Leprechaun seen in Mobile, Alabama

I know this video is old, but couldn't help but post it as I love the sketch of the purposed leprechaun (if you look closely you'll see a flash of the sketch of the Unibomber near the end of where the show the sketch of the leprechaun). Happy St. Patrick's Day. Éirinn go brách!!

Korean man marries pillow

Lee Jin-gyu fell for his 'dakimakura' - a kind of large, huggable pillow from Japan, often with a picture of a popular anime character printed on the side.

In Lee's case, his beloved pillow has an image of Fate Testarossa, from the 'magical girl' anime series Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha.

Now the 28-year-old otaku (a Japanese term that roughly translates to somewhere between 'obsessive' and 'nerd') has wed the pillow in a special ceremony, after fitting it out with a wedding dress for the service in front of a local priest. Their nuptials were eagerly chronicled by the local media.

'He is completely obsessed with this pillow and takes it everywhere,' said one friend.

'They go out to the park or the funfair where it will go on all the rides with him. Then when he goes out to eat he takes it with him and it gets its own seat and its own meal,' they added.

The pillow marriage is not the first similarly-themed unusual marriage in recent times - it comes after a Japanese otaku married his virtual girlfriendNene Anegasaki, a character who only exists in the Nintendo DS gameLove Plus, last November.

Original story can be found here.

Theodore Roosevelt – Monster Hunter?

The year is 1918 and some thing is stalking the woods around Knoxville, Tennessee.

The mysterious beast is killing farm animals – hogs and calves and the occasional hunting dog – and residents are afraid to leave the house at night. Children are kept home from school. Local efforts to stop the beast have failed so desperate residents make a plea to America’s foremost outdoorsman and big game hunter to come to their aid.

President Theodore Roosevelt.

The former president’s glory days were behind him at this point in his life. His health was poor. He was sixty and suffered from severe rheumatism and carried a bullet in his chest from a failed assassination attempt in 1912. He also had flare-ups of malaria, contracted during a 1913 expedition to the Brazilian jungle, and a leg injury from the same trip that sapped much of his legendary energy. But he remained a prominent figure in American affairs. Surely this old warhorse could be called upon for one last hunt.

And Roosevelt was indeed the man to call. A respected naturalist, he had hunted game as far afield as Africa. And he had at least a passing interest in monsters. In Roosevelt’s 1890 book The Wilderness Hunter, he recounts a terrifying tale related to him by an old trapper name Bauman. Bauman and his partner had gone deep into the wilds of Idaho looking for beaver pelts when they decided to hunt a remote pass where a man was rumored to have been killed and half-eaten by a mysterious beast. Despite the area’s evil reputation, the men pressed on. It was a mistake.

Something in the woods did not want them there. Something large. Something that walked on two legs and destroyed their camp at night. Something that smelled like a wild beast yet left human-like footprints. The two men, unnerved, decide to leave the area. Bauman went off to a nearby stream to retrieve some traps. When he returned he found his partner dead, his neck snapped like a twig and deep fang marks in the man’s throat. Bauman fled the camp with only his rifle and didn’t stop until he had put the horrible place far behind him. Another monster Roosevelt was interested in was the giant anaconda of the Amazon. While his exploration of the Brazilian jungle turned up no such specimen, Roosevelt was keen enough to find the creature that he offered a $1,000 reward for the capture of a snake over 30 feet for exhibition at the Bronx Zoo. The reward is still offered by the Wildlife Conservation Society and has grown to $50,000. So we know Roosevelt had an interest in monsters and if anyone had the skill bring the Knoxville beast to ground, it was Teddy. Sadly, he never got the chance - Roosevelt’s enormous heart gave out on him in January of 1919 and he never mounted an expedition into the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to face whatever lurked in the woods. But did he hunt other monsters?

A recent post on Cryptomundo (a website dealing with strange creatures like the Bigfoot and Chupacabra) tells the legend of the Vermont monster known as Old Slipperyfoot and a correspondent of the site mentions that Theodore Roosevelt had been called in to hunt it. Is this a separate incident from the Knoxville story or has history confused the two tales? Roosevelt did travel to Vermont on occasion but I could find no instances of him hunting there and he doesn’t mention it in his autobiography.

But then, monster hunting probably doesn’t look good on a presidential resume. Even if you are Theodore Roosevelt.

Original article can be found here.

Video of alleged alien body from UFO crash in Peru

Not really sure what to make of this video. I've heard bits in pieces of the story. Supposedly a UFO crashed in the Andes in the country of Peru sometime in 1974. The military was quick to come in and clean up the debris. This is the first I have heard of any corpses being retrieved, and I find it curious that someone was able to extract an alien body from a crash site with out the military's knowledge and then hide it in a shed for over 36 years.

If this is true I'm sure the Peruvian government, if not the American government is paying a visit to whoever made this video with an interest in finding out the truth. Still, whatever the case this video is interesting. I just hope it's not another hoax like that Roswell alien autopsy video that surfaced back in the 1990's.

Wichita man pays crack dealer with Monopoly money

Normally I try to stick with just paranormal or weird stories, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to share this story. Apparently a man was assaulted in Wichita, Kansas by his drug dealer after trying to buy some crack with Monopoly money.

Police in Wichita, Kansas are investigating an odd crime that involves drugs, assault and Monopoly money.

It started as a routine traffic stop in a Wichita neighborhood Thursday evening.

When police pulled over the car they found a 33-year-old man bleeding from the head and telling an unusual story.

The victim said a couple of weeks ago he bought several hundred dollars of crack-cocaine with Monopoly money and now the dealer was ready for pay back.

