Hitting your screens this May

So we finally took the plunge — after a year of planning and debate and — and announced our new Sitting Now TV show. The show will initially be available on the site, and via online distros like iTunes, YouTube, and Vimeo, and then later will appear on a channel to be announced later in the year (confusing I know).

Anyway, check out this ‘teaser’ intro, and let us know what you think!

From NME.com:

James Brown’s body has been stolen, according to his reported love child LaRhonda Pettit.

The soul legend’s body was put in a crypt after his death on Christmas Day in 2006. Since then it has been kept at his daughter Deanna’s house in South Carolina while a public mausoleum was being prepared.

Pettit has now claimed the body has gone missing. Consequently, she says she is being denied the opportunity to carry out an autopsy to determine Brown’s true cause of death, reports the Daily Mirror.

“My daddy’s body has disappeared. I have no clue where it was taken, but I need to know where,” Pettit explained.

She added: “I’m convinced his death was suspicious and I want the people responsible brought to justice. The only way to do that is to exhume his body and have an autopsy. I cannot understand why one was never conducted.”

[Read more at NME.com]

From the Examiner:

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.

[Read more at the Examiner]

Two glass phials said to contain the ghosts of an old man and a young girl have sold for NZ $2,000 (U.S. $1,395 / £935) in an online auction in New Zealand. The auction attracted more than 200,000 page views on the Trade Me website.

Avie Woodbury said the ghosts had been captured in her Christchurch house by an exorcist and stored in holy water. The top bidder, an electronic cigarette company, said it was looking for ideas on what to do with the ghosts.

Ms Woodbury told bidders she had experienced “bizarre activity” in her home.

“I would get things like the jug boiling itself, touching on the back of my neck, voices from other rooms, and items going missing then turning up in weird places,” she said.

Read More: BBC News

MSN

A woman has alarmed her small village in China after growing a 6cm horn on her forehead in less than a year.

Zhang Ruifang, 101, says she is also concerned about the appearance of a second mark on the other side of her forehead.

“We didn’t pay too much attention to it [at first] … but as time went on a horn grew out of her head,” said Mrs Zhang’s son Zhang Guozheng.

It is not every ballot initiative that has its own hip-hop song.

But then, how many times are voters asked to approve formation of a commission to study visitors from outer space?

Jeff Peckman, director of the extraterrestrial affairs commission ballot initiative, will launch a campaign to educate voters about his proposal this evening at 7 P.M. at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds.

Peckman collected signatures to have the measure placed on Denver’s Aug. 10 ballot. If it passes, the City of Denver will be required to create a seven-member commission tasked with collecting evidence that extraterrestrials and UFOs have been visiting Earth.

“Pink UFO,” a song by Chris Steele, of the hip-hop duo Calm, wrote and performs “Pink UFO,” which will be replayed at tonight’s event. The song, which is dedicated to the campaign, includes the refrain: “Pink UFO, Pink UFO, What truth do you know? What do you know?”

Peckman believes that the government is hiding evidence that technology found on an alien space craft that landed in Roswell, N.M., can cure cancer, among other things.

[Read more at the Denver Post]

For residents of a small Australian town, their usually mundane conversations about the weather have just become a whole lot more interesting.

That’s because in the outback town of Lajamanu it’s started raining fish. Yes, fish. Hundreds of them, falling from the sky. Over the past two days the town’s 660 residents have been bombarded with small white fish which have been falling like rain.

Locals say the fish, mostly spangled perch, have even been alive as they hit the floor. Lucky it wasn’t crocodiles then. Meteorologists believe the fish where sucked up by a tornado — which passed over a river some 300 miles away — before being carried through the sky at 40,000 to 50,000 feet.

Image: 1555 Engraving by Olaus Magnus (via Wikipedia)

Read More in Asylum

According to the New Catholic Dictionary the Holy Grail is “a legendary sacred vessel, identified with the chalice of the Eucharist or the dish of the Paschal Lamb, and the theme of a medieval cycle of romance”. It “is said to have been the dish… used by Joseph of Arimathea to gather the Precious Blood of Christ.” And, according to author, historian and folklorist Mark Oxbrow, the Grail has actually been found.

