WEEKLY WEIRD NEWS – Page 37 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Guest Blogger

MAN FINDS METEORITES FROM GIANT FIREBALL OVER CALIFORNIA

Robert Ward holds up two pieces of a meteorite he found in Lotus, California.

A man in California has made an amazing find after a huge fireball was seen hurling in through the sky from Sacremento, CA to Las Vegas, NV.

Robert Ward of Prescott, Arizona, who’s been hunting down meteorites for over 20 years now as he travels around the world, decided he was going to find out exactly where the mysterious object that blazed through the night sky went to and amazingly enough, he actually did!

The Telegraph writes:

The rocks each weighed about 10 grams, or the weight of two nickels, said John T Wasson, a longtime professor and expert in meteorites at UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.

Experts say the flaming meteor, dating to the early formation of the solar system 4 to 5 billion years ago, was probably about the size of a minivan when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere with a loud boom early Sunday. It was seen from Sacramento, California, to Las Vegas and parts of northern Nevada.

An event of that size might happen once a year around the world, said Don Yeomans of Nasa’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But most of them occur over the ocean or an uninhabited area, he said.

“Getting to see one is something special,” he said. He added, “Most meteors you see in the night’s sky are the size of tiny stones or even grains of sand, and their trail lasts all of a second or two.”

The meteor probably weighed about 70,000 kilograms, said Bill Cooke, a specialist in meteors at Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. At the time of disintegration, he said, it probably released energy equivalent to a 5-kiloton explosion. The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons.

SHARK FOUND WITH A REAL LASER ATTACHED TO IT, SERIOUSLY!

You’re always told not to believe what you hear, only what you see but, what if both are equally as absurd as the other?

That’s what happened when folks in the Bahamas saw a “shark in the water with a real-life laser attached to it’s body”, spread the word, watched it go viral and then got back the ensuing “Yeah, right!” from the world.

Well, unfortunately for us all, they were right!

The Herald Sun writes:

SHARKS with frickin’ lasers on their heads? Oh god, it’s real.

News just in confirms that last weekend, a shark in the Bahamas was seen with a frickin’ laser attached.

The shark was a ferocious lemon shark (Negaprion brevirostris), measuring more than two metres in length.

The laser was, well, a little disappointing to be honest – a “low end of potential energy output” model from George Lucas-bothering laser manufacturers Wicked Lasers.

BUT IT WAS ATTACHED TO A SHARK NONETHELESS, proving it could be done.

The frightening experiment was conducted by Wicked Lasers after it posted a Facebook statement last week saying if 2000 people Like their post by May 27, they’ll attach a real laser to a real shark.

That was Friday. By Monday, the laser was searing parts of the Bahamas sea floor and blinding clownfish.

FOUND: LOST PAGES FROM EGYPTS’ ANCIENT BOOK OF THE DEAD

The mummy of Hunefer, shown supported by the god Anubis (or a priest wearing a jackal mask). Hunefer's wife mourns, and two priests perform rituals.

An unexpected find by Egyptologist, John Taylor, has made a remarkable impact on the piecing together of the entire, original manuscript of the ancient Egyptian tome, the Book Of The Dead.

Wikipedia says about the book:

The Book of the Dead is made up of a number of individual texts and their accompanying illustrations. Most sub-texts begin with the word ro, which can mean mouth, speech, a chapter of a book, spell, utterance, or incantation. This ambiguity reflects the similarity in Egyptian thought between ritual speech and magical power. In the context of the Book of the Dead, it is typically translated as either “chapter” or “spell”. In this article, the word “spell” is used.

At present, some 192 spells are known,though no single manuscript contains them all. They served a range of purposes. Some are intended to give the deceased mystical knowledge in the afterlife, or perhaps to identify them with the gods: for instance, Spell 17, an obscure and lengthy description of the god Atum. Others are incantations to ensure the different elements of the dead person’s being were preserved and reunited, and to give the deceased control over the world around him. Still others protect the deceased from various hostile forces, or guide him through the underworld past various obstacles. Famously, two spells also deal with the judgement of the deceased in the Weighing of the Heart ritual.

CBC News writes:

Papyrus fragments from an Egyptian funerary text known as a Book of the Dead have been discovered in the archives of the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia.

“We are incredibly surprised that we had such a significant object in our collection,” museum CEO Ian Galloway told Australian press.

