STRANGE CONTINENT
ULRICH MAGIN rounds up the weirdness from Europe: fish falls, lake monsters and castrations on demand.
SMALL FRY
Far less sensational than the fish rain of Texarkana in Arkansas in December 2021 ( FT415:4) was a minor incident in Ilmenau, Thuringia, Germany, in 2021. On 18 October, police found about 100 dead guppies spread over an area of about some 50 yards at a roundabout. “We cannot say at the moment where the fish came from or how they died,” a police spokesperson said. Police then stated that they believed the fish had been thrown out of a car and that they were looking for possible witnesses. Rheinpfalz, 19 Oct 2021.
MUNICH EUNUCHS
At a trial in Munich in October 2021, a 66-year-old electrician admitted to castrating eight men on their own demand. He was put on trial for severe bodily injury and murder by wilful default – as one of his “patients” died from the treatment while the electrician passively looked on. The electrician had offered his services on an internet platform for sadistic sexual practices.
Strangely another electrician, this one in Australia, was also sentenced to prison after offering similar services (see FT410:10). Kölner StadtAnzeiger, 29 Oct 2021.
SEA MONSTER
A sunfish, the world’s heaviest bony fish, was washed ashore at Ameland, a Dutch North Sea island, on 14 December 2021. The dead animal was almost 2m long and 1.84m wide; another sunfish, even larger at more than two metres in length, had already been stranded on the island on 13 December 1889. The new specimen will be exhibited at Naturalis-Park in Leiden, which also houses the 132-year-old specimen. netzwerk- kryptozoologie.de, 29 Dec 2021.
WEIRD WEATHER
As if Covid were not enough, late 2021 saw all Europe plagued by freak weather. There were heavy storms and floods in Istanbul, Turkey; in November, snow fell on the deserts of Spain, and large parts of Mallorca were hit by a hail storm which turned the Mediterranean island into a winter landscape. Individual hailstones were as large as tomatoes and were piled up to a foot deep in Cala Ratjada and Son Servera. The ice cap soon vanished when temperatures rose to 14 degrees C again. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 6 Nov; euronews.com, 20 Nov; spiegel.de, 1 Dec 2021
ALIEN BIG CATS
2021 was not the best year for Alien Big Cats in Europe with only a few sightings reported, even at their usual haunts in Italy in Spain. The last Spanish ABC was a panther, in September 2020, in Granada. At the same time, Laura Antonini sent her photo of a black cat in the Collserola Mountains near Barcelona to newspapers, which suggested that the “alien” look was due to perspective and it was just a moggy after all. La Vanguardia, 21 Sept, 5 Oct 2020.
I have already covered the serval near my own home in Germany ( FT391:24), but sightings, and captures, of servals appear to be on the rise elsewhere. In April 2021, after a series of sightings of a panther around Bari, southern Italy, forest police spotted the cat and found it was only a serval “of the same colour”. If this means the serval was black instead of its usual tawny colour with black spots, this might indicate a very rare animal. metronews.it, 26 Apr 2021.
Back in Germany, in October, an “escaped exotic pet” that was observed near Stadtlohn in northern Germany was caught and proved to be another serval – this time with regular pelt colouring. The animal was traced to a Dutch owner in Winterswijk in the Netherlands, which is close to Stadtlohn. netzwerk-kryptozoologie.de,
17 Oct 2021.
STRANGE LIGHT
A weird light caused a minor sensation in Switzerland after Evelyn ZuberbühlerEhmann posted the photo of the phenomenon over Flawil, some 10 miles (16km) south of Lake Constance, on a local Facebook group. The incident happened shortly before
midnight on 10 December 2021, when many people spotted “a brilliant blue light in the night sky”. “I have observed similar lights occasionally in the last few years. The light is always at the same spot, but we can’t hear thunder or such,” Ms Zuberbühler-Ehmann explained. Later, eyewitnesses wrote in to say they had also seen the light from other places, such as Herisau, where “it was like a flash of lightning, you could not look at it directly.”