Of course, the Grail was once in the hands of Indiana Jones, but even he ultimately lost it; so what makes Oxbrow’s claims special? Why should we believe him when we already have several Grails, including the Nantios Cup, the “Holy Bloodline” of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and the Stone Tablets of the Ark of the Covenant in Graham Hancock’s The Sign and The Seal? And the foregoing is a non-exclusive list; a full tally of all claimants to being the Holy Grail would take considerably more room than space permits.

Before we examine Oxbrow’s claim, it might be worth establishing exactly what it is we’re actually talking about.

Traditionally, the Grail is said to be the plate used for the Last Supper, or a cup used to catch the blood of Christ on the cross. Where do these ideas come from? Three of the four Gospels of the New Testament specifically mention a cup or platter at the Last Supper – perhaps not all that surprising, as it was a meal, after all. None mention a vessel used by Joseph of Arimathea, or anyone else, to collect the Blood of Christ while on the Cross.The closest we have to a biblical mention of blood and a vessel is when Christ pours wine into a cup and urges the assembled Disciples to drink of his blood. So that’s pretty much all we can glean from the Bible.

For the next mention of the Grail we have to wait for an event which supposedly happened in AD 717 but was not recorded in writing until about 1200. In 717, according to the Cistercian chronicler Helinandus, a hermit was shown a vision of the dish of the Last Supper. This learned hermit then wrote a book in Latin, entitled Gradale. Gradale is the mediæval Latin for ‘dish’, and the Old French for dish was Gradalis, whence we get graal, greal and greel. One short leap across the English Channel and we end up with ‘grail’.

[Read more at Fortean Times]

The scientific evidence behind this growing set of suspicions — that the Spiral somehow caused the Russian missile to fail — lies in the extraordinary geometric structure that Enterprise has discovered within the too-perfect, too-concentric “shell-like rings” … making up the Spiral — A key part of this “impossible” geometry consisted of four, exactly 90-degree darkened “reticle-like” divisions of the Spiral … precisely separating it into four radiating quadrants ….

Geometric behavior simply inconceivable for any “randomly rotating … fuel-spewing third-stage rocket ….” This “too-too-regular-geometry …” can only be explained by the presence of —

Some kind of energy-induced, standing-wave-pattern in the Spiral …. Creating — Narrow, uniform-width concentric striations … ordered in an underlying medium (the leaking third-stage fuel?) by an external “forcing 3-D energy pattern” —

Then, it hit me: “Chladni Figures!”

Read More of Richard C. Hoagland on Enterprise Mission

Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Friday that he doesn’t know what people in southern Newfoundland saw recently but he promised the federal government does have plans to help them.

“We will provide money to build a landing strip for UFOs at Harbour Mille,” said MacKay, speaking in St. John’s to announce federal funding for road construction in the province.

“No, I’m only kidding. I’m joking. That’s a joke.” Jokes aside, MacKay said there’s no need to worry about the unidentified flying object. “We’ve checked with other countries and we’ll continue to do so but I don’t think it is any cause for panic,” said MacKay.

A model plane flier said an earlier a comment from the Prime Minister’s Office about a mysterious object spotted near Harbour Mille is laughable. Thursday, a federal government spokesperson suggested people in Newfoundland and Labrador like to launch model rockets.

[Read more at CBC News]

You’re six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations — and lived to tell the tale.

6:59:00 AM, 35,000 Feet: You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane?

You’re 6 miles up. You’re alone. You’re falling.

Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.

Or at least you will be. Oxygen is scarce at these heights. By now, hypoxia is starting to set in. You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again. When that happens, remember what you are about to read. The ground, after all, is your next destination.

Granted, the odds of surviving a 6-mile plummet are extra­ordinarily slim, but at this point you’ve got nothing to lose by understanding your situation. There are two ways to fall out of a plane. The first is to free-fall, or drop from the sky with absolutely no protection or means of slowing your descent. The second is to become a wreckage rider, a term coined by Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page — an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet…

Read More: Popular Mechanics

From UPI:

A meteorite that dropped into a Virginia doctors’ office is now at the center of an ownership battle between the doctors and their landlords.Dr. Marc Gallini and Dr. Frank Ciampi said they were in the process of donating the small meteorite that crashed into their Lorton office Jan. 18 to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History when their landlords, brothers Deniz and Erol Mutlu, claimed ownership of the rock, The Washington Post reported Friday.

