Several months ago, people had claimed to see flying humanoid figures in the skies. Most of the viral surge was from various consipiracy groups online. It turned out to be simple, flat, human-shaped RC planes.
We have a feeling that same group is going to be salivating over stories about a flying dragon.
No joke.
A flying dragon has been spotted in California at Minter Field Airport.
Obvious from the image above is that it’s not a real dragon but a weird hybrid of a paraglider’s parachute, a swamp boat and a dragon. It’s like the much bigger, cooler brother of the R/C dragon we reported on a while back.
According to a local newspaper near the airport where the dragon’s been spotted actually spitting fire, Disney Imagineers are the sorcerer’s behind this piece of awesome.
Patents were filed earlier this year for the vehicle showing details but Disney is keeping very hush about whatever project the Imagineers are up to that would involve the need for a flying dragon.
“I can’t really tell you much. So sorry,” Disney spokeswoman Angela Bliss said Thursday, confirming only that what people around the airport saw (she never used the word “dragon”) was a project of Glendale-based Walt Disney Imagineering.
“We’re really always looking for new ways to expand the magic at Disney Parks,” Bliss said. “But we really don’t have any specific comments about what you’re asking me about.”
The Minter Field general manager won’t talk about the dragon based on a confidentiality agreement but that hasn’t stopped people from talking about the fabled creature buzzing the airfield.
Pilot Patrick Wiens says he’d never seen anything like before. Neither had the people who’ve talked to him about it in casual conversation.
Wiens said, “They had never seen anything like it, either.”
NOAA, a government body that apparently has a lot of time on their hands, have recently laid to rest the idea that mermaids might actually exist.
According to NOAA? They don’t.
Thanks, NOAA…you’ve single-handedly just slapped several million little girls who adorably talk-sing ‘Part of Your World’ and dress up like Ariel right in their precious, red-wigged face and told them to “Knock it OFF!”
After a recent faux documentary called “Mermaids: The Body Found” aired on Animal Planet, NOAA decided it was time to put this silliness to rest once and for all.
“Mermaids: The Body Found” took small truths and sort of expanded upon them keeping the show just within the bounds of plausibility. Much like the “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” ‘documentary’ that aired on television in the 90s or going even further back to the original mayhem-causing broadcast of “War of the Worlds”, “The Body Found” sauntered up to the wall where science fiction and science fact eyeball one another and occasionally hi-five each other.
The mix of vague fact and more exciting fiction was just enough of a mix to get NOAA’s imagination police flustered enough to step in and settle this whole thing once and for all.
In a post titled “No Evidence of Aquatic Humanoids Has Ever Been Found,” NOAA states that:
The belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species. Magical female figures first appear in cave paintings in the late Paleolithic (Stone Age) period some 30,000 years ago, when modern humans gained dominion over the land and, presumably, began to sail the seas. Half-human creatures, called chimeras, also abound in mythology — in addition to mermaids, there were wise centaurs, wild satyrs, and frightful minotaurs, to name but a few. But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.
NOAA has also stepped up to swing a bat at the Lost City of Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle.
We turn it over to listener questions for this July 4th edition of the podcast. Who would win in a fight: a Unicorn or a Pegasus? If you could live forever and but a stranger had to die, would you? Is there a mega shark lurking beneath the waves?
The tables are turned as the hosts feel the brunt of our audiences weird questions!
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.
Like some kind of massive, uber-budgeted, city-wide set of a Ridley Scott film that takes place after the fall of mankind, several cities built by China are almost completely devoid of life.
What’s even stranger is that these massive cities continue to be built even though hardly a single living thing is taking up residence in them.
Recently an entire Chinese-built city in Africa popped up on everyone’s radar because of its sheer size. Named Nova Cidade de Kilamba, this massive city covers 12,335 acres, contains 750 eight-story apartment buildings, 12 schools, more than 100 retail units, is designed to hold an estimated 500,000 people and was built in less than three years for a hefty 3.5 billion dollars.
At the current build rate as many as 20 of these ‘ghost cities’ are being constructed every year with currently as many as 64 million vacant homes left empty.
These cities aren’t being built in people-friendly locations either…one of them is actually built in the middle of a Mongolian desert.
Grab your shovels, shotguns and a copy of Zombieland, kids…we’re just gettin’ started.
Here’s your cannibal/zombie update for the July 4th holiday:
United States – In Georgia, Karl Laventure consumes everyone’s favorite new synthetic brain-melter, bath salts. In a somewhat trendy move, he strips naked and begins running around and shouting. Only this time it’s not on a causeway…it’s a golf course. Laventure was running across a golf course, naked, twirling a golf club above his head and shouting to officers who attempted to stop him, “I’ma eat you. I’ll eat you! I don’t want to eat you but I will!” Laventure shrugged off pepper spray blasts and five tasers before the sixth taser brought him under control. Go acquaint yourself with just one taser to fully comprehend what that feels like. Seriously…SIX TASERS!
