As you may have heard, North Korea tried to launch a long-range rocket today and the results were not so hot.

But while the truth of what happened is being reported world wide, the question remains, how will North Korea’s famously stringent state-run broadcasters break the bad news to the locals?

Short answer: they won’t.

What you see above is footage broadcast by North Korean state television in 2009 depicting the fate of a rocket launch. The problem? In reality, it was a total failure according to Washington Post East Asia correspondent Chico Harlan on Twitter.

That didn’t stop the DRPK from getting their CGI on and creating this gem to show all the boys and girls back home that Glorious Leader had lead them to the stars. Strike up the band.

[Twitter]

After somebody spotted what they thought was an escaped tiger through a camera zoom lens near a country club, police in Hampshire scrambled a helicopter equipped with thermal imaging and a tranquilizer take down team from the local zoo. It was only after the downdraft of the helicopter blew the tiger over that everybody realized that it was just a toy. Whoops. Police are treating the incident as lost property and looking for the owner.

Golfers at County Golf Club were also escorted from the course and Saturday’s cricket game between Hampshire Academy and South Wilts was suspended for about half an hour.

Tony Middleton, Hampshire Cricket Academy director, added: “Rumours came round that there was a tiger on the golf course and we just carried on playing until a policeman came over and told us to clear the area.

“I assumed there was [a tiger] with everything that was going on, but we felt quite safe here.”

[BBC via Gizmodo]

The rapscallions who make up the band of mischief makers known as Anonymous had a new target this weekend, UFO believers. Unfortunately for them, the more cyber-savvy of the sky watchers were ready for the hoax.

“A triangle of about 8 yellow lights in the sky” is the key phrase Anonymous told those who wanted to participate to use on various UFO report blogs and forums yesterday. Their hope was to spark an international panic that hundreds, if not thousands, of alien ships of a similar design are moving into position around the globe.

But if various UFO forum threads are any indication, the hoax got little to no traction. A Google news alert for the key phrase only brings up one blog post discussing the plan before it went into motion.

[Ghost Theory]

“Something isn’t right. A snake that size shouldn’t be that slender,” says Chris Brennan, resident expert on giant snakes for WeirdThings.

According to Brennan, the color scheme resembles an anaconda which has a wider head and heavier build. Furthermore, the tail shouldn’t taper off the way it does for an anaconda of that size and the width should be at least double what it looks to be in the photo.

Brennan is a former park ranger who along with his licensed trapper father has helped capture nuisance reptiles around South Florida for 20 years.

The color and shape of the beast looks like a juvenile rainbow python or carpet python, adds Brennan. Carpet python would be more realistic because they don’t have a distinctive pattern, for example spots.

If it’s not photoshopped it would have to be an arboreal species trying to find dry land. However, this is far larger than a native species of snake so if the picture is legit, Brennan says it’s likely the species was imported from elsewhere.

This is not to say that stories of bizarre animals becoming displaced by the opening of flood gates in Mississippi should be dismissed whole cloth.

“If they are not seeing insane animal migration it’s a miracle,” says Brennan.

“When encountering a giant species in a wild, it looks alien,” he added. “You can divide a length of what someone says they saw by half.

“Always remember kids, while giant species of snakes are dangerous they are just as scared of you as you are of them.”

The publisher of this site, Andrew Mayne, once told me his take on the early films of action director John Woo. Sure, the fighting is insane and the plot is pretty hard nosed but since the film is subtitled, how does any English speaker know if the acting is any good?

Which is exactly how I feel about this Bigfoot video from the Ukraine. It’s almost note perfect as a horror film, which the heavy breathing and the fog drenched forrest. In fact, if this were shot in Gary, Indiana and not amongst the foothills of Eastern Europe the way we’d call shenanigans is the unnatural tone and content of the man behind the camera’s speech.

Since the speaker in this video is not conversing the King English (or if he is, he’s having a stroke) our natural BS detecter is blurred.

