-37B has been set.

[Space]

For artist Tervor Paglen, the truth is out there. Seriously, it’s like 60 miles away and you’re standing in front of his shot. Can you move? Thank you.

Paglen has become famous for compiling very long range, grainy photos of the the most secretive elements of our national defense. Rendition programs, codenamed projects, secret identities, redacted or misleading budget items, these are the leads he capitalizes on. He talked to Wired about his new monograph Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes.

“I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology,” said Paglen in a recent interview with Joerg Colberg, “The politics of how we know what we think we know. [An exploration] filled with all the contradictions, dead ends, moments of revelation, and confusion that characterize our collective ability to comprehend the world around us in general.”

Awesome stuff.

[Wired]

Joan Ginther came from Bishop, Texas. She earned her doctorate in math from Stanford in the 70′s but in more recent times locals saw her exiting a town convenience store carrying $50 reams of scratch off tickets at a time.

Joan Ginter has won the Texas lottery 4 times. She is a millionaire many times over and has declined every attempt by reporters to get her on the record about her winnings.

So how did Ginther do it, then?

Good luck pinning her down to ask.

Ginther has never spoken publicly about her lotto winnings and could not be found for comment. She now lives in Las Vegas after moving away from Bishop, and an answering machine message for a telephone number listed at her address says not to leave a message.

She asked the few people who’ve exchanged more than brief pleasantries with her not to grant interviews and sneaked into lottery headquarters in Austin to collect her winnings with the least publicity the state offers jackpot winners.

Is Joan Ginther astronomically lucky and press shy? Or has she achieved what so many have dreamed of, a mathematical flaw in a system designed to rake in money with only a glimmer of a statistical chance for a payout?

[AP]

The Apollo 11 moon landing happened 40 years ago toady, or as 6% of the country believe according to a new survey, one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated hoodwinked the world at large.

Here are five videos that help document the intervening four decades dotted with controversy, analysis, British people and Buzz Aldrin’s devastating right cross.

5- The Original Footage

Just so we’re all on the same page, here are some of the pictures and video footage that captivated a nation’s attention and imagination.

4- Conspiracy Cliff’s Notes

In case you’d like to reacquaint yourself with the claims of the moon hoax supporters here is a snippet from a UK documentary claiming to show definitive evidence that many of the iconic photos were staged. It also deals a blistering setback to many UK denizens who’d made progress against the Sneering, Pompous British Jerk stereotype that has plagued the nation.

3- Joe Rogan vs. Phil Plait

Many of the moon hoax arguments have been repeated ad hominem by all manner of people, so it’s refreshing to hear two well-spoken (dare I say, hilarious) figureheads debate their points in these Penn Radio clips featuring Bad Astronomer Phil Plait and comedian Joe Rogan. The back and forth was spread over two days and takes about an hour to listen through all of it. Enjoy!

2- Buzz Aldrin Sees A UFO! Or Not.

The British strike again! This time with a documentary that edited a Buzz Aldrin interview to make it sound like he had to see a UFO during the Apollo 11 flight. As the man himself explains in this Larry King Live clip, that was simply not the case.

This is a notable conspiracy in that it concedes the Apollo 11 mission was in fact en route to the moon, so they might as well have peeped an alien on the way.

1- The Eagle Has Landed

Our crown jewel of Apollo 11 conspiracy videos. Filmmaker Bart Sibrel has made two films building a case for the moon landing conspiracy, in September of 2002 he staged an interview with Aldrin under the false pretense that he and his crew were with a Japanese program. After the Q&A dissolved, Sibel confronted Aldrin with his claims and Aldrin responded by landing a vicious right cross square on the cheek of the larger man.

The one man who could have taken a picture of what really crashed in Roswell, NM in 1947 was bamboozled by a military escort into blowing his only chance to capture intergalactic history. That is the story told by an ailing Allan Grant, a legendary photographer for LIFE magazine dispatched to the desert to document “a meteorite.”

Last year, a dying Allen told blogger Anthony Bragalia, he had since became convinced that his military escort was there to make sure he didn’t got near the real wreckage of what crashed. Grant’s wife crystallized her late husband’s points.

Grant’s widow continues, “You take them someplace near -but not exactly to- the spot. Show the world there’s nothing there- and everybody is happy and relieved, and you can go about your business.” She believes that “perhaps they thought you could keep other media out of there if need be by saying that Life has already been there, and they found nothing.” And she was right- no mainstream media reported on the event after the first wire stories based on military press releases.

Before Allan died, he told Karin that he always believed that he was “used” by the military as a “potential cover” to in some way obfuscate something. He told her that the “something” what he had always thought -even at the time- was much bigger- an unidentified flying object.

Very interesting read.

Previously, this week, on Weird Things.

• A few tips for the novice Bigfoot hunter.

• Could the Son of Sam, a UFO investigating Air Force base and the birth of popular science fiction have helped create the Dover Demon?

• Michael Jackson may be dead, but his ghost is on a world tour.

• What happens, when myriad ghosts, have chosen to haunt a house, stop beings polite and start getting real? They say some really kooky stuff, that’s what.

• Rhode Island has never had a Bigfoot sighting, but that might be about to change.

Enjoy the weekend, as always, send weird photos, stories, sounds and happenings to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail.

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.

Something is amiss on Mars once again. The people over at paranormalnews.com spotted what appears to be shoddy airbrushing in a NASA photo taken of Hale’s Crater, and they’re shouting conspiracy. The nifty graphic above is supposed to expose poor photoshopping done by a NASA technician who apparently couldn’t be bothered to do a bang up job protecting government secrets from public view.

Take a look. Is it an alien landing pad cover up or is there a less sinister explanation? Maybe NASA just got so frustrated with hoaxes, like the face on mars, that they spotted a conspicuously shaped rock formation in Hale’s Crater and figured they’d spare humanity the trouble this time around.