Tag: weird

The tragedy and farce of Cleveland’s Balloonfest of ’86

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Cleveland, Ohio is used to being the butt of jokes. Its famous burning river and the perennial underperformance of its football team have earned it widespread mockery and the enduring moniker “the mistake on the lake.” Once one of the nation’s five largest metros, Cleveland’s industry has bled offshore and its people have fled for suburbs and Southern climes, leaving behind a well-worn rustbelt emblem with an outsized set of legacy cultural institutions.

In 1986, movers and shakers at the United Way tried to shift this narrative with a single bold stroke. Their plan: break a Guinness world record by releasing more than one million balloons into the air as a fundraising gimmick, and show the world that Cleveland could be something more than a cheap punchline.

To do so, they contracted an LA-based balloon company that spent six months preparing for the event. A structure the size of a city block, covered with a mesh net, was set up to hold the balloons, which were filled in a single day by 2,500 volunteers. Altogether, more than 1.4 million balloons were inflated and launched into the air on September 27, 1986 — and truly, it was a sight to see.

Alas, Balloonfest ’86 was not the positive turning point Cleveland had hoped for. A simple principle had evaded the organizers: what goes up must come down. A cold front trapped the balloons close to the ground and forced many of them into the lake just offshore. The rest caused problems elsewhere: shutting down airports, clogging highways and waterways, littering the region with plastic and string. Horses in surrounding exurbs suffered “permanent injuries” when they were spooked by balloons landing in their pastures, prompting lawsuits and a payout from the event organizers. Most tragically, a Coast Guard search for two missing fishermen had to be called off due to the balloons; both men drowned. (This also prompted a lawsuit and subsequent settlement.)

Asked for comment on the event years later, the United Way said simply “we would not do a balloon launch ever again.”

You can watch a short documentary (7 minutes) about the Balloonfest incident below:

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U.S. government releases interim UFO report

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At last, the moment we’ve been waiting for since last December’s COVID relief bill has arrived: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released its interim report on two decades of UFO sightings to Congress.

The New York Times reports:

A total of 143 reports gathered since 2004 remain unexplained, the document released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. Of those, 21 reports of unknown phenomena, involving 18 episodes, possibly demonstrate technological capabilities that are unknown to the United States: objects moving without observable propulsion or with rapid acceleration that is believed to be beyond the capabilities of Russia, China or other terrestrial nations.

[…]

The nine-page document essentially declines to draw conclusions, announcing that the available reporting is “largely inconclusive” and noting that limited and inconsistent data created a challenge in evaluating the phenomena.

[…]

The government intends to update Congress within 90 days on efforts to develop an improved collection strategy and what officials are calling a technical road map to develop technology to better observe the phenomena, senior government officials told reporters on Friday.

While details are scant and the report’s authors decline to go out on any limbs, what’s especially interesting here are the things that aren’t ruled out. One line in particular stands out to me: “21 reports of unknown phenomena, involving 18 episodes, possibly demonstrate technological capabilities that are unknown to the United States: objects moving without observable propulsion or with rapid acceleration that is believed to be beyond the capabilities of Russia, China or other terrestrial nations.”

You can read the unclassified report yourself here.

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Department of Defense UFO report expected as soon as tomorrow

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In recent weeks, the world has been abuzz about a string of UFO sightings, footage drops, and surprising statements from sober and well-regarded public officials. Long the purview of crackpots, cultists, and the New Age movement, recent sightings are seemingly now being taken seriously by the government and mainstream press alike.

For instance, the following footage, which depicts an unidentified triangular craft spotted by a U.S. Navy vessel, aired on NBC news last month:

Similarly, this segment appeared on the May 16 broadcast of 60 Minutes:


Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) published a New York Times op-ed in which he described his visits to Area 51 as well as a clandestine Pentagon operation, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which investigated reports of UFOs and similar phenomena involving American military personnel. The conclusions Reid shares are equivocal, but intriguing:

What have I personally learned from official investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena so far? The truth, disappointing as it may be, is that there’s still a great deal we don’t understand. It’s unclear whether the U.F.O.s we have encountered could have been built by foreign adversaries, whether our pilots’ visual perception during some encounters was somehow distorted, or whether we truly have credible evidence of extraterrestrial visitations.

Even former President Barack Obama commented on UFOs in a recent interview: “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are,” he said.

Apparently, we should prepare ourselves for further disclosures, thanks to an upcoming report. Writes New York Magazine:

One of the many curiosities packed into the $2.3 trillion omnibus spending and coronavirus-relief package passed by Congress in December was a stipulation requiring the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to deliver an unclassified report on unidentified flying objects to Congress within six months, compiling what the government knows about UFOs rocketing around over American airspace.

