STRANGE CONTINENT
Unfazed by Brexit, ULRICH MAGIN scours the papers for the weirdest news stories from across Europe...
BIG CATS, AGAIN
Jutland in Denmark was the scene for many puma encounters throughout last summer and well into the autumn of 2019. The first reports appeared in March. On the 17th, a large cat was seen in Rye and the next day in Funder. In May, there were further encounters in eastern Jutland; a German tourist saw a puma on 1 May at the E20 motorway exit at Vamdrup near Kolding, and a woman jogging saw the beast on 11 May in Vejle. The witnesses were doubted, and police suspected an escaped exotic pet or a lynx. The third observation of the month was made by a Dane who insisted “he had seen a wild cougar – or another ‘large’ cat” at Hylke, near Skanderborg, on 21 May. In July, a deer killed by a bite was found in the region and its death was blamed on the mystery cat. There were reports of more encounters into September.
In an overview of the scare, Midtjyllands Avis (6 Sept 2019) referred to the previous reports and published a map showing sightings near Tjørring, Funder, Lind, Rye, Hylke, Vejle, and Vamdrup. In early September, the puma was photographed, but later analysis by a biologist showed it had only been a common house cat.
A TV channel undertook a hunt for the big cat and new observations came in from Tørring, north of Vejle. The last reference I could find was a 5 October report in the Midtjyllands Avis which begged for an “end to the puma panic”. Dagens.dk, 20 March, 4 Sept; Aftonbladet, 11 May; DR, 13 May; Dagens.dk, 22 May; Extra Bladet, 26 May; Midtjyllands Avis, 6 July, 6 Sept, 5 Oct; Randers Amtsavis, 11+13 Sept 2019; shz. de, 16 Sept 2019.
As the Denmark puma scare finally ended, a tiger was spotted near a filling station
at Zwiesel in the Bayerwald, Bavaria, on the evening of 14 October 2019, when a woman motorist saw it crossing the road in front of her. She informed the police who searched the site but found no animal traces. The woman said the tiger was so large that it stood higher than her car’s bonnet. As a circus was camping near the encounter site, it naturally came under suspicion, but proved to have a strict no-animals policy. Police investigator Horst Fischl suggested the cat could not have been a lynx, as these are too small and look completely different. In press reports a week later, the woman driver had become male, the animal had been seen in darkest night, and police suggested it had only been a big dog – a second sighting or a garbled version of the first one?.
On the day of the last news report, a Romanian lorry driver called emergency services after he had run over a tiger on the A65 motorway near Edesheim in the Palatinate, Germany.
Edenkoben police rushed to the accident site, only to discover the “tiger” was a roe deer. The problem in this case, however, was not one of misperception but of language – the driver thought the German word for ‘roe’ was ‘tiger’. Bayerwald-Bote, 15 Oct 2019; Merkur, 23 Oct; ludwigshafen24.de, 23 Oct 2019.
ANIMAL TALES
In May 2019, the first bear seen in Portugal for 176 years was spotted by experts from the Spanish government of Castille and León in the north east of the neighbouring country. La Vanguardia, 8 May 2019.
In Germany, animals also appeared in unexpected places. For the first time in 13 years, a bear entered Bavaria via the Alps, and was photographed by a wildlife camera near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, while a young seal, some six months old, was rescued in Hamburg harbour near Tiefstack. Seal officer Olaf Nieß explained that the animal was wounded and “seriously undernourished”.
It was taken to the North Sea seal nursing station at Friedrichskoog. Die Rheinpfalz 8 Oct; Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger 26 Oct 2019.
At the end of August, day flies came to the Diesenbach quarter of Regenstauf in Bavaria in their millions, where they died and covered the streets in piles up to half an inch deep. Authorities warned that the smell “of the dead bodies might last for weeks” as locals removed the flies with shovels. In 2018, a similar invasion had hit Schwandorf, also in Bavaria. Day flies, as the name implies, live only for a single day once they have hatched, and then die in swarms. Ernst Fohringer, a local, said that the phenomenon occurred almost every year in his community. Münchner Merkur, 1 Sept 2019.
Even stranger was the green golden retriever born on 16 October 2019 in Wermelskirchen, Germany. Joanna Justice’s dog Melody gave birth to eight white pups
– and a mint green one! The green wonder was baptised ‘Mojito’. “I was a little worried at first, but all nine puppies are doing just fine,” said Justice. Christian Dimitriadis, a vet from Düsseldorf, said such births were rare, but easily explained by the presence of the chemical biliverdin in the dog’s placenta, which causes the greenish colour. Over the course of the next few weeks, she explained, Mojito’s hair would grow and lose its unusual tint. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 Oct 2019.