Is there anyone who can decipher what the man is saying? Does anyone buy this?

[Phantoms & Monsters]

The music is creepy and the alleged act is even grislier. Is this really a video of a German film crew digging up the remains of Andy Kaufman to prove he isn’t really running around in a Tony Clifton outfit?

What do you folks think? Fact or hoax?

Thanks to reader Zakk for passing this along.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town.

The Lake George Monster never saved a town. It didn’t herald a tourism boom or lure swarms of industrialists to the shores of Hague Bay. It doesn’t funky chicken around the sidelines of any public school basketball courts. And Lake George isn’t known as “Home of the Lake George Monster,” but rather as “Gateway to the Adirondacks.” Credit where credit is due, though, the Lake George Monster is probably the most extreme point (short of boat murder) to which a friendly fishing contest has ever escalated.
In 1904, Harry Watrous, a professional painter, made a bet with his friend, Colonel William Mann, the editor of an infamous gossip rag, over who could reel in a larger trout. And so it began. The men fished on the lake, often in sight of each other, each one determined to fish better, harder, faster than the other. In retrospect, that Mann decided to cheat shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

The paper the Colonel edited, “Town Topics,” once a respectable arts and leisure magazine, had, under Mann, become an inky mire of high society gossip and scandal-mongering. Mann’s ploy to avoid libel charges? Print standard, sometimes even complimentary, articles about known New York society members on the front of a page, then, on the flip side, directly lined up with the corresponding fluff pieces, run scandalous news about the same individuals, sans identification. Anyone who knew how to read the paper – and anyone who was anyone did – could easily match the public figures to the defaming rumors. “Town Topics,” of course, stayed in business by collecting bribes from guilty parties who wished to keep their faux pas private. Still, when Watrous finally identified the hulking monster of a trout that Mann casually held up from inside his own fishing craft, and later, in a ridiculous display of bravado, exhibited in his house, as a sculpted and painted hunk of wood, he swore revenge.

Like the Rhinelander Hodag, the Lake George Monster began life as a chunk of wood (specifically, a cedar log). Using bits of glass, metal and wood, Watrous affixed eyes, ears and a toothy snout to the 10-foot-long log, which he then painted in alternating yellow and black stripes. Also, white teeth, red mouth, red nostrils, and blue (yes, blue) ears. (Later, Watrous would repeatedly refer to his creation as a “Hippogriff”- the mythical offspring of a griffin and a mare, and noble companion to the Boy Who Lived – but I’m not seeing it.) He rowed out to an area of the lake frequented by his friend and nemesis, and rigged up the creature to a simple pulley system – a 100-foot-rope anchored to a rock on the shore.

Then he waited.

MUCH MORE… AFTER THE JUMP

(more…)

All this week: Halloween urban legends – horrific truths, bald-faced lies, wild embellishments and insane speculations. On Monday, Matt explored the panic over tainted candy. On Wednesday he took on the insane culture of ultimate haunted houses.

Today: Mock Gallows, Inadvertent Nooses and Accidental Hangings

As front-lawn Halloween displays have evolved beyond dollar-store cobwebbing and leering jack-o-lanterns to include severed limbs, colored lights and sound effect CDs that play out like bondage den wiretap recordings, Halloween urban legends have followed suit. An unfortunate teenaged actor is found dangling lifelessly from a hangman’s noose after a haunted hayride skit goes horribly awry. The bloating corpse of a rope-hanged suicide is admired by passersby who appraise it as a smashingly successful Halloween decoration.

Before inadvertent hangings (and grossly misinterpreted purposeful ones) became the stuff of Halloween legend, the most popular noose-hanged prop story came out of a real incident in which a camera crew shooting an episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man” broke the forearm off a funhouse dummy, revealing bones and mummified muscle tissue. A coroner’s exam revealed that the corpse belonged to infamous cowboy outlaw Elmer McCurdy, whose body had been autopsied, preserved and toted around as a sideshow spectacle before eventually getting lost to the fevered competition of 20th century amusement park entrepreneurship.

