The wizards at Martin Aircraft are on the bleeding edge of commercial jet pack technology and they’ve broken yet another milestone: sending a jet pack a mile into the air.
In this remarkable video an unmanned unit takes off from the ground while being controlled by a helicopter. It reaches 5,000 feet before coming back to Earth on a parachute.
The lights have amazed enthusiasts and confounded researchers for decades. Many swear they are evidence of UFOs emerging from an underground facility in the mountains. One hypothesis posits it might be a cluster of macroscopic Coulomb crystals in a plasma produced by the ionization of air and dust by Alpha particles during radon decay in the dusty atmosphere.
Either way, it’s pretty odd. Here is an hour-long documentary talking about it. Thanks to Weird Things reader Ben from Norway.
The Davis County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse Junior Queen Contest of Farmington, UT was the victim of a rare equine herpes outbreak which has affected many Western states and cancelled all horse related activities in Utah. For those curious, equine herpes is spread through nasal secretions when horses nuzzle together.
So these young women to the track with their own gallop astride stick horses. Giddy-up.
This is actually a really horrible story. A vervet monkey was killed and burned in South Africa by a mob who was convinced it was a witch. Bonus awful points – the police helped out by shooting at the monkey.
It reported that the monkey wandered into the settlement last week Monday, May 23, and was pelted with stones, shot at by police, and then burnt to death.
Moswetsi was woken up by friends on Monday morning and told about the monkey. They said it was going around Kagiso “talking to people”.
Hopefully this is not foreshadowing for the monkeys if they ever actually do develop the ability to speak.
Reindeer have developed the ability to see the world in ultraviolet light since migrating to the Arctic 10,000 years-ago. Most mammals, aside from rodents and some species of bats, can only see the visible spectrum and the shorter wavelength ultraviolet light remains invisible. Also, aside from being unable to see ultraviolet light, it is also damaging to most eyes, causing snow blindness.
In dark conditions, they shone LED lights of different wavelengths, including UV, into the eyes of 18 anaesthetised reindeers while recording with an electrode whether nerves in the eye fired, indicating that the light had been seen. The UV light triggered a response in the eyes of all the reindeer.
The eyes of most mammals cannot cope with UV light because it carries enough energy to destroy their sensitive photoreceptors, permanently damaging vision. To prevent this happening we experience “snow blindness”: our corneas respond to UV light by becoming temporarily cloudy, preventing excess amounts of UV reaching and burning the retina.
“Why don’t reindeer, arctic fox, polar bears or arctic seals get snow blindness?” asks Jeffery. “Arctic mammals must have a completely different mechanism for protecting their retinas.”
Here is world famous mentalist The Amazing Kreskin on why he wasn’t sweating all the Rapture talk by Harold Camping one week ago:
“I immediately checked my predictions for this year, and finding nothing regarding such, went on with my life.
“Of course, if we are to respect for even a fleeting second the pronouncement of this holy man and his conviction, we certainly would expect that he turned over every single solitary penny of his possessions to a charity by the day before the end of the world. Not doing that would label his pronouncements as phony as a $3 bill.
“Of course this holds true as well for all the individuals who were ‘passionately certain’ that the end of the world was definitely coming. Unless they relinquished all of their life savings, the question becomes, ‘Why haven’t they entered politics, where lying through one’s teeth is clearly one of the basic skills of the profession?'”
Someone is predicting the end of the world. Let me open by Trapper Keeper of yearly predictions. Hmmmm…. Hines Ward wins Dancing With The Stars, The Hangover II is boring, Sarah Palin announces she is running for president. Nope, nothing in here about the ascension of all God’s children into heaven. Case closed.
Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time with Mayne knows two emotions: an amazement that one man can be so multi-talented and a staggering frustration that one man can be so multi-talented. This year, he decided he wanted to be an author, more specifically a fiction author since he already has a robust library of non-fiction and instructional magic books.
So he sat down on a flight from Houston to Fort Lauderdale and on his iPad wrote out the beginnings of a story.
Until you find out that he’s written four more books. Since the release of Grendel. On March 28th. Four of them. In less than two months. The two of them that I’ve read are very good.
