Weekly Weird News for June 25, 2021
Every week I scour the news feeds for interesting pieces about fringe topics that you may have missed or have gone viral. Here is a roundup of those links with some additional suggestions about story points that have not received due attention. Feel free to comment! Send me stories via Twitter!
Disclaimer: News links go dead really quickly or they may require subscriptions or registration.
They lost their loved ones to Covid. Then they heard from them again
Many people have reported that they still experience contact with the loved ones lost in the COVID pandemic. This article explains how and why these modern ghostly experiences are such a common occurrence. We should all be aware that accounts like these have far more meaning. The shallow, overly simplified question, "Do ghosts exist?" hardly suits the deeper context of loss and survivor guilt. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/20/health/supernatural-encounters-pandemic-loved-ones-blake/index.html
Two intrusive animal stories showed up this week as locals did not much appreciate unwanted visits by local wildlife.
Elephant in the room: visitor crashes through kitchen wall in Thailand
An elephant invades a kitchen in Thailand looking for food. Elephants don't have much fear of human habitation and, therefore, plow through and do heavy damage. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/21/elephant-in-the-room-visitor-crashes-through-kitchen-wall-in-thailand
Bear identified as suspect in Thornton car break-ins
In New Hampshire, a rash of car break-ins was solved when a resident caught a black bear opening a car door and rummaging inside. They are searching for food. Once they figure out a container (of any shape) may have some and succeed in opening it, they will continue. Also, lock your door, sillies. https://www.wmur.com/article/bear-identified-as-suspect-in-thornton-car-break-ins/36757206#
Both stories show we are not doing a great job in living harmoniously with wildlife who was there first.
Digging continues at KwaHlathi despite ‘diamonds’ turning out to be quartz crystals
Social media created a "diamond rush" to a South African village after a cattleman claimed he found unknown stones that some wrongly concluded were diamonds. Diamonds can be found in certain areas of the country. Many people rushed to the site hoping to claim some of the gems prompting officials to worry about the spread of COVID. The officials seemed skeptical of the claims right off the mark as the "stones" did not look like diamonds to anyone with a discerning eye. They later confirmed they were just quartz pieces, even more common in this geological formation, which is not conducive to diamond formation. This article notes that the surrounding villages are economically depressed and the government needs to help the population find opportunities to make a living and ease their difficult lives. Stumbling upon riches isn’t a realistic hope. https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2021-06-21-digging-continues-at-kwahlathi-despite-diamonds-turning-out-to-be-quartz-crystals/
'Strange spiral in the skies' spotted across the Pacific explained
On Friday night, June 18, residents of the south Pacific islands of New Caledonia, Tokelau, Samoa and Fiji saw a spiral in the sky. This is not the first time a weird sky spiral has been seen (the most famous being over Norway in 2009). All have the same cause, fuel or exhaust expelled as part of a rocket launch. In this case, the launch was confirmed from China. It wasn’t a wormhole. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/strange-spiral-in-the-skies-spotted-across-the-pacific-explained/V5X3L5XHU32JGRZVINJZDXKZ2E/
TikToker Captures Mysterious ‘Ball Lightning’ And Scientists are Unable to Explain it
I have a Google alert for "ball lightning". Almost never do I get anything interesting from it. Here we go again. Someone told this person that they had captured ball lighting in a video of a lightning strike. It is not ball lightning. It's nothing unusual. The headline from this source went on to indicate it was also mysterious and unexplainable. Triple whammy of nope. Maybe they are referring to the look of the lightning partially hidden in the clouds, but I can't find any balls to speak of. It’s entirely sans ball. https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/tiktoker-captures-mysterious-ball-lightning-and-scientists-are-unable-to-explain-it-3882083.html
I once had the good fortune to see what's called "bead lightning" during a nighttime thunderstorm. The initial flash of the lightning stroke resolved into segments that resembled a string of beads for a fraction of a second. It was so bright that it momentarily imprinted on my retina. Cool. But that wasn't ball lightning either.