Not to harsh your collective mellow, but, like the McCurdy story, the tales of Halloween hangings are totally true. As urban legends go, it really just chalks up to the fact that a harness-rigged noose malfunction is more likely than a Pop Rocks-catalyzed belly explosion. Beginning in the early ‘90s, newspaper stories chronicling the untimely deaths of dedicated haunted house employees and ambitious partygoers to staged-hanging oopsy-daisies started appearing nationwide. More recently, as lynched newspaper-stuffed overalls have become a fixture of autumnal suburban landscaping, openly displayed suicide victims have been shrugged-off as clichéd décor. Just this October, the body of a California man who shot himself through the eye was left to decay in a porch chair for days while smiling neighbors stared at the corpse and admired what they perceived as holiday spirit.

Along with these inarguably unfortunate tales comes the requisite humbugging of so-called “gruesome” trends in decorating, and pleas for a return to straw bundles and carved pumpkins – you know, the simpler Pagan-inspired effigies of yore. Really, though, it’s a lot easier than that: If you’re going to build a supportive harness to stage a hanging, learn how to do it and don’t be a big stupid idiot. If you’re going to kill yourself, have the common decency to do it in your house or your sex dungeon or anywhere where no one has to look at your revolting, smelly body. Happy Halloween.

All this week: Halloween urban legends – horrific truths, bald-faced lies, wild embellishments and insane speculations. On Monday, Matt explored the panic over tainted candy.

Today: Questing After Haunted House Eden

Like the lost city of El Dorado, or perhaps more appropriately like the profusion of rumored “midget towns” across the country, the ultimate haunted house attraction is an infamous and highly sought after fantasy destination. These rumored Halloween paradises aren’t advertised and move to a different hidden location every year. They’re generally described as multi-floored (anywhere from 3 to 13) warehouses run by mysterious, wealthy cabals. Some allegedly offer full refunds to anyone who can make it through the entire production (sometimes the refund is offered in installments paid out as a participant completes each floor). Of course, they’re so genuinely terrifying that no one has ever managed to reclaim the full entry fee.

Interestingly, unlike the diminutive midget towns, which always seem to be tucked away in unmapped corners of forgotten counties, these Edenic bastions of fright are generally rumored to exist in urban areas – warehouse districts or dilapidated portside neighborhoods. Fueling these stories is a suburban fascination with the city. A panic-tempered awe. A wonder-blanched fear. The middle school kids who look forward to annual jaunts through the plywood corridors of local Kiwanis-run haunted houses construct elaborate fantasies about said houses’ wild urban equivalents. The stories are built from an ingrained hyperbolic vision of the city as a concrete wilderness that’s at once less sympathetic, less polite, less controlled and, most importantly, more grown up than the familiar suburban landscape. Like a profusion of the message board posts debating the supposed locations of these hidden terrordomes state: “Half the fun is finding [the attraction].” By the very nature of the attraction’s non-existence, the search becomes the destination and the “ultimate haunted house” is actually the city streets as seen through the eyes of cul de sac sons and development daughters.

The richest version of the legend I could find was actually the one I grew up hearing: Somewhere in Philadelphia, PA is a 13-floor haunted house called, well, “13 Floors.” The first couple floors are rumored to be laughably standard haunted house fare; subsequent floors give way to trapdoors, complete darkness, live insects and reptiles, and, supposedly, violent physical assaults by masked assailants. Really, the whole thing unfolds into a beautiful allegory for growing up. The horrific, whispered climax of the story? Every year, the one or two participants who manage to successfully soldier on past the seventh or eighth floor are Never. Heard from. Again.

These few fearful, but brave, souls become the ghosts of suburban grade school legend. Neither living nor dead – just lost to the city. They matured into vapor. Grew up into steam. In truth, they are the ones who escaped.