And then there was the “giant hamster” reported by a cab driver on the night of 8 September. The 49-year old man hit the brakes to avoid colliding with the animal in Attaching, near Freising in Bavaria, but crashed straight into it, causing 5,000 Euros’ worth of damage to his vehicle. It was, he told police, “a giant hamster with very big teeth.” The cops came and found – a dead wild boar. They checked but found the man was completely sober. Passauer Neue Presse, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 9 Sept 2019.
EURO-UFOS
Four (possibly more) strange lights were seen and filmed hovering over the disputed Crimea on 23 August 2019 and “left the witnesses bemused”, as the text says on YouTube (www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_kmmGdcbzcI, posted 29 Aug 2019). “This event was captured by three separate cameras, and the footage shows a group of lights hovering over the city of Kerch, Crimea, but in the last clip that we see these lights break formation.” The whole looks very much like the infamous Greifswald UFOs from Germany, which turned out to be signal flares on parachutes deployed in military manoeuvres.
According to A.r.i.a., the associazione ricerca italiana aliena (Italian Alien Research Association) of Sondrio, founded by the ufologists Angelo Maggioni and Antonio Bianucci, a video taken of a
UFO over the city in July 2019 shows a “dynamic of jumps, stretching and temporal space lengthening” that can only be explained by “the use of an anti-gravity propulsion system,” which “excludes the possibility that it may be a purely terrestrial object”. Of course, it is impossible to determine from the film the precise way in which these UFOs use this supposed technology, and not everyone is convinced that the objects are extraterrestrial in origin anyway. La Provincia di Lecco, 9 Oct 2019.
SNAKES ALIVE!
Snakes were in the news all over the continent. Starting in the Canary Islands, it was reported that introduced California king snakes were feeding on the archipelago’s extremely endangered giant lizards, posing a real danger to the protected animals. The snakes can grow to more than 2m in length and were first reported on Gran Canaria in 1998. On the Spanish mainland, a number of large serpents were captured, such as the 2.5m (8ft) Montpellier snake found in La Cala del Moral on the Costa del Sol. Three large snakes were caught by the Group for Nature Protection in Málaga, one of them a 1.6m (6ft) horseshoe whip snake. A
python more than 3m (10ft) long was captured in Almería, another of 1.5m (5ft) in a canal of the Río Segre, and yet another 1.5m (5ft) specimen Lleida. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20 Aug 2017; La Vanguardia, 11+18 June, 8 Sept, 9+11 Nov 2019.
FREAK WEATHER
Four people, two of them children, died and 140 were injured in a thunderstorm, in which lightning struck the iron cross and climbing chains on Mount Giewont, in the Tatra Mountains, Poland, on 22 August. The mountain is a Catholic place of pilgrimage. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 24 Aug 2019.
Large balls of snow, the smallest the size of a chicken’s egg, the largest as big as a soccer ball, appeared on Marjaniemi Beach of Hailuoto Island in the Finnish Sea. Risto Mattila, who photographed the phenomenon, said he had seen nothing like it in 25 years. Meteorologist Jouni Vainio said that air and water at temperatures of around 0°C, a shallow beach and a strong wind had created the perfect conditions for an ice cover to form around pebbles and driftwood. Other experts think the ‘ice eggs’ are the result of drift ice which is washed around by wave action – so take your pick. Similar balls were discovered two years ago at Nyda, Siberia, and on the Chicago banks of Lake Michigan. debate.com.mx, 9 Nov; spiegel.de, 11 Nov 2019. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 20 July 2019.
GERMAN FAKERS
A 48-year-old woman without any medical training who had posed as an anaesthesiologist in the Heilig Geist Clinic in Fritzlar, North Hesse, was arrested in November. It seemed she had photoshopped her false credentials and her ‘treatment’ had already killed four patients and left eight more seriously impaired. It’s not the first time that such a thing has happened in Germany. A few years ago, the imposter Gert Uwe Postel managed to become head of a psychiatric clinic.
In Gelsenkirchen, a 13-yearold pupil told police that a man had approached her and threatened her with a knife before attacking her with a syringe and injecting her with an unknown substance. However, a hospital examination showed that she had injured herself, with no attacker being involved. Kölner Stadt-Amzeiger, 2+16 Nov 2019.
DRUG-DEALING DUMMIES
A drug dealing gang made up of 12 people from Bonn, Germany, was caught after they affixed stamps of insufficient value to a parcel sent through the German post. The mailman returned the package to sender, a business completely unrelated to drug smuggling, which reported the matter to the police. The real dealers were arrested and stood trial in Bonn in August. Bonner Rundschau 2 Aug 2019.
Meanwhile, in Italy, wild boar unearthed a parcel containing 20,000 Euros’ worth of cocaine near Montepulciano in Tuscany. Police were already eavesdropping on the gang whose stash it was when they heard them complaining about the “bloody boar” – definitive proof that the gangsters had hidden the drugs. n-tv.de, 14 Nov 2019.