Also, in his spacious downtime from that he put in the research and development to create and release a brilliant new utility Photosynthesis. For which there are only eight left to pre-order.
It’s not human.
Yes, Andrew is a year older. But does it really matter? He’s just going to conquer death anyway then write 60,000 words about it in 48 hours.
In all seriousness, this site doesn’t exist without him. In this context as a writer, I do not either.
A team of archaeologists from the University of Alabama in Birmingham used infra-red satellite cameras to locate evidence of 17 lost pyramids and thousands of ancient structures not visible to the naked eye. In addition to the pyramids, they also identified 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements.
Archaeologists on the ground have excavated several sites and confirmed there is something on them.
Ancient Egyptians used dense mud bricks to build their homes and temples, and the cameras were able to differentiate between that and the regular soil surrounding them.
It’s a lonely Ontario night. You’re on the highway driving back home, listening to the radio station you always find yourself glued to: Air band radio, the communication frequency used by air traffic control and the pilots they guide in and out of Toronto’s International Airport.
Just then, over the airwaves crackles a tone of voice not often heard. Unease, curiosity, maybe even a hint of panic? It’s a pilot, he’s talking to air traffic control, but you can only hear one side of the conversation. As Highway 400 disappears under your tires, you pump your breaks, hoping you don’t lose the signal before you’ve heard more of what the pilot has to say:
Pilot: “I am a hunter and I can tell you they looked like group of ducks – but ducks flying at 25.1?” (25,100 feet AGL)
“It was pretty fast, whatever it was!”
“I know this will sound weird, but I’ve seen jets flying out of Cold Lake (Alberta) and it didn’t look like that.”
Static.
That’s all.
Before you turn the key on your apartment, you look into the sky and think about what the pilot saw. It had to still be out there. Wherever “out there” was.
Harold Camping, who predicted that the Rapture would commence last Saturday, has informed his bewildered followers that the actual date of final judgement is October 21st.
The October date was originally slated at the day Camping claimed Jesus would return to Earth after five months of tribulation in which our Earth would be consumed in global earthquakes. As for the May date, Camping said the following on his radio network Monday night:
…God is “loving and merciful,” and had decided not to punish the humanity with five months of destruction.
But he maintains that the end of the world is still coming.
“We’ve always said October 21 was the day,” Camping said during his show. “The only thing we didn’t understand was the spirituality of May 21. We’re seeing this as a spiritual thing happening rather than a physical thing happening. The timing, the structure, the proofs, none of that has changed at all.”
What will not happen again is the nationwide advertising push spearheaded by Campings’ Family Radio network. Camping maintains the world has been warned.
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.”
While former Russian president Vladimir Putin was publicly flirting with a return to power, he finally gave his opinion on a far more important matter, the ongoing presence of Yetis and Wood Goblins in the remote areas of his expansive home country.
Outdoor Life writer Gayne C. Young published a lengthy written interview with Putin about hunting, fishing and camping in the great outdoors of Russia. However, the question and answer we most cared about did not make the final cut. Specifically, it was “Are there Yetis or Russian ‘wood goblins’ in the taiga?”
Here is the answer, as published in a French Magazine:
Putin responded to the question with this answer: “Everything is possible. I recommend you come and look. Will not guarantee success, but the search itself will surely bring satisfaction. ”
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 UFOforumthreads 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.
Bogdan, the magnetic boy from Serbia, has some competition in neighboring Croatia. Ivan Stoiljkovic, the Magnet Boy of Croatia is not only “magnetic” but can also apparently can emit heat from his hands and has healing powers. I think that these two should have a competition to see who is the true magnet champion of the former Yugoslavian republics. Winner is whoever gets the most ridiculous object to stick to their chest.
Ivan, 6, is purported to posess an extraordinary and seemingly magical talent: the ability to attract metallic objects — from spoons to heavy frying pans — to his body. He is said to be able to carry up to 25 kg of metal stuck to his torso. Ivan’s family also claims that his hands can emit heat and his mysterious ability has also given him healing powers. “Medical checkups so far have reaped inconclusive results,” reports Reuters. More images follow, in which Ivan “attracts” cutlery, cookware, an iron, and other metallic objects.