According to an article from the October 1936 issue of Modern Mechanix, invisibility wasn’t just a possibility, it was a reality. The author credulously reports a description of an invisibility ray, but states emphatically that, “This is no illusion done by some magician, no trick of mirrors, it is asserted, but an actual performance of a new device which produces and projects what, for lack of a better name, may be called an ‘invisible ray.’”

Read the description of the potential applications and decide for yourself…

SUPPOSE that out onto a stage come eight chorus girls performing an intricate dance. Gradually something seems to happen, the heads, faces, and upper parts of the bodies of the girls seem to be disappearing. In fact, little by little they do become invisible to the audience until at last only eight pairs of legs are seen gracefully skipping about on the stage in perfect rhythm. You rub your eyes and begin to think you’d better see an oculist right away, but while you are worrying about it, back into your vision come the eight girls, wholly there and dancing gaily as though they had not just given you the shock of a lifetime. Or suppose again that a girl is sitting atop a piano, singing. The piano begins to fade from sight; finally the girl is left sitting in midair, nonchalantly swinging her feet and blithely singing, as though her perch was perfectly substantial.

If you did not think that you were just “seeing things,” right off you’d say, “Some invisible wires, or anyway, a cleverly arranged set of mirrors.” But you would be wrong in your guess. At least so says Mr. Adam Gosztonyi, the inventor of a machine which he claims can accomplish just such disappearing acts as have been described.

For something that’s not a magician’s trick, it’s kind of odd that all of the theoretical applications are theatrical in nature.

At that same time an illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost and the Blue Room was well known to magicians. It did *exactly* the same thing as described in the demonstration and under the same conditions. Check out a YouTube video here of a historic recreation of the effect (two facts: 1. It uses a mirror. 2. I’ve touched it).

In defense of the Modern Mechanix reporter, it’s a really awesome effect.

link: Modern Mechanix Invisibility At Last Within Grasp of Man

Does this sound kind of familiar? From the Detroit Tribune in 1858:

We have learned the full particulars of the balloon ascension…on Thursday, its subsequent descent, and its second ascension and runaway with the aeronaut while beyond his control…

While internally at Weird Things we were calling the balloon boy story a likely hoax given our own personal experiences in building such crafts (and the credulous nature of the father), it should serve as a cautionary tale.

The long history of being an aeronaut (what they used to call people who flew before airplanes) is a dangerous one. In the Google news archives you can find stories of missing and killed in action aeronauts going back almost 200 years. Here are a few of the more interesting ones:

Journals: Fate Of The First Aeronaut

Terrible Adventure of an Aeronaut

BALLOONIST FALLS TO DEATH.; Aeronaut Drops 700 Feet

SEEK FOR AERONAUTS IN SIERRA MADRES

Here’s one of the earliest aeronaut adventures we could find: From a London Paper

It’s the bane of any parent. Your school-aged children shoot a rudimentary “UFO sighting” video, it gets uploaded to YouTube, the troublemakers are thrilled when it sparks debate but just as your little darlings have filled themselves to the brim with delight, other YouTubers “pirate” the clip and repackage it for themselves. Or something.

Such is the issue facing Mark Obmascik, a columnist for the Denver Post who chronicled the amusing story behind the video above.

The good news is, as far as we can tell, the original video still dominates any of the knock-offs in terms of views with 80,000+.

We’ve unfortunately lost the email of the reader who sent this in, feel free to identify yourself in the comments and we’ll update the post.

Do you remember the news videos about the unexplained lights over Morristown, New Jersey in recent weeks? They certainly were Unidentified Flying Object, but were there origins terrestrial or from outer space?

Chris Russo and Joe Rudy have come forward taking credit for the lights as a hoax they designed to test the credulous. The above video shows them launching the simple, home made crafts that caused a media sensation.