STRANGE CONTINENT
ULRICH MAGIN rounds up fake news, daft pranks and cases of mistaken identity from across Europe
We are now well into the second year of the pandemic, and less fortean news seems to be reported in the mainstream media; when it is, the stories are often local in nature and don’t cross borders. I can’t imagine that people in Europe see fewer UFOs or ABCs, or are short of ghosts and poltergeists, but most of what I have assembled here concerns fake news, hoaxes, and silly mistakes. So, this month’s instalment is by accident, rather than by design, a bit of light relief.
APRIL FOOLS
Early in April, the Swiss air navigation service provider Skyguide explained in a press briefing that they would open the first “competence centre for UFO activities” in Switzerland. “The perceived rise in sightings of unidentified objects in the airspace monitored by Skyguide has prompted air traffic control to investigate these phenomena more closely.
“The UFO competence centre is to be located in the building of the district control centre in Wangen near Dübendorf and has three employees who specialise in UFOs. Further, an additional workstation will be created in the control towers for a specialised air traffic controller who will focus on observing unusual flying objects.”
Personnel were said to have “completed an intense training course in order to be able to cope with future activities. This included recreated UFO activities on the radar and in the tower simulator, but also the viewing of documentary material (such as the Roswell crash or UFO video recordings of the US Navy) as well as the study of spaceships and their flight behaviour in well-known science fiction movies. With this all-round training, Skyguide’s UFO experts are able to quickly discover and document unidentified objects in flight.” However, the date of the press release, was 1 April 2021, and the whole thing was a prank.
Meanwhile, an April Fool’s hoax on Facebook caused riots in Brussels, Belgium. Despite lockdown, a huge party was said to be taking place in the city’s Bois de la Cambre park. About 2,000 people assembled but were told by police they had to leave as only four people were allowed to meet in parks at the time. Police used water cannon to disperse the crowd, and fighting went on until well into the early hours. de.euronews.com, 1 April 2021.
NIGHT OF THE “IGUANA”
In mid-April 2021, in Krakow, Poland, a woman called Animal Welfare because she had seen an iguana staring at her from the branch of a lilac tree, where she said it had been sitting for the last two days. “We don’t dare open our windows here as we fear it might crawl in,” the worried caller said. When animal rescuers arrived at the site they found a croissant, the buttery pastry from France. “Our two inspectors were very surprised and amused, it was hard not to be,” said a spokesperson for the Krakow Animal Welfare Society. “They didn’t expect an iguana, but they weren’t prepared for what they saw of course.” Spiegel.de; Vice, 15 April 2021.
FILM FAKE
Ulrich Larsen is a retired 44-year-old cook who lives outside of Copenhagen. About 10 years ago he contacted director Mads Brügger after seeing his documentary about North Korea. Larsen suggested that he join the Danish branch of the Korean Friendship Asociation (KFA), a propaganda outlet for North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, just to see what happened. So while he was promoting the dictator’s country as a paradise on Earth in Denmark, he was quickly promoted in the ranks of the KFA and recruited by its head, Cao de Benós, whose real purpose was to find investors to bring foreign currency into North Korea. Larsen, with another actor, flew to North Korea, where they posed as wealthy cocaine dealers interested in a lasting commercial relationship with the state; they were offered anti-drone weapon systems and missiles as payment. They suggested to Kim Jong-un a plan to buy an island in Lake Victoria, Uganda, and build a luxury resort there; then, they would actually use the property, in the style of James Bond villains, as a centre for North Korea’s traffic in weapons and crystal meth. The whole thing was filmed, and openly so, as Larsen explained to his Korean contacts that he wanted to use some of the material on KFA’s YouTube channel. The documentary on this amazing game-playing, called Der Maulwurf ( The Mole), was streamed on German TV channel ZDF’s website. The press described it as a Boratstyle, but highly dangerous stunt. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 9 April 2021.
