And so was birthed, the Mars-er.

In a shocking new revelation surely set to explode into the national conversation as our 2012 election draws closer, a man has claimed that a 19-year-old Barack Obama teleported to Mars twice as part of a top secret government program.

Mr. Stillings’ statement, released at the same time, read: “I can confirm that Andrew D. Basiago and Barack Obama (then using the name “Barry Soetoro”) were in my Mars training course in Summer 1980 and that during the time period 1981 to 1983, I encountered Andy, Courtney M. Hunt of the CIA, and other Americans on the surface of Mars after reaching Mars via the “jump room” in El Segundo, California.”

The claims have been made by Andrew D. Basiago, a lawyer in Washington state who claims to have also been beamed to Mars twice. Among the unit of four college students he trained with was Obama’s appointed DARPA chief Regina Dugan.

Together, they were called Project Pegasus.

Responding to comment by Wired’s Danger Room blog a White House spokesman denied the story.

Officially, the White House says Obama never went to Mars. “Only if you count watching Marvin the Martian,” Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, tells Danger Room. But that’s exactly what a secret chrononaut wants you to believe.

To be fair to the White House, Basiago claims that the CIA did their best to erase the memories of the expeditions from the minds of Project Pegasus’ participants. They might have done a better job with our future 44th president.

[Exopolitics via Danger Room]

Don’t do it. Seriously. Move that cannon out to the field. What are you doing? If you light that… oh well.

Thanks to Weird Things reader Mark Sissons for this.

[Live Leak]

You may not know that the 1963 Hitchcock masterpiece The Birds was inspired by real events. But two years prior, a swarm of the normally docile Sooty Shearwaters which rarely come to shore at all, began slamming into houses inexplicably.

Hitchcock, who frequented nearby Santa Cruz, thought the story was so compelling he crafted the suspense classic.

The film never explained why the birds went rogue, which echoed reality. Until now. Louisiana State University oceanic researchers now hypothesize that it could have been poison red algae that created the airborne attacks.

In a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Bargu argues that “toxin-making algae were present in 79 percent of the plankton” the birds ate. The toxins contained “a nerve-damaging acid, which causes confusion, seizures and death in birds.”

“All the symptoms were extremely similar to later bird poisoning events in the same area,” Bargu said.

Pretty terrifying stuff.

[Marquee Blog]

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.

The world’s first hybrid shark was discovered off the coast of Australia containing both common and Australian black tip DNA, with up to 20% percent of the population sampled being hybrids. Scientist speculate that the hybridization increases the range that the sharks can survive and could be a result of changing sea temperatures.

The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.

“It’s very surprising because no one’s ever seen shark hybrids before, this is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination,” Morgan, from the University of Queensland, told AFP.

“This is evolution in action.”

[Yahoo! News]

Once again the town of Beebe, Arkansas is cleaning up dead blackbirds around New Years and the police are banning fireworks.

“It’s just got to be a pain in my career,” Beebe Police Chief Wayne Ballew said.

Prior to this New Year’s Eve, Ballew said he wouldn’t be surprised if people sit out on their front porches in case the winged creatures fall from the sky again.

“I guess we could have an annual blackbird watch,” he said with a laugh. “People can just bring their umbrellas, open them up and walk through the neighborhood and hope they don’t get hit.”

[ABC]

As we count down the final days of 2011, it’s high time we moved into serious put up or shut up time for the 2012 prophecies. Our favorite to watch out for (literally) is the promise that a planet Nibiru will crash into Earth, ending humanity.

Beginning in 1995 by alleged alien contactee Nancy Lieder, she offered the following warning…

Lieder originally called the bringer of doom “Planet X,” and later connected it to a planet that was hypothesized to exist by a writer named Zecharia Sitchin in his book “The 12th Planet” (Harper 1976). According to Sitchin (1920-2010), the ancient Sumerians wrote about a giant planet called Nibiru — the “twelfth planet” in the solar system, after the other planets (including Pluto), the sun and moon — which has an oblong orbit that swings near Earth every 3,600 years. Humans actually evolved on Nibiru, he said, and colonized this planet during a previous flyby.

Of course, there is no astronomical proof that Nibiru, or anything like Nibiru, exists or that Earth is on a collision course with a planet of any size. Of course, that might just be what it wants you to think.