The meteorite that dropped into a Virginia doctors’ office is now at the center of an ownership battle between the doctors and their landlords.Dr. Marc Gallini and Dr. Frank Ciampi said they were in the process of donating the small meteorite that crashed into their Lorton office Jan. 18 to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History when their landlords, brothers Deniz and Erol Mutlu, claimed ownership of the rock, The Washington Post reported Friday.

[Read more at UPI]

For nearly 20 years Sony in Japan has been plagued by the myth of the “Sony Timer” – but is there really a kill-switch that destroys your device just after its warranty runs out? Many Japanese genuinely believe that there is.

It was the recall of more than 4.1 million Dell laptops containing faulty Sony batteries in 2006 that jump-started a rumour that has been around for decades. From 1980 to 2006 geeks and tech-obsessed Japanese had joked about the existence of the timer, creating sarcastic manga and venting anger through online forums. But the Dell recall launched the urban legend into the public eye and angry Sony sufferers jumped at the chance to denounce the company.

The mass spontaneous combustion of those batteries damaged Sony’s reputation in Japan enormously. For a nation proud of their technological innovations, burning laptops and the biggest product recall in history were not exactly easy to deal with. Since then rumours have continued to fly across the internet about the existence of the timers. Sony itself is well aware of the urban legend – its current Vice Chairman Ryoji Chubachi mentioned it in public back in 2007.

But a Sony executive in 2006 had already stirred rumours when he mentioned the timers in a talk at a major technology event. He insisted that it was totally absurd and explained that the company was making every effort to dispel the myth.

[Read more at The Telegraph]

Workers at a golf course in Runaway Bay, an hour north of Fort Worth, Texas, recently found what they thought might be the carcass of the vampire beast “el chupacabra.” The strange dog-like animal was mostly hairless, with tan-brown skin. It didn’t look like anything the men had ever seen before. Was it the legendary goat-sucker, the bloodthirsty Hispanic version of Bigfoot?

As it turns out, no. Jennifer Barrow, a biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, examined the carcass and noted that the teeth, skull, and feet all matched a raccoon. It’s not clear why the animal lost its fur, though there are several diseases that can cause hair loss.

This is not the first time that a hairless raccoon has been (initially) misidentified as a monster. The so-called “Montauk Monster” was a strange creature that supposedly washed ashore on a beach in Montauk, New York, in July 2008. A photo of the odd animal circulated around the Web and became the subject of national media interest. Some thought it was a hoax; others believe that the photo depicted a pig, while others vaguely and cryptically suggest that the animal is somehow a result of “biological warfare.”

[Read more at LiveScience]

For every 300 Muscovites, there’s a stray dog wandering the streets of Russia’s capital. And according to Andrei Poyarkov, a researcher at the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, the fierce pressure of urban living has driven the dogs to evolve wolf-like traits, increased intelligence, and even the ability to navigate the subway.

Poyarkov has studied the dogs, which number about 35,000, for the last 30 years. Over that time, he observed the stray dog population lose the spotted coats, wagging tails, and friendliness that separate dogs from wolves, while at the same time evolving social structures and behaviors optimized to four ecological niches occupied by what Poyarkov calls guard dogs, scavengers, wild dogs, and beggars.

The guard dogs follow around, and receive food from, the security personnel at Moscow’s many fenced in sites. They think the guards are their masters, and serve as semi-feral assistants. The scavengers roam the city eating garbage. The wild dogs are the most wolf-like, hunting mice, rats, and cats under the cover of night.

But beggar dogs have evolved the most specialized behavior. Relying on scraps of food from commuters, the beggar dogs can not only recognize which humans are most likely to give them something to eat, but have evolved to ride the subway. Using scents, and the ability to recognize the train conductor’s names for different stops, they incorporate many stations into their territories.

[Read more at PopSci]

This has been Wired Science’s most successful year, by far. We like to think this is the result of a combination of your excellent taste and our efforts to learn what you like to read.