It’s happening, kids. Play time and funny podcast scenarios are over. We’re suggesting taking a little prep time now to save yourself some heartache later because you forgot to snag some ammo for your boomstick and find that the only shovel-like object you own is a rubber spatula.
Trust WeirdThings to keep you informed on any more zombie-like activity. Have a safe holiday and watch your face.
Feeling a little down lately? Maybe even depressed? Possibly eyeballing that extension cord in the garage and just thinking the world might be better off without you? Own a cat?
Then it’s really not you. You’re worthwhile. Stick around and enjoy life because it really is about to get better.
Just get rid of your cat and its litter box and all those suicidal feelings you’re having will go away.
Confused?
So was Dr. Teodor Postolache, an associate professor of psychiatry and director of the Mood and Anxiety Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine after studies showed low-grade activity in the immune systems of suicide victims.
A new study is suggesting that there is a link between Toxoplasma Gondii and suicide attempts among women.
No…really…someone’s studying that.
Toxoplasma Gondii (T. gondii) has also been linked to schizophrenia and other psychological issues associated with suicide. So…what does all this have to do with your cat’s crapper? Easy…the T. gondii bacteria is often found in been-used cat litter. According to the US National Library of Medicine one of the ways you can get T. gondii is by:
Carelessly handling cat litter, which can lead to accidental consumption of infectious particles.
While the study points out it’s likely that while T. gondii might quietly be causing suicidal thoughts in women, it’s also possible that a large majority of the population is already walking around with this parasite in their bodies and just aren’t acting on the impulse.
“It appears that toxoplasmosis does things that unbalance emotional mental functioning,” said Raison, CNNHealth.com’s mental health expert. “Depending on other risk factors, maybe it makes you depressed, maybe it makes you impulsive.”
It’s like Ridley Scott had a hand in designing worms.
Those dainty little flower-like objects in the picture above are anything but dainty little flower-like objects.
Those things are worms of the Osedax (Latin for “bone devourer”) family of wormy beings.
Those things aren’t just resting there either…they’re actually throwing up acid and trying to get at the marrow inside the bone!
Species of osedax have apparently been around forever but only discovered by researchers as recently as 2002 at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California.
What’s putting them back on everyone’s radar are new findings about something that’s been bugging researchers since they were discovered…How does a creature with no mouth attach, bore and extract nutrients from something as hard bone?
A fresh look at the osedax has revealed something ripe for a low-budget science-fiction film.
Using a technique not unlike Jeff Goldblum’s ‘BrundleFly’ vomit-drop from the film The Fly, the worms basically attach to the bones using root-like appendages which secrete a green, acidic enzyme on to the bone that then breaks down the tissue so that the worm can continue burrowing and extracting the nutrients it needs.
Meet the Joggobot, a small quadcopter drone, from Exertion Labs.
Running around town with your own drone is kinda nerdy…running around town with about four or five of these hovering around you? Badass.
Joggobot isn’t available to the masses yet, but we’re willing to bet that once it is, it’s only a matter of time before the ‘maker’ community arms it with options like pepper spray or a taser, slaps some devices on it for a mean game of LaserTag, some over-achiever hooks it to the Kinect or some Comic-Con cosplayer decides to go as Booster Gold and Skeets.
And, like we repeatedly mention on this blog and in the podcast, once it gets online? Joggobots world-wide will just wait for that inevitable signal from Skynet.
Our perception of the world around us could be very different than the person next to you.
In extreme cases it could mean the luscious red strawberry could look like a bulbous blueberry to someone else. Even more mind altering, results of new experiments with monkeys suggest that these receptors can be altered, allowing us to see colors we have never seen before and possibly helping reverse blindness.
In work published in the scientific journal ‘Nature’, colour vision scientist Jay Neitz from the University of Washington injected a virus into monkeys’ eyes which enabled them to see red as well as green and yellow.
Remarkably the group of squirrel monkeys were able to make sense of the new information despite their brains not being genetically programmed to respond to red signals.
The result was that just four months later the monkeys could see in full colour for the first time.
As well as allowing colour-blind humans to tell red from green, the innovative technique could restore sight to the blind.
Could color blindness really be a thing of the past? Does it make you wonder how different the world looks outside of your own head? How freaked out are those monkeys right now? Is this basically Pleasantville for them?
In an awesome case of 1890s cutting-edge tech meeting modern technology, sound historian (yes…that’s a job) at Indiana University, Patrick Feaster, has done something amazingly nerdy and fantastic.
While looking for an illustration of the world’s oldest recording studio for a talk he was giving on Thomas Edison’s recordings, Feaster pulled a book for research. Upon glancing at the index, he noticed there was an article on the gramophone. When he turned to the article? A paper print of the actual recording.
In February of this year, Feaster had done something amazing with these old paper prints of the recordings…
He played them back.
By scanning these paper copies Feaster is able to unwind or ‘de-spiral’ the line that the needle would follow on the physical record. Remarkably these unwound spirals look a lot like a modern audio file. Using special software, Feaster is able to then play back the audio captured from a flat photo.
