Month: June 2014

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Music Mondays at Free +1 at Museum of the Weird

It’s Monday, so that means the Alamo Ritz will be featuring their specialty event “Music Mondays” where at 10 pm for 5 bucks they show a music-related feature, along with weekly food and drink specials. Why are we posting about this on Museum of the Weird? Because we’re just down the street, and if you show up early (make sure you’ve got at least an hour to kill), pick up your ticket, you can show it to the staff and if you buy a ticket to the museum, a friend can get in for free with you!

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This week’s film is “The Past is a Grotesque Animal”, a documentary about the front man for the band “Of Montreal”.

 

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Latest UFO hotspot is in Hinckley, England

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Area 51 is SO two decades ago. Where does a dedicated UFOlogist go to catch sight of a saucer or two these days? According to a flurry of recent sightings, it appears the place is the rural market town of Hinckley England.

A number of citizens on different evenings have spotted oddly behaving lights in the sky. Earlier in May, witnesses described “an extremely bright red pulsating light hovering low in the sky”and that “at the rear of the main red light, there appeared to be a tail of some kind that was apparently being illuminated by the main light”. A local UFO investigation network volunteer Graham Hall said, “there were no flashing lights seen, or any other colors as on a normal aircraft”. It reportedly appeared to “swim through the night sky, giving the impression of a jellyfish as it moves through water, varying its appearance as it went, before moving very fast, and finally disappearing over rooftops.”

More recently, two different people have observed oddly behaving yellow and blue lights maneuvering in seemingly impossible patterns in the sky. One witness said, “I spotted a blue light traveling at speed. It moved across the sky very quickly at first, and then hovered from side to side before disappearing.”

There of course is a fine line with these sorts of sightings, based entirely on eye-witness testimony. With so many things to rule out, it’s very difficult to assign anything like ‘proof’ to these claims, but it’s certainly fun to speculate nonetheless. But it does beg the questions posed by legendary comic Bill Hicks, “the fact that they cross galaxies or universes to visit us, and always end up in places like … Fyffe f*%$ng Alabama. Maybe these aren’t super-intelligent beings, you know what I mean? “Don’t you wanna go to New York or LA?” “Nah, we just had a long trip, we’re gonna kick back and whittle some.” Oh my god, they’re idiots. We’re gonna enter our mothership in the tractor pull!” Last thing I wanna see is some flying saucer up on blocks in front of some trailer, bumper sticker on it, “They’ll get my raygun when they pry my cold, dead, eighteen-fingered hand off it!”

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Giant Great White Shark Eaten by Mystery Alpha Predator

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Sharks. Great…white…sharks. Ever since watching Steven Spielberg’s monumental flick “Jaws” as a kid, swimming in the ocean has taken on a decidedly tense flavor for me. Alpha predators swimming out of sight, MADE of teeth (or at least, that’s how I see it), hunting around for a ME buffet. Nope, don’t like it. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, how does one deal with this new information:

The tracking device on a  tagged nine foot long great white shark washed up on shore in Australia. Data on the device showed that the shark had a rapid temperature rise and then a sudden 580 degrees plunge. The working theory by researchers is that the shark was eaten by a MUCH bigger animal, which accounted for the temperature rise as it entered its digestive system. Then it presumably went back down to the considerably lower and darker depths which it lives, waiting for the next time I dip a toe in the ocean.

WHAT THE HECK EATS A 9 FOOT GREAT WHITE SHARK???

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Barring Godzilla (which sadly, the researchers have done) their belief is that it was eaten by a “colossal, cannibal great white shark”. Does anyone else think that we might be dealing with a cryptid situation here? Perhaps the titanic prehistoric shark, the Megalodon, isn’t as extinct as we thought? These things grew to be 50 feet long (possibly even bigger) and are considered to be one of the largest and most powerful predators in vertebrate history.

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I’m not even going to take a bath for six months after this, much less get in any large bodies of water.

You can check out “The Hunt for the Super Predator”, an upcoming Smithsonian Institute documentary on June 25th if you want to get even more freaked out.

 

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The Bizarre Anatomical Machines of a Prince

I can’t say I was familiar with Raimondo di Sangro, who was a noble and Prince of the city of San Severo in Italy back in the 18th century. Considering how cool (crazy?) this guy was, I’m now officially amazed he’s not as well known as folks like Nikola Tesla. As an inventor he created a waterproof cape, a hydraulic device that could pump water to any height, an ‘eternal flame’ made from chemical compounds he created, a carriage with wooden ‘horses’ with an internal mechanical structure that could travel on land and water, colored fireworks, a printing press that could print different colors in one impression, and quite a few more things. He was also a writer, a mason and was excommunicated by the church for some of those masonic activities. But none of that is half as interesting as what ELSE he was into…

Raimondo was also an alchemist and rumors swirled of a variety of feats he had achieved in the discipline, as well as darker rumors as to how he achieved some of them. One of the things we DO know he did, although we still don’t know how he did it, was to create elaborate anatomical models. Two of them, now on display in the Museo Capella Sansevero in Naples, are of a man and a woman which detail all the blood vessels in the body in a spectacular and gruesome fashion. Apparently they were created using a process called “anatomical injection’, but we don’t know with what and to who. Rumors (once again, those pesky things) say that they are of his servant and a pregnant woman, but since Raimondo destroyed all his scientific writings before he died, we’ll never know. But there’s no denying these things are incredibly creepy and cool.

