Who’s Pranking Whom? Why Ireland and Why Triangular UFOs?

AUSTIN - It’s like déjà vu all over again … remember back in October 2008 when we broke the story of how someone in Ireland’s media had been convinced that a then recent UFO sighting flap (which featured an apparent triangle ufo with a red laser caught with cellphone video footage) was connected to this amazing footage of a triangle ufo with red laser darting about but which turned out to be reused footage of an award winning model from a UFO hoax contest? Well it appears that someone has yet again pulled the wool over the media’s eyes.

I was just made aware of some “dramatic new triangular ufo footage” and as soon as I saw it I recognized it as something I’d seen just a few months ago in October 2009 when I was researching the ufo videos of Ed Grimsley who claims to witness ufo battles complete with lasers and explosions using only a pair of expensive nightvision goggles. Yet none of his footage is anywhere near as interesting as this “new” triangular footage which happens to apparently use this same type of green-tinting night vision tech

The video I saw in October of last year was allegedly “filmed 12/5/08 in fremont, ca.” and uploaded to YouTube the same day by someone who appears to own a pair of the goggles and/or collects footage of nightvision anomalies. Yet the online news reports and bits of information offerred so far contradict that stating…

A triangular formation of lights was filmed flying at night at “incredible speed”.
Sighting near the River Liffey in Dublin.

One has to wonder, who got this misrepresentation of the footage started? Was it deliberate or could it just be a simple case of a news editor / web manager posting an interesting accompanying video that looks like what was described but which apparently has absolutely nothing to do with the “new” alleged Dublin sighting?

So far a handful of newsites has been taken in by this “hoax” or misidentification / miscommunication. But the list is growing everytime I check:

• Liffey on Mars
  The Sun – Vince Soodin – Jan 21, 2010
  EXPERT Nick Pope says it’s vital for our security to log sightings – and he will review yours. Among the most mysterious include a UFO over Parliament in …
  www.thesun.co.uk
• UFO spotted above Ireland (video)
  Daily Contributor - 11 hours ago
  A strange triangular formation of lights moving at an “incredible speed” has been filmed flying near the River Liffey in Dublin. …
  ailycontributor.com
• Triangular light formation UFO seen in Dublin
  NewsLite – 17 hours ago
  Witnesses say the lights moves at an “incredible speed” as they sped over the River Liffey. In the footage – which seems to have been taken via a night …
  newslite.tv
• Footage of ‘UFO’ taken in Ireland
  Oneindia – 21 hours ago
  news.oneindia.in
• UFO spotted above Dublin as Ireland turns X-Files
  Metro – 13 hours ago
  www.metro.co.uk
• Footage of ‘UFO’ taken in Ireland
  Newstrack India (blog) – 22 hours ago
  London, Jan 22 (ANI): The footage of a UFO flying near the River Liffey in Dublin has left experts thinking it could either be a secret aircraft or …
  www.newstrackindia.com
• Footage of UFO taken in Ireland
  Little About (blog) – Jan 21, 2010
  London, Jan 22 : The footage of a UFO flying near the River Liffey in Dublin has left experts thinking it could either be a secret aircraft or spacecraft. …
  www.littleabout.com

We’ll keep you posted with updates as we receive them.

- SMiles Lewis

"And in this frame, if we blow it up enough, we can clearly see all the way to the coast and this blip here, this is Patty's brother, out on the ocean, jumping the shark."

This Thursday, I’m just wondering… is MK Davis the Andy Kaufman of the Bigfoot world? Is the Bluff Creek Massacre story his slow-burn version of wrestling Freddie Blassie?

I really hope so. I’d love to be able to actually sit back and comfortably chuckle at the strangeness of it all.

I mean, personally, I see the same twisted logic in the “Why doesn’t John Green just tell us what is on his back if not a camera?” argument from Davis supporter David Paulides that I see in the Gilbert Gottfried inspired  “Did Glen Beck rape and murder a young girl in 1990?” meme.

For those not familiar, the joke originated with a celebrity roast of Bob Saget where Gottfried asked why Saget never denied rumors that he had raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. A rumor that never existed until Godfrey created it, and that the comedian quickly followed with a proclamation that, while he himself didn’t believe it was true, it was curious that Saget never denied it.

The creative mind behind the Glenn Beck riff on this joke is skewering a tactic Beck often employs himself. That is, blind siding a guest with a ridiculous charge that he claims not to believe; but that he wants the guest to refute.

It would be great if Davis and friends were doing the same. Simply skewering the Bigfoot world’s sacred cows and inserting some levity in a field that sometimes takes itself too seriously, instead of jumping the shark after doing some undeniably worthwhile work stabilizing the PG footage.

Laughter is, after all, the best medicine.

But methinks the truth may be that MK needs something just a little bit stronger.

Photo from Yahoo images, Henry Ray Abrams, AFP

I have been remiss in my Thursday duties of late. I realize this and I’m sorry. I’ll say only that “real life” (i.e. the stuff you have to do to pay those pesky bills) has been very busy of late and beg your pardon for my slacking.

But I’m here, a day late and a dollar short as my dad would say, and I’ve got some interesting links. And by interesting I mean disturbing, sad, disgusting, and amusing.

Let’s start with the disturbing (sad and disgusting would also work here), and my requisite call for the tightening of rules relating to stun gun use, as two California police officers taser a legless double amputee.