The report — which comes after a slow, four-year drip of reporting and government admissions on UFO sightings — could be delivered to Congress as early as June 1. Regardless of what’s in it, the release will be the most direct and substantive U.S. government account of what officials call unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) ever made public.

Whatever the report describes, it is sure to be pretty interesting.

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Tonight is Krampus Night

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A vintage illustration of Krampus.
In Central European folklore, Krampus is a horned figure described as “half-goat, half-demon,” who during the Christmas season punishes children who have misbehaved.

Fewer Christmas traditions are stranger than that of Krampus. Krampus, as you may be aware, is St. Nicholas’s sinister (and lesser-known) demonic sidekick. If old St. Nick is the good cop who rewards well-behaved children with gifts of toys, Krampus is his bad cop counterpart: he punishes naughty children by beating them with birch switches (and by terrifying them with his demonic visage). Truly unlucky troublemakers might be kidnapped away in the basket he carries strapped to his back. The tradition recalls the old trope of saints vanquishing demons through the power of God and forcing them into their thrall, but likely has deeper roots in pre-Christian Alpine customs.

Many Americans remain unfamiliar with Krampus, although his profile has grown in recent years (owing in part, no doubt, to the 2015 holiday horror film of the same name). But he is widely celebrated across several parts of Europe, including Austria, Bavaria, Hungary, and surrounding regions. Young men in these parts will traditionally dress up as Krampus in the first two weeks of December, particularly on the evening of 5 December (the night before the Feast of St. Nicholas), and roam the streets frightening children with rusty chains and bells. So grab your mask, hit the streets, and get in the Krampusnacht spirit — just be prepared for some weird looks if you’re not in Europe.

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“Jap Herron,” the novel Mark Twain allegedly posthumously authored via Ouija board

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Jap Herron
In 1917, two spiritual mediums published a book they claimed had been dictated by Mark Twain’s ghost via ouija board.

Mark Twain, beloved humorist and the “father of American literature,” died in 1910. Ordinarily, you’d expect this would mean the end of his writing career (especially since this time, reports of his death had not been exaggerated). He was so dedicated to his craft, however, that his work apparently continued even from beyond the grave — at least, according to two spiritual mediums who claimed contact with Twain’s departed soul.

Emily Grant Hutchings and Lola V. Hays profess to have begun receiving messages from Mark Twain via Ouija board at a St. Louis seance in 1915. Over the next two years, Twain’s spirit would allegedly dictate an entire novel to the duo from the great beyond. The book, titled Jap Herron: A Novel Written From the Ouija Board, was published in 1917.

Ouija boards were in vogue at the time, and this wasn’t the first ghost-written work of fiction to grace the literary world; St. Louis writer Pearl Curran (a friend of Hutchings) published several novels that she claimed had been authored by a spirit named Patience Worth. The gimmick was one the public seemed to respond to: the novel sold, and generated sufficient attention to warrant a “review” in The New York Times. An excerpt from the Times:

The ouija board seems to have come to stay as a competitor of the typewriter in the production of fiction. For this is the third novel in the last few months that has claimed the authorship of some dead and gone being who, unwilling to give up human activities, has appeared to find in the ouija board a material means of expression.

[…]

The story itself, a long novelette, is scened in a Missouri town and tells how a lad born to poverty and shiftlessness, by the help of a fine-souled and high-minded man and woman, grew into a noble and useful manhood and helped to regenerate his town. There is evident a rather striking knowledge of the conditions of life and the peculiarities of character in a Missouri town, the dialect is true, and the picture has, in general, many features that will seem familiar to those who know their “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn.” A country paper fills an important place in the tale, and there is constant proof of familiarity with the life and work of the editor of such a sheet. The humor impresses as a feeble attempt at imitation and, while there is now and then a strong sure touch of pathos or a swift and true revelation of human nature, the “sob stuff” that oozes through many of the scenes, and the overdrawn emotions are too much for credulity. If this is the best that “Mark Twain” can do by reaching across the barrier, the army of admirers that his works have won for him will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary.

The book caused its share of controversy: Clara Clemens, Twain’s daughter and executor of his literary estate, threatened legal action;  Hutchings, Hays, and their publisher agreed to cease publication and to destroy remaining copies of the work.

Of course, there are some who suggest that Twain didn’t die in 1910 after all.

You can read the full New York Times review here, or check out the text of Jap Herron (which did ultimately survive) itself here.

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Fuzzy green “glacier mice” puzzle scientists

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Glacier mice
Glacier mice are colonies of mosses found on some glaciers which appear to move non-randomly across the ice.