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The Jackalope actually based on science…and it’s kinda gross

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The Jackalope: America’s own portmanteau cryptid. Except I didn’t think anyone actually believed these things were out there for real.

The modern beginnings of the creature’s popularity goes back to the 1930s in Wyoming where a hunter used his taxidermy skills to attach antelope horns onto a jackrabbit. And from there, a pocket industry began selling the things to bars, curio shops, etc. However, the legend of the beastie goes much further back to legends shared around campfires in the old west, the indigenous Hulchoi people of Mexico, and even the alpine and Scandinavian areas of Europe. How did this stories of this silly thing get started? Was there an actual Jackalope at some point that the legends stemmed from?

Sort of.

Basically, they’re rabbits with HPV (human papillomavirus). So, no, this isn’t a crusty dudes with STDs having sex with bunnies story (thank god), as the virus appears in animals as well. Only instead of creating cancerous tumors in the cervix, like with humans, in rabbits the papillomavirus manifests as manifests as horns. Basically, these ‘jackalopes’ seen were deeply diseased creatures, usually reaching the end of their existence. The virus horns don’t just manifest on the head, sometimes blocking their mouths causing them to starve.

Seriously, ew.

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Of course, this won’t stop our fascination with them. Here in Austin, the home of The Museum of the Weird, we have The Jackalope Bar (which presumably has lots of HOPPY beers…*ducks*), they appeared in the popular video game Red Dead Redemption, have an ice hockey team (the Odessa Jackalopes), were the main character in a Pixar short animated film, and, well jeez, just about everywhere.

Learning their origin story now takes away a good deal of cute factor, to be sure. Sorry to rain on your parade. Next thing you know, they’ll tell us Bigfoot’s giant feet are actually herpes growths. PLEASE don’t tell us that.

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Golf Course Discovered to have been built over Cemetery

“You son of a bitch! You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn’t you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones! Lies! Lies!

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Although I don’t believe this golf course in Atlanta has been sucked into another dimension by angry spirits (yet) I’d probably think twice about playing all 18 holes. You see, what happened was, the city built this course in 1930 WELL aware that they were covering the graves (much like the guy Craig T Nelson is yelling at in the pic above from “Poltergeist”). But all this information was lost over the years until just recently when a map was uncovered confirming what were believed at this point to be nothing but spooky rumors.

The city doesn’t currently have plans to move the course and restore the graveyard, but I know I’d feel a little weird about playing there; especially since the graves are believed to be those of very poor who probably would look at a bunch of rich dudes playing GOLF on top of their final resting places to be A BIT insulting. Playing one stroke over par there might earn you a BogeyMAN.

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New Documentary “Mirage Men” exposes UFO hoaxes

UFO folklore is filled with any number of wild stories. It’s always been hard to not take the whole kit and kaboodle with a big grain of salt. Well now, many of the discrepancies and contradictions have been explained in this new documentary, out on DVD this week, “Mirage Men”.

The film follows Richard Doty, a retired special agent for the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigation whose job it was to engage with ‘believers’ and feed them misinformation. But not to cover up UFO sightings, but to encourage them.

Asserting that he was tasked with creating and encouraging more alien lore to lead astray investigations into strange lights and craft (that turned out later to be early tests of stealth planes and drone tech), he drove at least one poor guy to the brink of insanity with his manipulations. These misinformation campaigns for his benefit went so far as to equip black unmarked helicopters with unusual light arrays and plant faked downed space crafts.

Regardless of all of this, “Mirage Men” doesn’t seek to deny the existence of UFOs, just to explore how much of the common lore was in fact misinformation from Doty, the NSA and other government agencies. Doty himself says in the film that he believes Roswell was for real, and that he can’t explain a good deal of the mythology. He even regularly attends UFO conferences as he, in his own way, is indeed a believer. Whether or not you will be after viewing the film will at the very least be tempered by this new and frightening information into the ways the government has in the past sought to manipulate perception and media.

You can buy the film now on Amazon.com right here.

Mirage-Men

 

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Go see a special event at the Alamo Ritz, get a friend in free to the museum

Are you going to the Alamo Drafthouse to see a Music Monday, Terror Tuesday, or Weird Wednesday event? You should get down to 6th an hour or so early and take advantage of a special deal at Museum of the Weird.

It’s like this: go pick up your tickets from the Alamo for one of those special movie nights and if you bring them to the Museum (same day only), and you buy a ticket to the Museum tour, you can bring one friend with you on the tour for free! Spread the word!

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Harvard discovers that one of their books is bound in human skin

It probably speaks volumes (Ha! Get it?) about one whether your reaction to this is EEEEWWWW or COOL! We decline to say what our reaction was.

Experts at Harvard University have tested a 19th century volume in their library, “Des Destinees de L’Ame” and discovered that it is indeed bound with human skin tanned with sumac. The book, according to its author as “a meditation on the soul and life after death” was bound by a friend of the writer, a doctor, who bound the book “with skin from the unclaimed body of a female mental patient”. Although an earlier claim by the college newspaper claimed at least three books in their collection had this frightening fastening, the library claims after testing the books in question, this is the only one so bound. I guess if you’re still hunting for that copy of the Necronomicon, you might want to move onto Yale.

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