The discovery was made recently during a visit to the museum by British Museum Egyptologist John Taylor.

While on a tour of the Australian venue’s Egyptian collection ahead of its new exhibit Mummy: Secrets of the Tomb (which opened Thursday), Taylor noticed a familiar name — Amenhotep, a well-known ancient Egyptian head of builders — on a fragile piece of papyrus long ago conserved by Queensland Museum curators.

Upon further examination of the collection, he confirmed that the ancient scraps were from The Book of the Dead of Amenhotep, an ancient Egyptian official from approximately 1420 B.C.

NASA CAPTURES PHOTO OF UFO SAILING AROUND THE SUN

Did NASA capture a ufo on film near the Sun?

NASA cameras have caught something very interesting hanging out near the sun recently.

The photo above shows a white streak in the bottom left hand corner which, in the time-lapse style the photo was taken in, represents a large, moving object, oddly close to the sun. In fact, they’ve never seen anything like it before!

Whatever it is, we can be sure it’s big, it’s floating around in space, it can withstand the heat of the sun, and it moves of its’ own accord and, that alone is fascinating!

Daily Mail writes:

A strange object flying close to the sun looks unnervingly like a huge, metallic ‘mothership’ familiar from Hollywood blockbusters.

The picture was released by Nasa’s sun-watching Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, known as SOHO – and has become an immediate cult hit on the internet.

UFO fan site Gather News said: ‘An unusually shaped, gigantic UFO was spotted on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and posted in a video on YouTube.

‘The unidentified flying object, which bears no resemblance to anything ever spotted near the Sun, somehow manages to withstand the blazing heat thrown off by solar flare activity and the incredibly high temperatures emanating from nuclear fusion generated on the surface of the star.

DOES SWEDEN HAVE ITS’ VERY OWN STONEHENGE?

A little fishing village in Sweden is used to getting a bit of attention for its’ unusual set of monolithic stones that were placed in the outline of a ship on it’s beautiful, bright green coast 1,ooo years ago. Some recent investigations on the other-hand, have discovered the stones may actually date back quite a bit older than originally thought, from 1,000 years old to 2,500 years old.

Live Science writes:

Ancient Scandinavians dragged 59 boulders to a seaside cliff near what is now the Swedish fishing village of Kåseberga. They carefully arranged the massive stones — each weighing up to 4,000 pounds (1,800 kilograms) — in the outline of a 220-foot-long (67-meter) ship overlooking the Baltic Sea.

Archaeologists generally agree this megalithic structure, known as Ales Stenar (“Ale’s Stones”), was assembled about 1,000 years ago, near the end of the Iron Age, as a burial monument. But a team of researchers now argues it’s really 2,500 years old, dating from the Scandinavian Bronze Age, and was built as an astronomical calendar with the same underlying geometry as England’s Stonehenge.

EXPEDITION LOOKS FOR LIVING DINOSAURS IN THE CONGO

Does the vastly unexplored Congo of Africa hide the legendary Mokele-mbembe?

An adventurous man and some friends of his have decided they are going on a mission. A mission that involves traveling to the most remote, dense, and dangerous part of the Republic of Congo’s very own jungle to discover and catalog hundreds of new species of insects, plant life, and oh yeah… to hunt for a living dinosaur that eats hippos. You know, everyday stuff.

According to the legends and stories told be natives, he shouldn’t have much trouble. They tell of a creature that resembles the species of dinosaurs known as Sauropods, with short legs, long necks, and even longer tails.

Yahoo News writes:

A young Missouri man has turned to the Internet in search of investors for his expedition into the remote jungles of Africa seeking to document undiscovered flora and fauna. That is not so unusual, but one of the creatures he hopes to find is: a living dinosaur.

The region Stephen McCullah, the organizer of the expedition, has chosen to explore is the reputed home of the Mokèlé-mbèmbé, a dinosaur-like creature said to be up to 35 feet long (11 meters), with brownish-gray skin and a long, flexible neck. Many locals believe that it lives in the caves it digs in riverbanks, and that the beast feeds on elephants, hippos and crocodiles.

McCullah posted his pitch on Kickstarter.com asking for $27,000 in donations so that he and his friends can launch the Newmac Expedition, “one of the first expeditions in this century with the goal of categorizing plant and animal species in the vastly unexplored Republic of the Congo.” The preliminary four-man venture is slated to launch June 26.