[Life’s Little Mysteries]

This iBook commercial from the very early Return of Jobs era for Apple demonstrates something very rare for Mac products. Not the telekinetic ability to move physical objects with a mouse or empty your garbage with a click of your OS9 drop down menu.

No, this is an example of one of the last Apple ads where a feature that isn’t actually available is demonstrated. Apple’s recent ads have all religiously opted against metaphoric messages. Instead they’ve highlighted stylized versions of actual usage. Even when Santa is using Siri, everything he does is something a new customer could do right out of the box. Although, we aren’t sure if iCal can handle 3.7 billion contacts on one day.

Thanks to Mark Sissons for sending this along.

A female Yeti has finally been captured in the Republic of Ingushetia. The creature was spotting killing a sheep, before dragging it into the woods and eating it. Authorities found the beast and captured it.

“I tell you what. The animal looks like a gorilla. It is nearly two meters tall. We believe it’s a female, but she is really big. A gorilla usually moves using its front extremities, but this creature stands vertically, like a human being. She roars and produces strange sounds,” the minister said.

The animal is frightened; she eats meat and herbal food, the official added.

Or so the initial report read. Until the truth was revealed.

“That was a life-size puppet that we are going to use for New Year holidays. You guys just think – it’s December 29th – what kind of Yeti can there be before the New Year holidays? He will be our Yeti for three days: on December 29, 30 and 31,” the minister said.

The story was concocted for local children. The Yeti will be joined by several talking animals including a squirrel and a wolf.

You know what would have been a great way to cap off this awesome story? Not telling anyone until after the New Year! Stupid Republic of Ingushetia…

[Cryptomundo]

We previously discussed the Krampus here. In short, he’s a demon equivalent to Santa Claus who kidnaps naughty children on Christmas Eve, takes them to his lair and eats them.

Here they are on parade.

Hide ya wife. Hide ya kids.

Thanks to Coverville’s own Brian Ibbot for passing this along.

io9 has posted the un-picked up pilot for Ronald D. Moore’s magician cop NBC pilot 17th Precient. We will post the embed here for as long as it stays up but should you not catch it, don’t worry.

17th combines all the worst tendencies of the final seasons of Battlestar with enough nonsense magi-babble to choke a unicorn. It also features startlingly generic performances from BSG favorites Tricia Helfer, Jamie Bamber and James Callis.

Plot-wise, the missing element in all of this is relatable human emotion. Partners Bamber and Callis somberly shuffle through the BFF buddy cop two-step giving viewers no reason to care if they live or die. Meanwhile, our plot is continually complicated by random magic elements and barriers that have no weight since they are being literally invented as the script moves along.

None of the main characters have any real skin in the game. It’s just a regular day at the “magical” office. Contrast that with other properties freely employing magical elements, Harry Potter and Pushing Daisies, which were packed with enough compelling human drama you could remove the spells and still be entertained.

io9’s Meredith Woerner revels in bits of creativity imbued into the universe.

We can understand how a pack of “Just Keep Making Three And A Half Men” executives might not grasp the white hot creativity burning from this one episode, because it hasn’t been done before. This world is, to put it bluntly, exceptionally weird. The energy sources are different (plants) their religion is different (Wiccan?) — even their paper is different (it’s a stream of smoke light people dip their fingers into, then they point to a paper and PRESTO — news.) All the same “weird sh-t items” we’re betting that Moore had to fight to save at every turning point on Battlestar Galactica. But these two dramas are only similar in two ways: their cast, and the fact that they demand the audience to jump into this brave new world, or else you can just show yourself out.

The props are not the play. We didn’t love the sawed off edges on every piece of paper in Battlestar because they were different. We loved the sawed off edges because the papers themselves contained grave warnings, great news and horrifying revelations. Subbing in frak for f-ck is iconic only if it’s a tool to express emotion, which through the bulk of BSG was done extremely well.

In 17th all these little flourishes, although certainly different, are left to die on the vine because they aren’t used to do anything particularly relatable or interesting.

If it took a bunch of meatheaded NBC executives to stop io9 telling me how much I was missing out by not watching this over a period of weeks, then let me know where to send the fraking fruit basket.

A new brothel is set to open in 2012 offering patrons the ability to make deep contact with Science Fiction beauties. It is the brainchild of Dennis Hof, the owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, most prominently featured in the HBO series Cathouse.

So as this institution is erected, I figured we’d pitch a few suggestions for some of the girls we feel would be very popular with future clientele. On a side note, they should seriously just build a monorail direct from CES to this place. It’s going to look like the road the Woodstock every night of the convention.