Once again, we see random uninteresting stuff on TikTok is being repackaged with extra layers of fake drama. Speaking of social media randomness totally overblown…
Police kick out group holding exorcism 'for the dead trees' at Pennsylvania Home Depot
This story is hardly even worth mentioning but it has since entered the news stream and was distributed all over the world. Now, it's a trending story. And it started (and pretty much ended) with just a tiny blurb on the Facebook page of the Dickson City police department in northeastern PA (adjacent to Scranton):
“3:26pm Commerce Blvd. @ Home Depot for disorderly people having an exorcism in the lumber isle (sic) for the dead trees. They were escorted out of the building.”
That's it. That's all you get. There are NO details to this whatsoever that I could find. But the story went to the local news station where it got picked up by other PA media outlets and now the goofy thing is on Boing Boing! Only the same tiny bit is repeated. I found that one journalist - from the source linked in this article https://www.phillyvoice.com/home-depot-exorcism-pennsylvania-dickson-city-police-commerce-boulevard/ - called the DCPD and found that it was more like a séance.
"There were two people hanging out in the lumber department doing their little exorcism thing," the officer said. "Some people at the store started picking up that something was happening that was not necessarily normal."
The individuals involved will not be charged, the officer said.
"It was a séance type of thing for the dead," he said.
That makes only slightly more sense. The Home Depot was not allowed to comment - I really feel bad for them because they might experience some more disruptions because of the attention whipped up by this non-event. It is entirely unclear why people would do this unless they really liked trees and wanted to speak to their spirits. Kind of a odd thing to do, though. The use of the term “exorcism” was a trigger to take this story really far afield. I do not see any evidence the trees were infested with demons, but the price of lumber these days is hellishly high.
Update: Clipped from the local paper, we find that two men in black were chanting and moaning. Umm…?
Did the FBI find a cache of lost gold in Elk County, PA?
Dents Run, north-central PA, a sparsely settled area. Treasure hunters allege that the FBI was looking for a Civil War-era cache of gold they suspected was hidden there. Newly unsealed documents showed that was true. The FBI organized a dig after obtaining permission from the state forestry officials and obtaining data from a contractor who used instruments to detect an underground anomaly in the area. The official answer is they found nothing but mysteries remain all over the place. Was a gold cache really hidden in the area? Did the FBI find it and remove it under cover of darkness? Was some state official trying to get in on the action? Check out the story. A private research group is angry and believes there is a cover-up. I don’t know, maybe. But, I don’t feel too bad if it was actually found by the feds as it was returned to the government instead of treasure hunters. https://apnews.com/article/pennsylvania-oddities-technology-lifestyle-government-and-politics-2c2d2a064fa7f8b3835648821ca3ecbc
More monoliths. Boring…
Mysterious metal obelisk appears in Woodmont neighborhood of Des Moines
This one gets moved around. I'm kind of over this whole monolith stuff. Maybe people should move on to different shapes. https://www.king5.com/article/news/community/mysterious-metal-obelisk-appears-in-woodmont-neighborhood-of-des-moines/281-e659f7b0-a208-490d-be5a-e909224c7979
The Watcher house is getting the Netflix treatment
Netflix has apparently won the rights to produce the story of a home in New Jersey whose one set of residents were harassed with threatening letters. The letters told them he/she was the official "watcher" of the house, one of many in a line of watchers. The letter writer was never identified. https://nj1015.com/new-jersey-mysterious-house-subject-to-netflix-thriller/
Creepy. But nothing bad ever befell the owners except that they sold the house at a really big loss.
In an update to the story about diseased birds in the mid-Atlantic last week, officials are seeing birds farther inland.
Blue Jays, Grackles, Other Birds Dying From Mysterious Ailment
Officials say the mass mortality event is serious and have not figured out the cause. The birds did not have avian flu. One hypothesis is that the Brood X cicada emergence may be related. But it's too soon to tell. Expect more to come out of this story as experts test the victims. https://www.npr.org/local/305/2021/06/16/1007154493/blue-jays-grackles-other-birds-dying-from-mysterious-ailment