Feaster had already done this twice with two other recordings. What makes this recording interesting is that it predate his other finds.
“In that recording, Berliner tells us he’s making a record for Rosenthal to experiment with,” Feaster says. “He shares that they’re in this particular building in Hanover, and then he recites some poetry, sings a song and counts to 20 in several languages.”
According to Feaster and his colleagues what he accidentally stumbled across was the earliest known gramophone recording ever made…printed out on paper…and played back 122 years later.
Science can’t seem to make up its mind about Mars.
Over one hundred years ago, scientists thought that Mars ran wild with water. Many decades later, scientists discovered they were wrong and that the planet may have once had water but was now completely dry. Only a few decades after that scientists learned that there is a small amount of water but only hanging delicately in the atmosphere.
Which brings us up to speed with the latest speculation…
That just below the surface of the planet there might actually be reservoirs of that refreshing martian water.
What’s strange about the discovery is that we didn’t even have to travel to the planet’s surface to get the information. We had the answers to our questions about Mars’ water situation right here on Earth for over a century.
Two meteorites, ejected from Mars almost 2.5 million years ago and which are right here on earth, contained the potential answers to just how ‘wet’ the planet may be all along.
A research team has recently looked at the amount of water molecules locked inside of minerals within both meteorites and used their finding to determine how much water was in the original rock on Mars that produced them.
Their findings so far? That Mars contains an amount of water eerily similar to Earth’s own mantle.
This could be huge for possible colonization of the planet (let’s face it…it’s going to happen).
Mars will begin revealing more of its secrets when, and if, NASA’s Curiosity rover begins playing in the dirt up there when it touches down in August.
Let’s imagine Mother Nature wanted to create a wasp to remind us that she’s still very much in charge of things. Let’s say she’s been looking at a lot of HR Giger’s work for inspiration. Now let’s say that she’s already finished it and released it into the wild.
That horrifying looking thing pictured above is actually real….and it’s called a couple of equally terrifying things; “King of Wasps”, “Horror Wasp” and “Warrior Wasp”. It’s also one more piece of evidence that suggests Mother Nature is getting ready to maybe shake off all the helpless human beings that keep putting up strip malls.
Discovered only as recently as 2011 by Lynn Kimsey of UC Davis in California, the wasp has been dubbed Garuda, the name of a mythical figure that is part-human, part eagle. Garuda is not the biggest known wasp in the world (that award goes to another wasp commonly referred to a the ‘Tarantula Hawk’) but it is the most intimidating-looking wasp out there.
Kimsey discovered the wasp in the Mekongga Mountains of Indonesia and says that they weren’t very common.
That’s great news. We’re sure TSA’s meticulous searches (read that with oozing sarcasm, folks) found any that might’ve stowed away in her luggage, right?
Eventually it’s going to stop, right? The zombie-style incidents? They’ll come to an end before we all end up eating one another, won’t they?
Not any time soon, people.
Not only will they not stop but they’re already getting tired of the taste of tender human meat and are now moving on to man’s best friend.
Yeah. You read that last part correctly…a dog is the latest victim in the new drug-zombie phenomena.
Michael Terron Daniel, a 22-year-old Texan was high on the designer drug known as K2 (a synthetic cannabis) when he began chasing a neighbor…like a dog. Complete with barks and growls, Daniel then turned his attention to the family dog. What happened next was too graphic to really go into detail about according to reports. One witness reported that he was “ripping pieces of flesh away.” The dog was pronounced dead at the scene.
Waco officers (yes…THAT Waco) arrived to find a blood-covered porch and Daniel pleading for them to either fight him or use the stun gun in order “to help him get off his bad trip.”
Daniel has been charged with felony cruelty to a non-livestock animal.
Centuries ago, in AD 774, some guy in Britain is keeping a written record of life’s goings-on.
In that year he mentions witnessing something strange…a weird “red crucifix” hanging in the sky.
Fling yourself forward in time. Researchers are unable to explain a strange spike in carbon 14 levels that manifested in unique growth rings in Japanese Cedar trees that year.
UC Santa Cruz biochemistry major Jonathon Allen was listening to a Nature podcast when he heard about the trees and something clicked.
According to Allen’s theory, the spike in carbon 14 that caused the change in the ring patterns of the trees and the ancient text reporting the glowing crucifix in the sky, which seemed to occur around the same period in time, may have both been the same incident…a possible supernova or massive solar flare.
Most scholars that Allen has presented his theory to seem to agree that some kind of massive stellar event took place back in the eighth century and that both nature and the author of an ancient text witnessed it.
Brian stumbles into his new infant child’s room only to find a bloody mystery involving a deadly animal and a hidden menace. Andrew reassures the listeners that the labs producing the most deadly diseases on the planet are being kept extremely safe and secure. Wait, no. The opposite of that. Also, ferrets could be the harbinger of a new super plague.
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.