Next we have the sad tale of Sticky the kitten, found wrapped in duct tape in North Philadelphia. Apparently brotherly love doesn’t extend to our four legged brethren.

On the disgusting front we have the story of a New Jersey police officer acquitted of animal cruelty charges related to his molestation of a number of cows (evidence of which was uncovered during a probe of sexual misconduct with minors). Between this and the tasering, makes you wonder if maybe our kitten wasn’t the work of some bored off-duty cops looking for a laugh.

Finally, Snohomish County, Washington cops aren’t making any new friends among the sorts of guys who like to eat at strip club buffets because “it’s a good value.” Police there have arrested five “bikini baristas” accused of exposing their breasts and buttocks to patrons of the Grab-n-Go Espresso looking for a little more than the standard morning pick-me-up.

They are also being charged with prostitution for allowing patrons to grope them for tips (hey, GRAB-n-GO… it’s right there in the name!) While they might have been violating some health codes with their whipped cream shows (this is why I bring a thermos of coffee to work with me), the prostitution charge seems more than a bit harsh for capitalizing on the kind of objectification that has occurred since the first barmaid tied on an apron.

So, that’s it for this day late and dollar short Thursday feature. Miles and I will be in Tyler, TX this weekend for the TBRC’s Texas Bigfoot Conference. This year’s line-up includes such luminaries as Loren Coleman, Peter Matthiesen, Esteban Sarmiento, John Bindernagel, John Mioncynzski, and Bill Dranginis, among others.

911 Truther Shoots Movement in Foot – Commits Pseudocide

by SMiles Lewis

As if the 911 Truth Movement weren’t weird and ridiculed enough already – now it goes and shoots itself in the foot … again.

How often do people come across a severed human head lying in the middle of the road? Apparently as often as someone might happen to tune-in and hear a radio-show co-host commit suicide live on the air. Or is it simply a matter of weirdness acting as a strange attractor for ever more weirdness? Whatever the explanation, I witnessed both within forty-eight hours of each other.

On Tuesday, January 6th at about 2:35 pm (Central Standard Time) I was tuning in to the webradio stream of upstart Austin alternative media outlet, Freedom Underground Radio. This is the new radio station “rising from the ashes of We The People Radio Network.” WFU Radio has been founded by a co-founder of WTPRN. (Full disclosure: WFURadio has recently started carrying the PsiOp Radio show which I co-host with Mack White.)

I was tuning in to James Fetzer’s show, The Real Deal. Now, I’m not a huge fan of his research nor a regular listener to his show. He had on someone whose name I recognized as having been on the show before as a co-host who has been active within the 911-TV-Fakery branch of the conspiracy community, Ace Baker. Apparently they had switched roles for this particular show with Ace interviewing Jim instead of the other way around.

Within moments of tuning in I had the thought, “Is this guy (Ace Baker) about to commit suicide?” And moments later he did. He was speaking of regret, longing and despair regarding his daughter and deceased parents, about the disrespect and outright attacks that others in the movement had heaped upon him. “I’m coming home,” he said before I heard the sound of a gunshot. The moments leading up to and those that followed that bang were some of the most awkward live radio I’ve ever experienced.

Fetzer was understandably more or less speechless and to his credit seemed to keep his head. He managed to call Baker’s wife and leave a voicemail begging her to check on Ace saying he was worried about him. This is especially amazing for Fetzer as we were later to learn that his own Mother had killed herself when he was only 11 years old and he says had told Ace about this previously.

Of course immediately, the possibility of a hoax was apparent, at least doubly so because of the involvement of someone involved in the “fakery” branch of 911 conspiracy theories who is also a sound engineer. But even contemplating the hoax possibility I was still feeling shocked and shaky – calling my friend Mack and posting online and within Jack Blood’s Deadline Live website chatroom.

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In addition to the various folk tales and fairy stories they collected in their publications, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm also collected supposedly true stories of tragedy, such as the infamous Children Play at Hog Killing, from the first edition of their book and dropped from later editions as too grisly. In these types of stories a group of children, usually after witnessing a butcher slaughtering a hog, play a game to reenact the spectacle with the end result being the tragic death of the child playing the role of the pig.

The butcher boy story may or may not be an exaggerated tale based in actual occurrences, as analogs are found in other regions and cultures. But regardless of the butcher boy’s veracity, there are real life tragedies, ones we can read about in our hometown newspapers, that occur often enough to reinforce the importance of these folk stories as cautionary tales. They may even give us some clues to the origins of some of the various prototypical fairy tales that have maintained perennial popularity and invited repeated revisitation and reinterpretation.

The recently reported story of a teenage boy, held captive with chains about his ankles in a perfectly kept suburban home in one of the safest communities in Northern California, tells us as much about the nature of our species and our society as any folk tale. Hollywood couldn’t concoct a more chilling tale. Here is your stereotypical “they looked like a normal happy family” from the schlocky Saturday matinee horror feature, in the flesh. Here is your warning about the dangers that can lurk behind a pretty facade. Here is your wolf in sheep’s clothing, Snow White’s beautiful but poisoned apple, your fallen morning star tempting you with pretty sin. Here is your gingerbread house, with white collar witches inside, waiting to gobble you up and strip away innocence like marrow sucked from a bone.