STRANGE CONTINENT
Italy’s Jesus of Light and other Euro-oddities
CHRIST OF LIGHT
When he took a photo of a beam of light that pierced the sky above the sea at Agropoli, Salerno, Italy, on 1 March, Alfredo Lo Brutto found the resulting image resembled the form of Christ with open arms, similar to the famous statue in Rio de Janeiro. He called his shot “The Christ of Light on the Sea of Agropoli”, and it went viral on social media. L’Arena, 2 Mar 2019.
EPIC VULTURE FLIGHT
A cinereous vulture (Aegypius monachus) nicknamed Brínzola and born in 2016 in a Spanish breeding station in the Sierra de la Demanda, some 50km (30 miles) east of Burgos, took to the air on 20 April 2019, leaving Spain and heading north. Its movements can be followed as it carries a tracking device. It flew over the French Basque country, and reached Belgium on 9 May, where more than 200 photographers gathered to snap a picture of the majestic bird. It reached Germany the day after, passing the southern Netherlands, and was joined by a second specimen over northern Germany. It travelled some 250km (155 miles) in just five hours, and then sailed over Denmark on 14 May. The bird flew over Sweden, reaching Växjø on 16 May, and had reached Norway the following day, where it remains at the time of writing. https://netzwerkkryptozoologie.de/, 15 May 2019.
Also far from its usual haunts was a vulture which landed near Novara, northern Italy, in April. The female, born in 2016, had a tracking device which showed she had flown from her usual haunts at the eastern end of the Pyrenees, in France. Further vultures have been reported over Maastricht (on the Belgian side of the river), on the Baltic island of Rügen, and in Bavaria, Germany. Provincia di Lecco, 25 April 2019.
ALIEN BIG CATS
The Como puma, or panther (see FT375:23, 378:16), continues to be seen. On the afternoon of 7 March, Monica Mancuso from Fino Mornasco saw it cross a street: “It had a long tail, pointed ears, was of medium size and had light brown hair. I have no doubt the puma crossed my path.” The animal had a limp, and it was feared it had been hurt. Police warned it might become dangerous if it couldn’t hunt properly due to its injury. At the end of April, an Erba man saw a large animal in his courtyard, and “recalling the numerous sightings and the many articles, I immediately
thought it was the puma”. He took a clear snap – which shows that it was actually a fox. According to the witness, animals from dogs to cows were in a state of alarm when the “cat” appeared. Provincia di Lecco, 8+9 Mar, 26 Apr 2019. Meanwhile, police in Bochum, Germany, were searching for a lynx. This was the real thing – a two-year-old male that had escaped in November 2018 from an animal park at Haltern am See, near Recklinghausen, after someone cut a hole in the wire fence. The cat was seen and photographed on 10 March near Herne, and spotted again over the following days. After further sightings in April and May in CastropRauxel and Bochum-Werne, the lynx was finally captured. On 11 May, the animal was frightened by a hunter’s dogs in Bochum and fled up a tree, where it was caught by animal park employees. Netzwerk für Kryptozoologie, 13 May 2019.
WEIRD GERMANY
When police investigated a farm at Feldbach in Styria, Austria, responding to reports that the pigs there were very emaciated, they discovered the bodies of 70 to 80 mummified pigs. The animals had all died in the last 20 years. There is no information as to whether the farmer hoarded the dead animals or whether they had been preserved by natural causes. web.de, 13. Apr 2019.
In April, several strange incidents were reported from Germany. A woman from Lübeck called police because she was not happy with the way her hairdresser had dyed her hair. She had been back to him three times, but no matter what he did the colour just didn’t look right! Police explained that the emergency phone line was reserved for real emergencies, not for hairstyle advice. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 6 Apr 2019.
In a similar case only a few days later, a Lüdenscheid woman called the cops because of damage to her car. She had found spots of colour on the bodywork. Police came, investigated, and found the mysterious spots were bird droppings. web.de, 9 April 2019.
A bizarre suicide pact excited Germany in mid-May. On 11 May, police found three bodies in a Passau, Bavaria, guesthouse, together with three crossbows. A 53-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman, holding hands, lay dead on a bed, with a third female corpse on the floor beside them. This last woman, 30 years old,
had killed the others with a crossbow, and the last will of two of the deceased was found on a table. Two days later, the girlfriend of the woman beside the bed was discovered dead, along with another woman, in her house in Wittingen, Lower-Saxony, some 600km (373 miles) distant, and two days later; the causes of death were unknown. Further details gradually came to light. All five of the deceased knew each other and their life was centred on the dead man, who taught sword fighting, kept a shop selling equipment for mediaeval reenactors and – so it seemed – was the lover of all four of the dead women. The tabloids spoke of a sex cult, while the police preferred to describe it as a case of extended suicide. Der Westen, 14 May; Welt 15 May 2019.
MYSTERIOUS ILLNESSES AND PANICS
There were several gas scares in Germany recently. In Unkel, on the Rhine, panic broke out in a shopping mall after firefighters were informed of a smell of gas. However, their measuring instruments found nothing. Despite this, 55 people complained about irritation of the eyes and breathing difficulties, and had to be hospitalised. Two days later, police explained that the cause of the irritation had to remain
“unexplained”. (Honnef-heute. de, 20 + 21 Feb 2019) In April, a gas alarm was sounded in nearby St Augustin-Menden; again, no agent was found. WDR TV news, 29 Apr 2019.
In March, a strange illness was reported from Spain. The Hospital General Universitario of Alicante reported the case of a 31-year-old unnamed woman who came to the emergency room suffering from vomiting and breathing problems and with reddened skin all over her body. The medics found she was allergic to the amoxicillin in her husband’s sperm, and had reacted to it after she had fellated him. ABC, Madrid, 14 Mar 2019.
PROPHECIES
Bulgarian prophet Baba Vanga, born as Vangeliya Pandeva Dimitrova in 1911, died in 1996 (see FTFT93:8, 351:20-21), but the blind “Nostradamus of the Balkans” left behind prophecies that covered the period following her death. She is said to have predicted 9/11, the 2004 tsunami, and even Brexit. By the time you read this, all or part of the following predictions she made concerning 2019 may have come true (or not). There will be assassination attempts by their own security teams on both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump; Trump will become deaf from a “mystery
illness”; Brexit will cause economic problems; and there will be severe earthquakes and tsunamis which will completely destroy large parts of Pakistan, India, China, Japan and Indonesia. RTL.de, 28 Dec 2018.
SEEN IN THE SKIES
UFOs seldom hit the headlines in Germany, but when an airline passenger filmed a supposed UFO over the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece, possibly in March 2019, it became news even on the web pages of mainstream magazines. The film was taken through the airplane’s window and shows a massive grey-black contrail-like object cutting through a layer of clouds. Critical investigators concluded it was an F-4 fighter jet of the Greek Air Force. stern.de, 27 Mar 2019.
What was the mysterious UFO that fell over Cogollos de Guadix?” asked the Spanish newspaper ABC on 13 February 2019. In the afternoon of 10 February, several neighbours observed three mysterious lights flashing across the sky at great speed, each of which came down and impacted in different parts of the village in Granada. One of the objects hit and destroyed the roof of a house, which luckily was empty at the time. Experts, like José María Madiedo, professor at the Universidad de Huelva,
ruled out meteorites as they would have been seen for many miles around, and the observations had been purely local. For the same reasons, other experts suggested the damage was due to ball lightning.
MONKEY BUSINESS
Flyers reading “Wanted monkey”, apparently seeking help in the search for a lost pet, appeared all over the northern Italian city of Verona. They gave little information besides the primate’s birthday (31 May) and the phone numbers of its alleged owner. The monkey was said to have disappeared on 15 April, “after having spent the day with us and our friends”. The whole thing, which was widely shared on social media, was later revealed as a publicity stunt for a new shop. L’Arena, 9 May 2019.