NEW VENTURE PLANS TO MINE ASTEROIDS FOR MINERALS

Do asteroids passing near Earth have minerals worth mining for?

A new investment from famous director James Cameron and friends, Google’s chief executive Larry Page and its executive chairman Eric Schmidt have given themselves the lofty goal of mining asteroids that come near Earth for precious minerals.

BBC News writes:

Details have been emerging of the plan by billionaire entrepreneurs to mine asteroids for their resources.

The multi-million-dollar plan would use robotic spacecraft to squeeze chemical components of fuel and minerals such as platinum and gold out of the rocks.

The founders include film director and explorer James Cameron as well as Google’s chief executive Larry Page and its executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

They even aim to create a fuel depot in space by 2020.

However, several scientists have responded with scepticism, calling the plan daring, difficult and highly expensive.

MAN COVERED WITH OVER 330,000 BEES

32-year old She Ping wearing over 300,000 (almost 73 pounds) of bees!

Bee-daredevil (didn’t know there was such a thing), She Ping donned a suit consisting of 330,000 bees that weighed up to 73 pounds the other day at an attempt to break the world record for, well… wearing bees.

Sadly, his attempt was in vein due to the fact that another man, 42-year-old beekeeper Wang Dalin, that wore a suit of 613,500 bees that weighed 136 pounds in July of 2011.

Wang Dalin in Shaoyang City, Hunan Province, China on July 17, 2011.

The Time writes:

She Ping, a beekeeper and farmer near the southwestern Chinese city of Chonqing, attempted to set a record for the most bees worn on a human body. And while he successfully donned a buzzing, swarming bodysuit weighing 33.1 kilograms (73 pounds), due to the vagaries of international bee record scoring, he may have fallen short of his goal.

While She’s estimated 331,000-bee feat might sound like a lot, and while he handily beat the previous Chinese title-holder Ruan Lianming (who wore 26.8 kilograms of bees in 2008), that might be only one of the record holders he’s contending with.

The details are a bit murky…But all these accomplishments may be for naught. The website of the Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t mention any of the Chinese bee-fashionistas; instead, it lists one Vipin Seth as wearing the world’s “heaviest mantle of bees.”

The Indian man wore a calculated 613,500 bees in his 61.4 kg mantle—which translates to a whopping 136 pounds and 4 ounces worth of bees, nearly double She’s recently-reported record.

CHICKEN BORN WITHOUT EGG!

This story flips science, and the age old question of “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” right on it’s head!

The chick shown above was born out of its’ mother alive and hopping around, not inside an egg which, as we all know, is not how chickens are supposed to be born.

BBC news writes:

A Sri Lanka hen has given birth to a chick without an egg, in a new twist on the age-old question of whether the chicken or the egg came first.

Instead of passing out of the hen’s body and being incubated outside, the egg was incubated in the hen for 21 days and then hatched inside the hen.

The chick is fully formed and healthy, although the mother has died.

The government veterinary officer in the area said he had never seen anything like it before.

PR Yapa, the chief veterinary officer of Welimada, where it took place, examined the hen’s carcass.

He found that the fertilised egg had developed within the hen’s reproductive system, but stayed inside the hen’s body until it hatched.

MEN IN BLACK PAY HOTEL A VISIT, ARE CAUGHT ON SECURITY CAMERA

As if things weren’t creepy enough for the staff of a hotel that had recently had a UFO sighting, they were apparently paid a visit by the enigmatic figures known as “men in black,” which often appear on the scene shortly after a UFO encounter.

Afterwards, one of the hotel staff decided to check the security cams, and sure enough the MIB were captured by the hotel’s cameras. If real, then this would mark the first time the mysterious “men in black” phenomenon has been recorded on video.

MIB — Could these figures be the mysterious "Men in Black"?

Ghost Theory writes:

From the Aerial Phenomen Investigations Team in Maryland comes this unique case with an exceptionally unique footage. According to the API Team, a recent UFO investigation case in Maryland received some attention from two strange looking men dressed in all black and looking so alike, that employees thought that they might be twins. They wore the exact same clothing, hats, and even had the same facial features. The men were captured on a hotel’s security camera entering the lobby in a straight strut.

According to those employees who talked to the men, they described them as tall, with extremely pale skin and no visible facial hair. Including no eyebrows and no eyelashes. Their eyes were described as being “so big and so blue, that they almost hypnotized..”

Here’s a clip of the actual footage: