Author: Alex Vogel

Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI announced that the first-ever scientific dating of bones discovered in a hidden tomb under the alter of St. Paul’s Basilica in Rome “seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that they are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul.” Radio carbon dating performed on the bone fragments indicate they are from the first or second century AD.
The announcement came just a day after the Vatican reported the discovery of the oldest known icon of Paul found on a fresco inside another tomb that had been excavated, St. Tecia in Rome. 
St. Paul, one of the main Apostles of Jesus to spread Christianity after his crucifixion, is traditionally acknowledged  to have been beheaded in Rome under the emperors’ persecution of early Christians. It is widely believed that the bone fragments discovered in the tomb under the Basilica of St. Paul are the remains of his body, while his skull fragments are believed to be held in another basilica, St. John Lateran in Rome.

On the cryptozoological front, a new species of elephant-shrew, or sengis, has been discovered in the remote forests of Tanzania, in what the mainstream media is dubbing a “giant shrew.”  

While I wouldn’t say this previously unknown species “dwarfs” other sengis species (it is only about 25% larger than other known species), nevertheless it is an important zoological find. 

UPDATE: The creature shot and killed in Medina County last week has been positively identified by a veterinarian as a coyote with a severe case of mange.

This is not the first time a mangy coyote was misidentified as a chupacabras. Remember the Cuero Chupacabras of 2007? It was identified through DNA testing to be a virtually identical match to a coyote. 

Then there was the “Elmendorf Beast” of 2004, and last year’s chupacabras caught on a Texas patrolman’s dashboard camera, both bearing a striking resemblance to mangy coyotes.
So the real mystery may not be so much what the identity of these so-called “chupacabras” are, but rather why are so many Texas coyotes coming down such severe cases of mange?

Could the following image be that of a mysterious creature known as the Chupacabras (meaning “goat-sucker” in Spanish)? It appears that another one of these creatures was shot and killed here in Texas, which has seen a spate of sightings of the elusive creature in recent years. We will be investigating this claim further and provide you with updates here.  Stay tuned!

In case you didn’t catch this iReport on CNN, here’s footage captured Saturday, June 13th of a UFO hovering over the King’s Dominion theme park in Doswell, VA (no, not Roswell… Doswell). 

It’s obviously a smoke ring created by the nearby “Volcano” ride. What is interesting is how long the ring actually hovers there and keeps its shape. Otherwise nothing particularly noteworthy.
If you really want to waste any more of your time on this one, you can catch the whole story here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq-9jc_jMao

Not so weird as it is horrifying, a young 6 year old girl came out today to tell her story of how she was set on fire by her mother in a bizarre act of voodoo exorcism.  Reported by WABC News, the incident occurred on February 4th in the basement of Marie Lauradin’s Queens, NY household.  Lauradin, the mother of the girl, was apparently intent on driving out an evil spirit she believed had taken possession of her daughter.
According to Queens District Attorney Richard Brown, “it’s alleged that an accelerant was poured over the child, and that the child was forced into a ring of fire, and…was burned over 25% of her body.”
Thankfully, the child is now living with a foster family and is recuperating after spending 55 days in the hospital. Both the mother and grandmother of the girl were arrested.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Steve Butler of Ghost Chat New England, a cable access show in the northeast. The program will air in about a month, I will post it here when it does.

14-year-old Gerrit Blank of Essen, Germany was struck by a pebble-sized meteorite on Friday, and lived to tell about it. 
According to The Telegraph, Gerrit saw a ball of light in the sky shooting straight towards him, and in an instant was stuck in the hand by the red hot meteorite, sending the boy flying and creating a foot wide crater in the road.
According to the teen, at the moment of impact “there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder” that was so loud it left his ears ringing for hours.
Subsequent tests on the rock have proven that it did indeed originate from outer space. The incident marks the first time on record that a human suffered a direct hit by a meteorite, the odds of which are more than one-in-a-million.
Sources: Yahoo News, The Telegraph (UK