"The man from whom he had bought the drugs was upset and invited him over to his house and upon arrival struck him in the head several times with a handgun and other people jumped into the fray," said Gordon Bassham with the Wichita Police Department.

The victim was able to get away and escape serious injury.

At this point police say he's being uncooperative.

Despite the unusual circumstances, officers still want to arrest the attacker.

"That was not a get out-of-jail-free card," Bassham said.

The victim's injuries were not life threatening.

Original story can be found here.

Update on video of strange creatures captured on Fresno CCTV

One of my first blog posts had me sharing a video from a CCTV feed from a house that showed some strange creatures moving across the front yard of said house. I still have no idea what was walking across that yard, but it was definitely strange. I tried to find out where it this was filmed or anything else that could shed some light.

As luck would have it, I was searching for something else regarding a UFO sighting in Fresno when I came across a longer video explaining the CCTV footage as going to the person's residence where the footage was taken and showing the yard. To be honest, after watching this video I have even more questions now given what I saw.

With that being said, here's the video. Now if I can find the neighborhood this was filmed in and talk to the owner and see what the hell actually went on.

The goat woman, Chinese grandmother has horn growing from her forehead.

An elderly Chinese woman has stunned her family and fellow villagers by growing from her forehead a horn than resembles a goat’s.

Grandmother Zhang Ruifang, 101, of Linlou village, Henan province, began developing the mysterious protrusion last year.

Since then it has grown 2.4in in length and another now appears to emerging on the other side of the mother of seven’s forehead.

The condition has left her family baffled and worried.

Her youngest of six sons, Zhang Guozheng, 60, said when a patch of rough skin formed on her forehead last year ‘we didn't pay too much attention to it’.

‘But as time went on a horn grew out of her head and it is now 6cm long,' added Mr Zhang, whose eldest brother and sibling is 82 years old.

‘Now something is also growing on the right side of her forehead. It’s quite possible that it’s another horn.’

Although, it is unknown what the protrusion is on Mrs Zhang’s head, it resembles a cutaneous horn.

This is a funnel-shaped growth and although most are only a few millimetres in length, some can extend a number of inches from the skin.

Cutaneous horns are made up of compacted keratin, which is the same protein we have in our hair and nails, and forms horns, wool and feathers in animals.

They usually develop in fair-skinned elderly adults who have a history of significant sun exposure but it is extremely unusual to see it form protrusions of this size.

The growths are most common in elderly people, aged between 60 and the mid-70s. They can sometimes be cancerous but more than half of cases are benign.

Common underlying causes of cutaneous horns are common warts, skin cancer and actinic keratoses, patches of scaly skin that develop on skin exposed to the sun, such as your face, scalp or forearms.

Cutaneous horns can be removed surgically but this does not treat the underlying cause.

Original story can be found here.

Searching for alien life in California's Mono Lake

Mono Lake has a bizarre, extraterrestrial beauty. Just east of Yosemite National Park in California, the ancient lake covers about 65 square miles. Above its surface rise the twisted shapes of tufa, formed when freshwater springs bubble up through the alkaline waters.

Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a geobiologist, is interested in the lake not for its scenery but because it may be harbouring alien life forms, or “weird life”. Mono Lake, a basin with no outlet, has built up over many millennia one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth. Dr Wolfe-Simon is investigating whether, in the mud around the lake or in the water, there exist microbes whose biological make-up is so fundamentally different from that of any known life on Earth that it may provide proof of a shadow biosphere, a second genesis for life on this planet.

Arsenic is chemically close to phosphorus. While phosphorus is a primary building block of life on Earth — an essential component of DNA and ATP, the energy molecule — arsenic is a deadly poison. In Mono Lake there are micro-organisms that live with arsenic. But they don’t incorporate it into their biology.

Dr Wolfe-Simon has theorised that there may be life that chose an “evolutionary pathway” to utilise arsenic. If such microbes existed, it could suggest that life started on our planet not once but at least twice. In turn this would help to support the idea that life is much more likely to have started elsewhere in the galaxy.

“There is life ‘as we know it’ and there is life ‘as we don’t know it’. What would that look like? I am trying to give us a framework to work with to help us look for what ‘we don’t know’, the particular framework of arsenic,” she says.

Dr Wolfe-Simon has taken samples from the mud and the waters of the lake and is performing a series of multiple dilutions — hugely increasing the levels of arsenic and reducing residual phosphorous to zero. She adds sugar, vitamins and other nutrients to encourage organisms to grow and tests the results.

Her experiments are not yet over but she is quietly pleased with the progress she is making. “We have some very exciting data,” she says. The results should be published by the end of this year.

She points out that Mono Lake arsenic life, if found, may only go as far as proving the extreme adaptability of life on Earth billions of years ago. It is generally agreed that on early Earth the chemical soup was very different because of the material being thrown out of the planet’s depths by volcanoes and hydrothermal vents and the lack of biologically derived oxygen. If arsenic was around in far greater concentrations then, perhaps “arsenolife”, as she calls it, in Mono Lake is evidence of that ancestral life, a finding that would deepen our understanding of how life on Earth got started.

But she hopes that her research may help scientists to reconsider what alien or “weird” life might look like: “It may prove that there are other possibilities that are beyond our imagination. It opens the door for us to think about biology in ways we have never thought. We are going to look for life on other planets and we only know to look for that which we know. This may help us to develop tools to look for something we have never seen.”

Her work is funded by the Nasa Astrobiology Institute and she is based at the laboratories of Professor Ron Oremland, of the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. Does she believe that there are alien life forms out there? “I don’t know how there could not be extraterrestrial life,” she replies.

Original story can be found here.