STRANGE CONTINENT
Captain Boomer creates a whale of a tale
WHALE OF A TALE
In May, German authorities sprang quickly into action and issued a press release when a 17m (56ft) long sperm whale was discovered, having evidently washed ashore near the town of Zingst on the Baltic Sea. Astonished onlookers witnessed several officiallooking men in biohazard suits carefully inspecting the carcase. The story soon blew up however, as the whale turned out to be a plastic life-size replica, made by Belgian art collective Captain Boomer, and the ‘scientists’ in hazmat suits hired actors. According to the mayor of Zingst, the event took place as part of a festival aimed at raising public awareness of marine pollution. One problem remained though: no one notified the authorities beforehand, and they were not amused. The organisers of the festival might now be looking at a stiff fine and a police inquiry. NOS Nieuws, Kölner StadtAnzeiger, 25 May 2018.
RUSSIAN POLTERGEIST
In the hamlet of Maraksa, Western Siberia, some 331km northwest of Tomsk, local police called in a priest to exorcise a house plagued by a poltergeist. In mid-April, a married couple and their 15-year-old adopted son had been disturbed by moving furniture and “weird things like flying knives”, as they explained in a call to the emergency services. Police arrived on the scene to find the home in a state of complete chaos; objects appeared to have been thrown around wildly, while a knife was stuck in one of the wooden walls. Officers said they felt “the power of “something that they could not explain rationally”. As they were searching the house, a cupboard fell down next to them without warning, a piece of wood came flying in from an empty room, and books fell off the shelves. Police filed a report and called a priest to try and soothe the “evil spirits” with blessings. The Kolpashevsky Eparchy (Diocese) confirmed its participation: “A priest was sent to talk to the family and pray. He also witnessed all the things described in the report. When the priest arrived, the socalled poltergeist calmed down a bit, but then the phenomenon continued.” Siberian Times, 14 Feb; heute.at, 17 Feb 2018.
STRANGE CRIME
Two odd offenders haunted Austria and Germany this spring. An unknown nocturnal culprit threw eggs at shop doors in Frohnleiten, Styria, in mid-March, with over 20 cases recorded. “Sometimes nothing happens for several nights, then a new attack follows,” a police spokesman said.
Then, another mystery was reported from Tutzing, Bavaria, when several trees went missing from a plot of land belonging to the church of St Joseph. Kai Motschmann, spokesman of Starnberg police, explained that it was hard to determine the time of the crime, the number of trees taken (at least a dozen), or the motive. The only thing he was certain of was that “it was not a professional job”, as the trees had been sawn off “at a height of over one metre”. Kleine Zeitung (Graz), 18 Mar; merkur.de, 28 Mar 2018.
STRANGE FALLS
Shortly before midnight on 2 December 2017, Gerhard Mayer and Rita Peter-Mayer, of Lauingen in Bavaria, heard a “terrible bang” and later found several of their roof tiles shattered, as well as a large block of ice. Police assumed the ice had become dislodged from an aeroplane wing, although they also admitted “we have never before had such a case in our region”.
In the second week of April, Ulrich Magin found his car and post box covered with fine dust. It was no local event – the media were full of reports about a rain of Sahara sand having been blown from Africa to Europe, and the grey sky was explained by this dust. The dust was also registered at a Swiss observatory on the Jungfrauchjoch (at 40 micrograms per cubic metre of air), and two weeks earliere, Saharan sand had been so dense (at 1,000 micrograms per cubic metre) in Greece that it interfered with traffic at the Heraklion airport in Crete. Augsburger Allgemeine, 4 Dec 2017; General-Anzeiger, 10 April, SPIEGEL online, 12 April 2018.
VANISHING SWALLOWS
In May, birdwatchers in Belgium and the Netherlands discovered during routine counting that tens of thousands of swallows had vanished. It is presumed that they did not find their way back from Africa. Ornithologists came up with various explanations, such as hurricanes or sandstorms blowing the birds off course, after which they would have perished from exhaustion. Gerald Driessen, a scout at Natuurpunt, feared that the riddle was complex, with no immediate solution, saying: “We must seek the solution in both Europe and in Africa.” Although the cause of the mass vanishings was unknown, ornithologist
and Greenpeace employee FilipVerbelen suggested that large-scale agriculture might be the culprit, as it endangered nesting places in Europe and hibernation spots in Africa. According to a report published in May by CLM, a Dutch independent advisory bureau for agriculture, a cocktail of 14 pesticides was found when non-hatched eggs, a number of dead young swallows and one deceased adult swallow were examined. In 93 per cent of all the samples, DDT was found; surprising, as the report stated, because the use of DDT has been forbidden since the 1970s, although it is still in use in Africa to combat malaria. De Morgen, 14 May 2018, www.clm. nl/publicatie/146/18.
MYSTERY BOOK
In April, Bergen op Zoom, a town in the Netherlands, became captivated by a mystery when a centuriesold book was found during maintenance work. The tome had a chain wrapped around it and it had been immured under the floor of the 16th-century tower of Het Markiezenhof, one of the oldest palaces in the Netherlands and now a museum. Images show an impressive-looking book in a leather binding grown dark with age. Specialists had placed the book “in quarantine”, according to the local press, and research was underway to examine its origin and possible value. Within a month, the mystery collapsed, when Het Markiezenhof admitted that the municipality had made up the entire story as a PR stunt for the museum. In an editorial, the chief editor of local TV station Omroep Brabant, which had initially reported the story, voiced his displeasure with this canard, accusing the museum and the municipality of spreading fake news. Omroep Brabant, 16 April & 23 May 2018.
BIG CATS AND DOGS
The panther of Guadalajara, Spain (see FT363:20), has turned out to be a shaggy dog story, with the cryptid cat now apparently identified as a “large black feral dog”. At the end of January, a video was taken of a presumed panther near Jadraque. Two kilometres away, Guardia Civil officers spotted a feral dog, and a patrol of the Nature Protection Service of Brihuega and Atienza managed to take photos of the animal, which was described as “very large and black” and accompanied by a second dog. “This matches the characteristics described by the witnesses who have seen the animal in this region.” ABC, Madrid, 30 Jan 2018.
On 6 March 2018, a “wolf” with a bright spot on its hindquarters was videotaped near Rettenberg, in the Oberallgäu, Bavaria. The tape shows a large, dog-like creature in a meadow, but Wildlife Management Service found
the images too fuzzy and unconvincing to prove the presence of a wolf. Back in summer 2017, tourists had spotted a wolf in the region, and local hunters and farmers feared for livestock and asked for the “wolf” to be removed. Bayrischer Rundfunk, 7 Mar 2018.
On 30 April, the “Day of the Wolf” in Germany, 40 sheep from a larger flock of 150 perished at Bad Wildbad in the Black Forest after a midnight attack by a wolf or wolves. The predators killed and partially ate 16 animals, while another 24 died when they fled into a stream where they drowned. “It was a scene of horror,” said Anette Wohlfarth, head of the Federal State’s Sheep Farming Association. Investigation by the Forest Research Institute of Baden-Württemberg confirmed that the kills were typical of wolves, and later DNA testing showed beyond doubt that wolves had indeed killed the sheep. This is not the first time wolves have appeared in the area, as a deer had been killed at the end of November 2017 near Freudenstadt and another early in December at Rippoldsau-Schapbach. DNA tests revealed both kills were by the same animal. Four wolves have been found dead in the region, one shot and thrown into Lake Schluchsee, two as road kills, and one that had died from natural causes. After the Bad Wildbad incident, hunting associations urged that wolves be taken off the list of protected animals. Schwarzwälder Bote, 30 April 2018.
QUAKES AND BOOMS
Two loud sky booms were heard all over Lecco province in Northern Italy around 11am on 21 March. The booms were so frightening that several schools were evacuated as a precautionary measure; many people were sufficiently alarmed to call the fire service, and the website of the local newspaper crashed due to so many people trying to access it for information. No one could pinpoint the source of the sounds, but it was assumed that two F35 military planes from Grosseto Air Base on a lowaltitude mission to intercept a plane that had illegally entered Italian airspace had created a sonic boom. Provincia di Lecco, 22 Mar 2018.
Since early April, police in Stekene, East Flanders, have logged multiple reports of inhabitants hearing a mysterious noise sounding like a horn. “The sound lasts a few seconds, and then returns after a few minutes”, municipal employee Jan van Dooren stated. A number of possible causes had been investigated, but without success. The investigation managed to establish that the sound did not originate from a pumping station or a nearby factory. De Standaard, Nieuwsblad.be, 23 May 2018.