The Shroud of Turin has been, well, shrouded in mystery for centuries. It tempts the hopeful and irks the skeptics. The Vatican refuses to comment on the authenticity of the cloth that wrapped Jesus’ body after the crucifixion. It seems a little convenient that they have now used a secret order of Knights to explain the shroud’s whereabouts during a serious record gap. Especially when you consider that three independent carbon dating tests, performed during the eighties and published in ‘Nature Magazine’, confirmed that the shroud was created at least 1300 years after the crucifixion during the middle ages. So until concrete evidence can be found, claims that the Knights Templar secretly guarded the shroud for a hundred years seem speculative at best.

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.

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A new species of freshwater fish has been discovered in the streams of Myanmar, and it’s kind of freaky looking. What makes the fishy counterpart of Nosferatu so unusual is that the characteristic fangs are not actually fangs at all, but fake fangs developed as an extension of the jaw. According to Live Science:

The newly discovered minnow species called the dracula fish apparently spent 30 million years redeveloping superficial fangs after losing its vampire-looking teeth earlier in its evolution.

Whether the fangs are fake or not they still look like they could put a couple of puncture marks in your neck, if the fish wasn’t a tiny minnow.

The UFO Casebook has published a photo of a purported “Drone Like UFO” taken in Petten, Holland in 2007. The craft reportedly hovered for about half an hour before disappearing mysteriously. It certainly appears to be an Unidentified Flying Object, but does that necessarily mean it’s of alien origin?

-For the original photo without the blowup click here.

photo credit: tamra hays

Turritopsis Nutricula, a species of jellyfish native to the Caribbean, has now spread to all corners of the ocean. Why? Because they don’t die:

Turritopsis Nutricula is technically known as a hydrozoan and is the only known animal that is capable of reverting completely to its younger self.

It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation.

Scientists believe the cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it potentially immortal.

This according to a Telegraph article about the interminable little critters.

Amazingly these jellies can reach sexual maturity, revert to a polyp state, then grow to sexual maturity again ad infinitum. But don’t flee the oceans just yet. The little fellas are only five millimeters long and are harmless….for now.

A previously overlooked planet has been found hiding in an 11 year old Hubble Telescope image. Using new techniques that more accurately gauge the distribution of scattered light given off by close stars, patches that appeared as blank space years ago now could yield exciting results. More hidden planets could be discovered as more old Hubble photos are examined using the new technique.

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.

photo credit: Pacific Yooper

Clergy from the Vatican are investigating the case of a purported miracle in Ohio. Jory Aebly was shot in the head at point blank range during a robbery in Cleveland. The doctors called it a “non-survivable injury”. But Aebly somehow survived. What was his miraculous recovery attributed to?

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Two film makers sought out Indonesian Qi Gong Master John Chang to have him dazzle them with his powers. Take a look at the video. At first glance it seems pretty convincing, but note that the miraculous electrocution coming off his body is something that can be replicated with a portable high voltage generator strapped somewhere on the body. And the spontaneous newspaper combustion is something that any good slight of hand artist with a couple of gel caps filled with potassium permanganate and glycerin could accomplish with ease. Food for thought.

Image credit: miss_blackbutterfly

Rumors were flying late last month at the Historic Latin School in Boston that a female vampire, an unnamed student, had cut someone’s neck and sucked blood, also that police officers had been summoned to the school to apprehend the vampire.

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Photo: CATERS NEWS

The World’s first and only pink bottle nosed dolphin was discovered in an inland saltwater lake in Louisiana earlier this month. Dolphins have never seemed so cuddly.

photo credit: thedimka

Calls poured in to 911 dispatchers in Virginia on Sunday describing an unexplained loud boom and a streak of light across the sky. A space.com article published Monday called a Russian rocket falling back to earth the culprit:

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

But according to a livescience.com article published today, the Virginia boom couldn’t have been the Russian Rocket:

U.S. Strategic Command has since reported that the rocket re-entered Earth’s atmosphere near Taiwan, on the other side of the world, several hours after the reports of the fireball. So both its timing and entry location rule out the rocket as the explanation for the fireball.

Astronomers now believe that it was a meteor, but with only eye-witness testimony to go on, who knows what it was?

Bubbly Creek looks placid enough in the photo above, but its shallow depths hold a gruesome secret. This small section of the Chicago River was named Bubbly Creek because of the bubbling gas coming off the riverbed below that has been present for the last hundred years.

So what makes the creek bubble? Rotting blood.

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Strangest Sea Creatures – For more amazing video clips, click here

For those of you who enjoy gawking at some of the more bizarre denizens of the deep. Is that a lobster or an alien?

Astronomers have identified two massive balls of ice, orbiting a dwarf planet on the fringe of our solar system. According to sciencenews.org:

You’d need a mighty tall glass to hold two space objects that researchers have now identified as ice cubes at the fringes of the solar system. The larger of the icy bodies is about the width of Ohio, the smaller about twice the length of Rhode Island. Both bodies are moons of the dwarf planet Haumea.

Now that’s a lot of ice. It’s nice to know that when we finally get around to colonizing the solar system that there will be no shortage of fresh water to be harvested from these two ice spheres and space objects like them.

For years enthusiasts of the weird have dredged and searched Loch Ness for a monster and come up empty handed. Little did they know that a real ancient oddity was standing right behind them. Archaeologists in Scotland believe that a boulder on a hill overlooking Loch Ness was carved and used as a marker by ancient farmers to track the spring and autumn equinoxes and thus know when to plant their crops. This civilization has long since vanished, apparently their knowledge of astronomy did little to save them from being devoured by Nessy.