STRANGE CONTINENT
ULRICH MAGIN rounds up the weirdest news from Europe, including a snow circle and some blue dogs
STRANGE SKIES
Once again, the sky over Europe was full of strange sounds, while sand rained down and aeroplane parts fell from above. In November 2020, a mysterious hum was reported from Bad Honnef, Germany, near the former capital of Bonn. While several neighbours complained, others were unable to hear anything. Similar humming sounds had previously been heard in nearby Hennef in 2005, but telecom equipment found no external source for the annoying noises. This is fairly typical of similar hum phenomena worldwide – they appear more personal than environmental, like a sort of tinnitus. WDR, 2 Nov 2020.
The sounds that haunted northern Italy were different. In Bedizzole, 5km (3 miles) southeast of Lake Garda, people repeatedly heard “loud roars” coming from above in January 2021. It was the second such occurrence, the first having happened in 2016. There were many suggestions as to the origin of the sounds, including the nearby speed train construction site, the steelworks at Lonato or a detonating meteorite, but not a single one was confirmed. Slightly further west, at 6.41pm on 16 February, a magnitude 2.3 earthquake with the epicentre 2km (1.2 miles) south of Viandanica, hit the whole province of Bergamo. People distinctly heard “a loud roar and felt the movement of the ground”. Luckily, there were no reports of damage or injuries. Were the previous sky noises an omen for the later quake? Giornale di Brescia, 1+16 Feb 2021.
Falls, too, were reported all over Europe. On 5 January, seismographic data indicated that a meteorite had landed near Løten, Norway, some 120km (74 miles) north of Oslo. Many people in the region heard a loud report and observed a brilliant light in the sky. Strangely enough, Anne Lycke, director of the Norsar seismographic station, discouraged anyone from searching for the cosmic visitor. “It would be fun to find it, but you’d need a lot of luck to come across it in the forest.” The meteorite hit Norway close to where a large landslide destroyed part of the village of Ask on 30 December 2020. web. de, 11 Jan 2021.
For almost the whole of February, Saharan sand rained down on parts of central and southern Europe. At the end of the month, I was privileged to observe a magnificent sunset in which the Sun looked like a gigantic glass ball hovering just a few feet above the horizon. TV news later said this had been due to atmospheric haze caused by the masses of sand. The first accounts I read were from early February, when the sky in southern Germany was said to be yellow and brown. Similar skies were also reported from north-western Spain and the Côte d’Azur in France. It was almost dark in Lyon. In Alicante and Valencia, Spain, many people ran to the streets to photograph the heavens. A spokesman from the German Meteorological Service told the press he had received calls asking whether the world was about to end. In Andorra, the ski-slopes turned bright yellow. Badische Neueste Nachrichten, 6 Feb; yahoo.de, 8 Feb 2021.
Then, in February, in Maastricht in the Netherlands, part of a Boeing airplane became loose, crashing down and injuring two people, an elderly woman who had to be hospitalised after being hit by plane parts, and a child who received slight burns. One of the four engines of the plane had caught fire, but the craft managed to land at Liege airport in Belgium. This was the very same day that parts of a jet engine of a United Airlines Boeing 777 fell on Denver, Colorado. achener Zeitung, 21 Feb 2021.