Meanwhile…

Mary the Three Breasted Mutant from Total Recall Whichever young lady decides to park herself in the make-up chair for a few hours in the morning to get this baby pasted on is going to be saying to themselves “I wish I had more hands… to hold all this money!” Bonus: This character is actually a hooker. From Mars.

Jar Jar Binks People work out hate in the strangest ways.

Loraine Baines Okay, it was kind of weird when she got all riled up flirting with her own son. But imagine, if that just happened to be you hit by Mr. Baine’s car and taken into Loraine’s room in 1959? Each costumer gets a free pair of underwear and the working girl promises to call you Calvin.

OR… for REALLY disturbed high rollers you execute the entire scene with their own mother. Then you can provide a childhood picture of the patron that slowly fades away.

Tribbles Why shouldn’t the yiffers get a little Sci Fi bang for their buck?

Orion Slave Girl This is the Big Mac of the SF sex trade. Iconic costume, fairly easy to execute and a character known not only for banging people but specifically banging Captain Kirk. Nobody minds Kirk’s sloppy seconds, if it was good enough for Picard it’s good enough for us! Aside from the various forms of Princess Leia, this is going to be your number one seller.

—

We are pretty sure that Hof’s establishments only offer female companionship however, if male talent is hired, we’d suggest the Doctor Manhattan special. It requires three blue dudes, two to service the customer and one to conduct a science experiment in the next room.

Thanks to everyone on Twitter who helped me with this list. I’ll see you all in Vegas!

Are you a fan of Andrew Mayne’s fiction books? Would you like to know all the inside scoop on what’s coming next? Sneak peaks at projects in progress? Free un-published anywhere else short stories?

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Andrew catalogues some of the forgotten heroes of Christmas including trolls, elves, Oden and a midnight menace so scary the Pope had to take action against them. Bonnie The Invisible Wife tuns the tables on Mayne, inventing a bone chilling (yet strangely erotic) scenario involving a grim Christmas gift request. Brian brings to light a new commercial comparing the most infamous group of racists ever and their possible allegiance with dog lovers everywhere. Justin passionately defends the right to name planets silly names.

Everyone gives their 2012 predictions! Space Age II! Politicians! Maker Bots! AND MORE!

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A Spanish researcher has released the results of a study seeking to codify the faces made during sex. 100 volunteers recording their mugs during some kind of sexual event which ended in completion. The faces were reviewed for similarities amongst each other in an effort match them to the Facial Action Coding System, a database for human facial movements. The video above, although unrelated to this study, shows some of the Action Units from FACS.

But according to the study, here are the faces you see whilst on the job…

• AU42 (slit eyes)
• AU43 (closed eyes)

• AU4 (frown/brow lower)
• AU6 (cheek raise)

• AU10 (upper lip raise)
• AU12 (lip corner pull)
• AU25 (lips part)
• AU26 (jaw drop)
• AU27 (mouth stretch)

• AU 29 or 30 (jaw thrust, or jaw sideways)

Or as we’ve nicknamed them…

• AU42 (The Newborn Puppy)
• AU43 (The See No Evil)

• AU4 (The I’ve Made A Horrible Mistake)
• AU6 (The Alvin also known as The Simon or Theodore)

• AU10 (The 1%)
• AU12 (The Fish Hook)
• AU25 (The Shy Librarian)
• AU26 (The Hangman’s Daughter)
• AU27 (The Fly Catcher)

• AU 29 or 30 (The Mr. Hyde)

Read about the rest of the study as well as some important questions at the link below.

[Improbable Research]

Harold Camping, who famously predicted the rapture twice in 2011, has retired from his role as host on the Christian station Family Radio Network and from doomsday predictions in general. An aide says Camping will make no proclamations for the coming year.

And as for those persistent theories that the Mayan calendar heralds the end of days in 2012. You know, the ones that threaten to turn all of our New Year’s Resolutions into Bucket List items?

Fake.

One thing is guaranteed, however: Camping will not be jumping on the bandwagon with people who believe the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012 — the date that supposedly marks the end of the Mayan calendar cycle. “Mr. Camping does not believe the Mayan calendar holds any significance at all,” Espinoza said in an email.

I can’t explain it, but I think this makes the 2012 prophecy slightly more credible.

[Life’s Little Mysteries]