MEDIA WHORE
In Germany, a 2020 documentary by director Elke Margate Lehrenkraus, Lovemobil, received the German Documentary Award for its shockingly brutal portrayal of the life of a prostitute, Rita, who works from her van. Then, a German TV programme revealed that many of the incidents shown had been carefully scripted and were not ‘real’ in the normal sense of a documentary. Lehrenkraus at first fought the accusations, saying the film showed “a reality more authentic than reality” but
finally handed the award back. She was removed from the list for the even more prestigious German Grimme Award. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 27 Mar; Zeit, 24 Mar 2021.
GRAVE DISCOVERY
A minor mystery posed itself when the skeleton of a fiveor-six-month-old foetus was discovered in the 342-yearold coffin of Lutheran bishop Peder Winstrup in Sweden some 10 years ago. “The strange bones have puzzled historians for a long time,” said reports, but now scientists from the Centre for Palæogenetics at Stockholm University have analysed DNA material from the bishop and the additional small bones which had been preserved in a linen cloth, and found a 25 per cent match. The DNA proved the child was a boy and a second degree paternal relative. The researchers assume that the boy was the bishop’s grandson. “It is not unlikely that the stillborn boy was the son of Peder Pedersen Winstrup, and that the bishop was his grandfather,” said Maja Krzewinska of the Centre for Palæogenetics. Peder Pedersen Winstrup lost all his property a year after his father died in 1679 and lived on alms. It is assumed he buried his son in his father’s coffin as a symbolic gesture. “It was common to lay down little children in the coffins of adults. The foetus was probably put into the coffin after the grandfather’s burial, which was in a vault in Lund Cathedral and easy to access,” said Torbjörn Ahlström, professor of historic osteology at Lund University. The corpse of Bishop Winstrup is famous in its own right as one of the best-preserved human bodies of the 17th century. His clothing, skin, bones and internal organs were all found to be intact, even after centuries had passed, possibly because air circulation in his coffin had transformed him into a natural mummy. Web.de, 12 April 2021.
EEL STRANDING
We are used to mass strandings of whales and porpoises, but Dormagen, on the Rhine in Germany, saw something similar recently with eels. The river had been in spate in February, but when the water levels went down, about 100 dead eels were found hanging in branches of trees and lying on the gravel in a stretch of some 500 yards near Dormagen. The dead animals were discovered by environmental activists, but the official environmental protection agency found no evidence for either disease or pollution and could only suggest the mass death was somehow related to the high water levels. Stefan Saas, head of the professional fishermen of the region, said the dead eels were an “uncommon phenomenon” and the animals had probably frozen to death. Similar reports do surface from time to time. The Roman writer on portents, Julius Obsequens, noted of the year 44 BC that “the Padus river flooded the land and when it returned into its bed, it left huge amounts of snakes on the shore.” And after weeks of drought “tens of thousands of dead eels” were washed up on the Dutch banks of the Rhine in the summer of 2003. Stern, 7 Aug 2003; www. tag24.de, 17 Feb 2021.
BODY IN MOTION
Meanwhile, Spanish police were in for a surprise when they finally caught up with a speeding car. On 8 April 2021, a 66-year-old Spanish driver had been stopped at Le Boulou border station between France and Spain and tried to escape, with French and Spanish police in hot pursuit. After travelling 30km (19 miles) in the wrong direction on motorways in France and Spain, he finally crashed on the AP-7 motorway near Jafre in Catalonia. Officers rushing to the site found the heavily decomposed body of his 88-year-old partner, who, it is said, had died from unknown causes. The driver was detained, and it is thought that he had been trying to smuggle the dead body of his partner to his home in Switzerland in contravention of Covid-19 rules. web.de/ magazine, 9 April 2021.
BIZARRE BOLIDE
“A fireball originating from an asteroid” crossed Andalusia on the afternoon of 13 February. The phenomenon was observed by crowds of witnesses, especially in Malaga, Granada and Almería, who reported their sightings on social media, said astrophysicist José María Madiedo of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia. A preliminary analysis determined that the fireball started at an altitude of about 95km (60 miles) over the north of Granada, and moved in a south-westerly direction to end at an altitude of about 55km (34 miles) south of the province. Its speed was estimated at 72,000km/h (44,740mph). That a meteor or bolide would originate from “an asteroid” sounds like something out ofVelikovsky, but I assume journalistic incompetence rather than sensationalism here. La Vanguardia, 13 Feb 2021.