  This week I’ve been recounting my experience of how I first opened the museum. You can read the first two installments here and here.
    After settling on the name “Museum of the Weird” and acquiring some cool attractions to put on display, I decided I had to open it in time for one of our biggest events of the year, the spring Pecan Street Festival, which was only a week or so away at the time. I knew the size of the crowd we’d get that weekend we wouldn’t see again for several more months, so I wanted to seize upon the opportunity, even though there was almost nothing completed in the way of construction of the museum. So I labored day and night trying to get the exhibits finished, sometimes pulling all nighters, sometimes skipping a couple of meals just to work through the day.
    Finally, the time came to share my creation with the rest of the world. The date was May 5th, 2007. I was very excited, and a little bit nervous. As we opened the doors that first morning of the Pecan Street Festival, people slowly started to trickle in, then as the afternoon progressed, more and more people were coming in. Before I knew it, the place was crowded to capacity, and there was a line of people waiting to get in.  And I was afraid nobody was going to show up!
    And did all those hours of work pay off? Well, monetarily it was a success. But, to be completely honest, the initial  reviews were, how shall we say… less than stellar. 
    I’d say about half of the people who came out were disappointed, the other half loved it. The ones who loved it seemed to get the fact that this was a sideshow in the tradition of P.T. Barnum and the dime museums of old. The ones who were disappointed mainly seemed like they expected more and wanted to get more bang for their buck. Some people thought it was a haunted house, and didn’t understand that it was just a sideshow exhibit. Others just assumed that everything in there was all fake (which, I can assure you, is not the case). While I was definitely grateful for all the people who loved it, part of me was frustrated that not everyone enjoyed it. I would think “for $3, what were they expecting, Disneyworld?” But I also realized that billing the place as a “museum” instead of a sideshow may have been a mistake at first. The biggest complaint was that everyone wanted to see more. 
    So from this experience, I learned a couple of valuable lessons. One was, no matter how hard you try to entertain the public, you just can’t please all the people all the time. To quote the great Bill Cosby, “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”  
    I also learned I did have a specific audience who love and appreciate what I am doing. I had found my niche. And for those people, the true fans of the weird, I was going to do everything in my power to really make this museum something they would not soon forget!  I wanted this place to become legendary.
     And so began my quest over the ensuing years to constantly expand, improve, and perfect the Museum of the Weird. Today, while the physical space is still small, I finally feel like we have enough exhibits to call the place a true museum… it’s outgrown it’s initial incarnation as a tiny sideshow.  And the reviews have steadily gotten better month after month, to the point now where almost every single person who comes in has a satisfying experience.
    And my quest is ongoing. In fact, it may be never-ending, as I constantly embark on my search to bring to you the bizarre, the strange, the unusual…the WEIRD!  I hope you come visit if you’re ever in Austin, TX, and I hope you have as much fun exploring our museum as I had putting it together for you!  
-Steve Busti

Two days ago I had begun to tell the tale of how the museum came about (you can read it here), but I mainly focused on our gift shop, Lucky Lizard Curios & Gifts. Today I’ll continue to explore how our gift shop eventually gave birth to the Museum of the Weird.

    As I mentioned earlier, my concept for Lucky Lizard was to be a curiosity shop of bizarre oddities for sale, mixed in with more merchandisable items like t-shirts, postcards, etc.  Well, as I found out, it was not an easy task to consistently stock a gift shop full of unusual, one-of-a-kind objects for sale, mainly because after you’ve tracked some cool item down, purchased it and then put it on the shelf for resale, once you sell that item it is gone and you’ll never get it back — ever. I’m not talking about some antique or collectible that, although possibly rare and valuable, there were probably hundreds or thousands of its kind in existence. No, I’m talking about an object that there is nothing else like it in the world, a true one-of-a-kind. After selling off several really cool things (and later regretting it), I decided maybe I could just display the remaining items in the shop, but mark them “Not For Sale”. 
    Well, in the back of the store I had a large glass display case that I was using as a terrarium to house two large lizards, my 15 year old iguana Simone and a 10 year old nile monitor I dubbed Torgo (bonus points if you can guess where the name came from. Hint: MST3K). After realizing people kept coming in to the store just to see the lizards, and not buying anything, I jokingly thought “gee, maybe we can start charging admission!”  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it might not be a bad idea. After all, we did have a large section in the back of the store that was not really being used, and I probably had collected enough strange and unusual objects that we could actually make a small “museum” (actually more the size of a sideshow than a legitimate museum) and the lizards would be the main attraction. So I took the remaining NFS items from the store, and began my search in earnest for even more strange exhibits for my Freakatorium. 
    In the beginning, besides the lizards I only had three star attractions to display: a one-eyed cyclops pig that had been freeze-dried and mounted; a shrunken head I had on loan from a collector; and a fiji mermaid. While still a miniscule collection, I felt it was enough to open to the public soon as a small sideshow attraction. I originally wanted to call it “The Freakatorium,” but had found out there already was one in NYC owned and operated by Johnny Fox (I think it has since closed down). I knew that Austinites already considered themselves “weird” — our city’s unofficial motto is “Keep Austin Weird.” So I decided to capitalize on the popularity of the slogan and named it the “Museum of the Weird.” Now, all I had to do was build it… and see if anyone would come!

TO BE CONTINUED!
FRIDAY: Part 3 of 
The Origin of the Museum of the Weird!