We have often joked that the perfect Wired Science story is about robot sharks with lasers in space. While we haven’t gotten a chance to write that one just yet, looking at this list of our most popular stories of the year, we’ve come pretty close. Golden-silk-spinning spiders, the mathematics of zombies and weird clouds were all among your favorites.

10. Mysterious, Glowing Clouds Appear Across America’s Night Skies
Speaking of weird clouds, number 10 on our 2009 hit list is the mysterious appearance of noctilucent clouds in the night skies over the United States and Europe. These night-shining clouds typically form closer to the poles, but more frequent sightings in lower latitudes could be the result of human-caused climate change.
9. Astronauts Spot Mysterious Ice Circles in World’s Deepest Lake
Apparently our readers love a good mystery, judging from numbers 9 and 10 on our list. In April, astronauts on the International Space Station took this photograph of circular formations in the ice on the surface of Lake Baikal. Scientists later determined the strange circles were caused by methane rising from the lake bottom.

[Read more at Wired]

Weirdness takes many forms, and 2009 had its share of weird events. Here’s a look back at the strangest news stories of the year drawn from the realms of pseudoscience, the paranormal, media hype, outright lies and the just plain strange.

9. Trailcam Transforms Hiker into Bigfoot

When some hunters set up a camera to record wildlife in the Minnesota woods, they accidentally photographed a hiker or hunter on a trail. A few local Bigfoot buffs concluded that the dark figure was probably Bigfoot, much to the embarrassment of other Bigfoot researchers who claimed it was just a guy in a dark outfit—unlike the famous 1967 image of Bigfoot, which couldn’t possibly be a guy in a dark outfit.

8. Turin Shroud Duplicated

A team of Italian scientists duplicated the Shroud of Turin, believed by some to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The test does not prove that the shroud was faked, merely that it could have been faked. Believers, of course, remain unconvinced, and Shroud T-shirt sales remain brisk.

7. Dogs Maul Mother Earth

According to research published in New Scientist, a medium-sized dog is more damaging to the earth than a gas-guzzling SUV, based on the amount of land and resources each uses in the course of a year.

6. Sleeping Girl Wakes Up with Star Tats

An 18-year-old Belgian girl claimed she fell asleep at a tattoo parlor and woke up to find 56 star tattoos on her face. She accused the tattooist of inking her without permission, and the girl’s father threatened to sue. She later admitted that she had been awake and requested the tattoos, and lied about it because her father was furious when he saw them.

[Read more at LiveScience.com]

Reporting from Denver – Manuel A. Sanchez has ruled out every logical explanation for the fate that has befallen the calves on his ranch in southern Colorado.

Over the past month, he’s found four calves dead in a way that he cannot reconcile with anything in his 50 years of raising cattle: eyes and ears missing, tongues and genitals excised in what appeared to be a series of fine cuts.

Mountain lions, bears or coyotes would leave messier marks, he said. And Sanchez found no tire tracks or footprints that would suggest a human invader — nor even bloodstains he’d expect to find around the carcasses if someone had butchered them.

“There’s nothing to go by,” said Sanchez, who estimated his financial loss at $10,000. “I can’t figure it out.”

Costilla County Sheriff’s Sgt. James Chavez agreed: “There’s nothing to follow up on.”

Besides Sanchez’s calves in San Luis, several cases have been reported near Trinidad.

It’s not the first time.

[Read more at the LA Times]

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story.

“It’s never-ending,” says Denise Schaan of the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil, who made many of the new discoveries from planes or by examining Google Earth images. “Every week we find new structures.” Some of them are square or rectangular, while others form concentric circles or complex geometric figures such as hexagons and octagons connected by avenues or roads. The researchers describe them all as geoglyphs.

[Read more at NewScientist]

RIA Novosoti, the Russian news agency, says the incident occurred while the unidentified 25-year-old student at Ukraine’s Kiev Polytechnic Institute was working at a computer at his parents’ house in the city of Konotop.

“A loud pop was heard from the student’s room,” ukranews.com reports, quoting an aide to the police chief . “When his relatives entered the room they saw that the lower part of the young man’s face had been blown off.”

The report says a forensic examination found that the gum was covered with an unidentified chemical substance, thought to be some type of explosive material.

