Weekly Weird News for 16 June 2023

Slim pickings

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me for another weird news roundup. There was not that much going on this week. I struggled to scrape up interesting stuff. I’ll start with a story that hasn’t died yet, though it’s hardly worth talking about.

Come and see the show

The Las Vegas aliens in the backyard saga continues. The real story here is how speculation, exaggeration, and pareidolia on social media can create a self-sustaining buzz. Even a week later, KLAS in Las Vegas is still hyping the story. Why? Because the reporter is George Knapp, a well-known UFO promoter. Crazy stories are good for business. As I included in last week’s edition of WWN, the “UFO” was identified as a meteor and it didn’t land anywhere. As a follow-up, more of the evidence was debunked. Internet citizens found that the “circular mark” on the ground (supposedly from a “craft”) was not new, but that the mark in the dirt had been there for at least a year, and it was unrelated to the incident. And, the “Men in Black” reported by the residents were curious, unofficial, but entirely unmysterious, investigators poking around. The opposite also happened - new “bunk” was created. Some people looking for alien faces in the shadows and in between the fence panels claimed to have found them. Those who REALLY wanted this tale to grow longer milked the story, but there is no substantive evidence that anything otherworldly happened here. The reasonable conclusion is that scared people linked certain vague circumstances together to manufacture a fantastic narrative. Mashed all together, the facts can be squished to make a crazy story. But that story itself is entirely conjecture, not factual, held together by imagination and fear. https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/las-vegas-alien-911-call-not-hoax-sources-say-so-what-happened/ For a detailed examination, see the Metabunk thread. https://www.metabunk.org/threads/claim-ufo-crashes-near-las-vegas-crash-captured-on-cops-body-cam.12980/ Now, let’s hope this story dies. Bets that it won’t.

Trips to Hel have been downgraded

There is a lovely town called Hel on Poland’s Baltic coast. In order to capitalize on tourist interest in visiting such a curiously named place, there was a bus tour offered via ingeniously numbered bus 666. Religious people decided to ruin that by protesting. The local bus operator, PKS Gdynia, announced this week that the bus number would be changed to 669 because some Christians were offended by the evil connotation. Most others, even other Christians, are perturbed by the axing because they found the original labeling to be quite amusing. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/14/bus-666-to-hel-poland-devils-number-transport-route-protest

Visit more devil-named places and entrances to Hell on my Spooky Geology site.

Fish-apocalypse

There was a mass mortality event near San Antonio on June 9. Thousands of dead fish washed onshore at Quintana Beach near Freeport, Texas. The fish were identified as Gulf menhaden and the carnage could reportedly be seen along miles of beach. While this seems disturbing, it does happen naturally and may not be related to pollution. Huge gatherings of these fish can deplete the water of oxygen and they die en masse. The fish kill was reported to be the result of low dissolved oxygen in the water which is more common in warm weather. Regardless of the cause, a mass die-off creates an immediate environmental problem because of the smell and waste. It also sparks belief in more dire explanations. But maybe people should start noticing the dire situations around them due to climate change. https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/fish-texas-oxygen-18144860.php

El Nino could bring record heat

As if we needed another boost to global temperatures, 2023 is shaping up to be the hottest on record. El Niño, a naturally recurring phenomenon where sections of the Pacific Ocean heat up, typically causes increased temperatures across the world. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/15/record-temperatures-global-heating

Ice fall on a summer day

An interesting case of a cryometeor, or falling ice chunk, happened in a suburb of Philly on Thursday. A large chunk of ice, maybe 8 inches across, hit a home, damaging a gutter. It did not go through the roof but split apart when it hit the ground. The suspected cause was ice from an aircraft. A plane can accumulate ice on its exterior which falls off on descent. Elkins Park, PA is about 10 miles northeast of the PHL airport. The incident happened about 12:15. Just before noon, the weather changed as a front was moving through creating windy conditions. It would be possible to figure out which one of the 30-some planes that landed at PHL in a half-hour time span may have flown over the house but that would take me a good bit of time and not really help out this guy. It’s worth noting that there are some suspected cases of giant hailstones that formed suddenly in unstable atmospheric conditions and then fell to earth. This might be a case of that too. It appears the guy took some of the ice and made it into a slushy that he drank as a stunt. That is not smart - ice traveling through the air collects pollutants and bacteria. https://6abc.com/mysterious-chunk-of-ice-jesse-gonzales-elkins-park-home-damaged-gutter/13388126/

Disguised as a car seat

Driverless cars are becoming a reality. But how do people react to them? Researchers in the UK created a study where the driver of a vehicle disguised himself as a car seat in order to create the impression that there was no driver. People still gestured to the car as if someone was in it. I love this so much. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-nottinghamshire-65857348

She had a really bad day

A woman in Ecuador woke up at her funeral and scared the bejeezus out of her family. The 76 yr old was pronounced dead at the hospital after a suspected stroke and cardiac arrest. It appears that they held the wake later that same day. No embalming was done. She woke up in the coffin and began moving around. They took her to the hospital where she is still in serious condition but responding. Similar kinds of cases do surface every so often. And like this one, they prompt a review of medical staff to see how they are determining death. In the US, where embalming and larger funerals are normal, the delay in preparation almost guarantees that the person has not been prematurely declared dead. However, some people have come close to catastrophe. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/woman-declared-dead-knocks-on-coffin-wake-ecuador/

He had a really bad night

A man in Illinois called emergency services to report he’d been shot in his home, in his bed. His explanation was that he was asleep and dreaming there was an intruder. Half awake, he shot himself in the leg. Hmm. Is this a concocted story? Why was he sleeping with a gun? Turns out he did not have the proper legal approvals for owning the revolver. He was also charged with reckless discharge of the firearm and was arrested. I suspect there is a lot more to this story but we won’t hear it. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/man-shot-himself-dream-intruder-illegal-possession-lake-county-illinois/

[Post-publication edits were made for typos. Sorry about that.]

Thanks for reading!