“What the heck is this!” was the reaction of one glaciologist when he first encountered glacier mice.1  Long known to researchers but still not fully understood, glacier mice might best be thought of as bundles of moss that form pearl-like around pebbles or other impurities on glacial surfaces.

Found as far afield as Alaska, Chile, and Norway, glacier mice were first described in 1951 by Icelandic meteorologist Jón Eyþórsson, who referred to them as jökla-mýs (Icelandic for “glacier mice”).2

What’s particularly curious about these “critters,” however, is that they seem to move around much more than any ordinary moss might.

From NPR:

The movement of the moss balls was peculiar. The researchers had expected that the balls would travel around randomly by rolling off their ice pedestals. The reality was different. The balls moved about an average of an inch a day in a kind of choreographed formation — like a flock of birds or a herd of wildebeests.

 

The researchers considered several possible explanations. The first, and most obvious one, is that they just rolled downhill. But measurements showed that the moss balls weren’t going down a slope.

 

“We next thought maybe the wind is sort of blowing them in consistent directions,” says Bartholomaus, “and so we measured the dominant direction of the wind.”

 

That didn’t explain it either, nor did the pattern of the sunlight.

 

“We still don’t know,” he says. “I’m still kind of baffled.”

You can listen to an 11-minute NPR story about glacier mice here:

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The unnerving link between pandemics and psychosis

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As we continue to face down the coronavirus, and begin to use our time in quarantine to ponder its possible long-term consequences, Vice.com reports on an unexpected side effect of similar disease outbreaks.

In flu pandemics of years past — such as the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the 1889-90 influenza — a few doctors noted something striking. Specifically, they observed that a significant number of patients developed symptoms outside the normal set associated with influenza: hallucinations, mental disorders, psychosis. Sophisticated contemporary research lends support to these observations, finding evidence of a connection between the flu and schizophrenia. (For instance, children of mothers who had the flu while pregnant appear substantially more likely to develop schizophrenia later in life.)

Check out an excerpt from Vice’s article below:

While today, we consider viral infections to be diseases of the body—they infect the lungs, give us fevers, stuffy noses, or a cough—throughout history there’s also been a strange link between influenza and psychotic disorders similar to schizophrenia, a severe mental disorder that can affect how people think.
                 
By 1919, the Spanish Flu pandemic had spread influenza to a third of the world’s population, or around 500 million people. Psychiatrist Karl Menninger was treating people at Boston Psychopathic Hospital who’d recently been infected. But his patients had symptoms far beyond what’s usually associated with the flu. In a paper on 100 cases he saw over three months, he described seeing extreme mental disturbances—over half of his patients had some sort of psychosis, and almost two-thirds had hallucinations.
                 
After outbreaks of influenza in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1889, people experienced insomnia, depression, suicidal thoughts, and homicidal urges. One neurologist wrote that it wasn’t uncommon for people with the flu to feel “dark forebodings of…impending disaster” or to think they had committed a “fearful crime” and were about to be punished.

You can read the full article here.

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Tonight is Krampus Night

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Krampus
In Central European folklore, Krampus is a horned figure described as “half-goat, half-demon,” who during the Christmas season punishes children who have misbehaved.

Fewer Christmas traditions are stranger than that of Krampus. Krampus, you may be aware, is St. Nicholas’s sinister (and lesser-known) demonic sidekick. If old St. Nick is the good cop who rewards well-behaved children with gifts of toys, Krampus is his bad cop counterpart: he punishes naughty children by beating them with birch switches (and by terrifying them with his demonic visage). Truly unlucky troublemakers might be kidnapped away in the basket he carries strapped to his back. The tradition recalls the old trope of saints vanquishing demons through the power of God and forcing them into their thrall, but likely has deeper roots in pre-Christian Alpine customs.

Many Americans remain unfamiliar with Krampus, although his profile has grown in recent years (owing in part, no doubt, to the 2015 holiday horror film of the same name). But he is widely celebrated across several parts of Europe, including Austria, Bavaria, Hungary, and surrounding regions. Young men in these parts will traditionally dress up as Krampus in the first two weeks of December, particularly on the evening of 5 December, and roam the streets frightening children with rusty chains and bells. So grab your mask, hit the streets, and get in the Krampusnacht spirit — just be prepared for some weird looks if you’re not in Europe.

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How Cleveland Lost the World’s Largest Book

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The Golden Book of Cleveland
The Golden Book of Cleveland was 7 feet by 5 feet and 3 feet thick, with 6,000 pages. It was about the size of a queen-size bed and weighed 2 1/2 tons.

The Golden Book of Cleveland was as big as a queen sized bed, contained more than half a million signatures, and weighed more than two tons. If it still exists, it is the largest book in the world. But its whereabouts have been unknown since 1937.