Investigators found that the student often dipped his chewing gum into a packet of citric acid and had inadvertently dipped it instead into a similar-looking packet holding explosive material that was also on his desk.

Local police feared the substance might explode if they sent it to Kiev for analysis, so experts from the capital have been summoned to Konotop, RIA Novosti reports.

A Ukrainian chemistry student was killed when a stick of chewing gum apparently exploded in his mouth, Ukrainian media report.

Read More: USA Today

For half a century, my friend Loren Coleman has been obsessed with unusual animals, many of which may not exist at all. Loren is a cryptozoologist. He studies hidden and unknown animals, and the mythology, urban legends, folklore, and culture surrounding them. Sure, Bigfoot, Yeti, and Nessie are the big names, but there are countless others — the Jersey Devil, the Thunderbird, the Mothman, to name just a few. Loren has written more than a dozen books on the subject and posts daily at the Cryptomundo blog, all from a firmly Fortean perspective. Does he actually “believe” in Sasquatch or sea monsters? No, because belief, he has said, “belongs in the providence of religion.” He just tries to keep an open mind in order to accept or deny evidence based on examination and investigation.Over the years, Loren has amassed an astounding collection of cryptozoology curiosities, artifacts, and oddities, from toys, beer cans, and t-shirts emblazoned with one cryptid or another to scientific specimens, plaster casts, and movie props. His collection, called the International Cryptozoology Museum, has been housed in part of his Portland, Maine home and viewable only by appointment only. (Two years ago, he gave BBtv a tour.) But all the while, Loren has dreamt of opening up his wunderkammer to the public. Last month, he finally made that happen. The International Cryptozoology Museum opened in a permanent space in downtown Portland, Maine, sharing space with a fantastically-fringe bookstore Green Hand Books. It has regular hours and admission is just $5. Loren answered my questions in between giving the steady stream of visitors personal tours of the collection.

[Read more at BoingBoing]

Tromsø Geophysical Observatory researcher Truls Lynne Hansen was certain the light had been caused by a missile launch. He told Norwegian media that the missile had likely lost control and exploded. The spiral, he claimed, was the result of light reflecting on the leaking fuel. He was quoted as saying the light was sunlight, despite the strange lights showing up at night.

The Barents Observer quoted Norwegian Defence spokesman Jon Espen Lien as saying that the Norwegian military does not know what the lights were — but that they were probably from a Russian missile. He said it was normal for Russia to use the White Sea and the Barents Sea as a testing ground for missiles.

C’mon, time travel is so much more fun…

The treasure hunters who recovered gold and silver worth an estimated £250million from a shipwreck off Cornwall spirited their haul to the United States in an apparent attempt to stop Britain staking a claim.

In a highly secretive operation, American firm Odyssey Marine Exploration worked on the wreck of an English ship, believed to be the 17th Century Merchant Royal, less than 40 miles from the British coast.

But Odyssey carefully avoided landing their treasure on UK soil.

If the 17 tons of coins, gold ornaments and tableware had been brought ashore, Odyssey would have been obliged to inform the Government’s Receiver of Wreck, which would probably have impounded the haul, triggering a potentially lengthy legal row about ownership rights.

Instead, the trove was secretly moved to the tax haven of Gibraltar. Odyssey then chartered a jet to take hundreds of plastic containers brimming with coins to the United States on Thursday, where they have been analysed by Nick Bruyer, an expert in antique coinage.

[Read more at The Daily Mail]

What could be the only footage of an actual human headshrinking ceremony in South America — which shows heads being boiled and dried — may be real, says an explorer in a new documentary.

This story is so peculiar and conjures so many images and questions that we just couldn’t resist mentioning it. Model-turned-talk-show host Tyra Banks had what she called an “international exclusive” interview on her Tyra show Friday with a woman who says she was born with two vaginas.

Yes, you heard right!

Banks opens the interview by saying, “It’s already tough enough having one vagina, and you have two. So, OK: two of everything?”

Lauren, 29, whose last name isn’t mentioned, seems to have a good attitude about her double trouble. She answers Banks’ questions without embarrassment, admitting that she “thinks” she has two periods given that hers last a whopping 21 days. Yikes! (More on Tonic)