Spike TV’s show about hunting and possibly capturing a Bigfoot should probably just pack it in because Rick Dyer, a guy who’s somehow forgotten that he pulled a bigfoot hoax prior to what’s sadly going to amount to more of the same, has bagged a Bigfoot. For real. If you believe him.

“Bigfoot is not a tooth fairy — Bigfoot is real. The most important thing to me is being vindicated, letting people know that I am the best Bigfoot tracker in the world and it’s not just me saying it.”

Dyer will be taking the “corpse” on a cross-country tour and on February 6th he’ll be holding a press conference telling you exactly where you can come catch a glimpse of the sadly departed Bigfoot.

For now you can take a look at the odd video that Dyer sent television station KSAT showing off his trophy which features one of our new favorite catchphrases of 2014, “Six inches from face!”

Hopefully there are still more elusive Bigfoots out there and this won’t be the end of everyone’s favorite hairy hominid.

We can only hope it isn’t a hoax. (cough)

[CNET]

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.

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.