Cleveland, Ohio played host to the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936-37, its own effort at a World’s Fair that attracted more than 7 million visitors over its two-year run. The expo was “conceived as a way to energize a city hit hard by the Great Depression” and featured rides, sideshows, botanical gardens, cafes, art galleries, and other attractions. Notable among these was the Golden Book of Cleveland, billed as the largest book in the world. From Cleveland Magazine:

The Golden Book of Cleveland, official registration book of the Great Lakes Exposition, stood inside the main entrance on St. Clair Avenue during the expo’s first season. It was 7 feet by 5 feet and 3 feet thick, with 6,000 pages — about the size of a queen-size bed. It weighed 2 1/2 tons. The Golden Book had spaces for 4 million signatures. By Aug. 17, 1936, halfway through the expo’s season, 587,400 people had signed it.

According to Cleveland Magazine, the expo’s organizers intended to donate the book to a local historical society. (“The idea was that fairgoers or their descendants could visit Cleveland again years later, look on the page number recorded in their booklet and find their signature.”) The book disappeared from expo coverage in Cleveland newspapers after August 1936, however, and after the expo ended it vanished from the public record entirely. Cleveland Magazine checked three libraries’ archives, a dozen books of newspaper clippings from the expo, more than a dozen Cleveland historians, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the Ohio Historical Society, and none could account for the book’s ultimate fate.

So where might Cleveland’s lost bed-sized book have ended up? Some speculate that it was simply destroyed following the expo. However, after Cleveland Magazine published an article about the book in 2006, a man named Al Budnick claimed that his father had sold the book to a Tucson doctor in the early 1950s. While no physical trace of the book (nor the identity of its alleged purchaser) has since turned up, you can read more in a 2007 article in the Arizona Daily Star.

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Alligator spotted in Chicago lagoon

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Spotted in a pond in Chicago’s Humboldt Park: a four-to-five foot long crocodilian. The latest Chicago-area gator-sighting since a four-footer was found swimming in Lake Michigan last October, residents observed the reptile earlier this afternoon and Chicago Police and Animal Care and Control — though skeptical at first — later confirmed the report.

Humboldt Park alligator
An alligator was spotted in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, July 2019. (Photo credit Block Club Chicago.)

From the Chicago Tribune:

Chicago officials confirmed an alligator was living in Humboldt Park Lagoon after several people reported seeing the animal there Tuesday morning and others shared possible photos of it.

Chicago police were called to the 1400 block of North Humboldt Drive about 12:15 p.m. after someone called 911 “saying they saw a Facebook post saying there is an alligator in the lagoon area,” said Chicago police spokeswoman Karie James.

Police had “independently confirmed the alligator is in the lagoon and state reptile specialists” said it was 4 to 5 feet long, police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a tweet. The animal was expected to be trapped Tuesday night “and relocated to a zoo for veterinary evaluation.”

Sounds like the makings of a summertime blockbuster! Hopefully the alligator will be captured and relocated without too much fuss.

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Man paddles world’s largest pumpkin boat down Yorkish river

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Happy Halloween! The BBC brings good tidings from York:

A man has paddled down the River Ouse in a giant pumpkin boat.

Tom Pearcy, who works at York Maze, claims it is a world record for the largest pumpkin boat, weighing 619kg (1364lbs).

As there is currently no recognised world record for the largest pumpkin boat, York Maze have applied to Guinness World Records to have this achievement recognised.

You can see video footage of this magnificent vessel here, or watch below:

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Alligator found swimming in Lake Michigan

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A kayaker on Lake Michigan spotted something shocking early Monday morning: a 4-foot alligator paddling in the water nearby. The Chicago Tribune reports:

The kayaking fisherman, David Castaneda, reported the animal to Waukegan’s Animal Control, the Lake County News-Sun reported. The animal had its mouth taped shut, and initially reports described it as a caiman, but the Wildlife Discovery Center later confirmed it was indeed an American alligator.

Dave Bernier, a general curator at Lincoln Park Zoo, suspects someone brought it to the area recently and that the gator hasn’t had to endure a Chicago January.

“It would never be able to survive the winter here,” Bernier said.

You can see the kayaker’s video of the encounter below:

This isn’t the first time gators have been spotted in Chicagoland: another small alligator was captured in the Chicago River back in 2010. Given that these cold-blooded creatures can’t survive winters at these latitudes, it is likely they were pets that escaped or were released into the wild.

Alligators aren’t the only exotic animals that are purported to sometimes lurk in Lake Michigan. Persistent urban legends tell of occasional shark sightings (including a supposed 1955 bull shark attack). (None of these instances have ever been confirmed, of course, and experts consider the aforementioned attack unlikely to have ever occurred.)

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