Soon speculation was rife about what the light might have been. One user was certain it was a laser projected from the Säntis, the highest mountain in the local area, where an experimental “laser lightning rod” had been deployed since May to divert lightning. Roger Perret of Meteonews ruled out a meteorological event, but suggested it was the light of a large house fire at St Josefen. Other ideas, of course, included a landing by aliens, while the air traffic control agency Skyguide ruled out the misidentification of a common aircraft. Marco Scirroco thought the light had been caused by military manoeuvres, explaining: “In my service time, we held target practice on the Schwägalp.” However, Markus Krucker, the local military commander ruled this out, as there had been no military exercises on that specific day. He suggested that the light had been due to flashes on the overhead lines of a train, which he said were especially common in cold weather. Readers wrote in to confirm this identification with their own experiences. It was also pointed out that there had been an electrical blackout in Appenzell Canton on the very same night, although how this would result in a brilliant light was not explained.
“So the cause for the light remains unidentified,” said one news website, adding that “there is still much room for speculation.” One user suggested “it was the baby
Jesus on his way to a Christmas present factory.” www. fm1today.ch, 13+14 Dec 2021.
RAGING RELIGION
On Sunday, 5 December 2021, a spectacular case of demonic possession frightened hundreds of the assembled pious in the pilgrimage church Madonna of Monte Merico in Vicenza, Italy. A 28-year-old woman suddenly shouted blasphemies and obscenities while in the confessional box and started to attack her priest. The church had to be closed and churchgoers were sent home, but the priest did not call for police, but for an exorcist, Don Giuseppe Bernardi, who, with four brothers, tried to exorcise the evil spirit in an eight-hour session. Shocked, the local press reported on the case, and Church authorities informed the Public Attorney’s Office, which is investigating. In Italy, exorcism is still a daily occurrence, and the International Union of Exorcists, associated with the Vatican, believe they offer their services about a half million times a year in Italy alone. Each Diocese has official exorcists, and the number of cases has risen considerably due to the Covid pandemic. Ildebrando Di Fulvia, an exorcist in the Cistercian Abbey of Casamari, south of Rome, warns that “many people believe they are possessed but only a few actually are.” Most alleged possessions were cases of severe depression or psychic
Many people spotted “a brilliant blue light in the sky”
disorders, therefore, each exorcism must be preceded by a careful psychological and medical examination – as is the provision of the Vatican’s “Rituale Romanum”, the official Church handbook for exorcists. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 10 Dec 2021.
LAKE MONSTERS
Lake Enol, 1,000m (3,280ft) up in the mountains and 10km (six miles) from Spain’s Asturian coast, was formed by the withdrawal of a glacier. Today, it is a well-known beauty spot with restaurants and a visitor centre, which is why bus driver Jorge Toraño directed his coach to the Pilar mountain pass on 12 October 2021. When he looked at the lake he noticed “something strange floating in the water”, as he told the local newspaper El Comercio.
It appeared to him like “a kind of light greyish snake… about 15m [50ft] long. It was quite an animal to behold!” Astonished, he stopped and parked his bus to have a second look. “I have no idea what it could be, but I’ve been here at the lakes my whole life and I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. He took pictures of the phenomenon, which actually show very little. The report soon spread on social media and the silent beauty spot was overrun with visitors. Several “logical” explanations for the sighting have been proposed, among them reflections in the water or an exotic pet. Yet the most likely solution was presented by the unnamed Coordinator for the Study and Protection of Marine Species (CEPESMA). According to El Comercio, he studied the images and attributes the sighting to “an emission of gases from the bottom, which can appear linear and can be confused with a kind of snake.” Such subaquatic releases of gas have, in the past, also been used to explain reports from Loch Ness.
ABC Madrid, 13 Oct 2021.
In October 2021, Stralsund artist Ian Wiskow announced he intended to deploy a model of the Dargun Dragon in the Klostersee, or Abbey Lake, at Dargun in MecklenburgVorpommern, Germany. The Lake was created by monks in the 14th century. Before that, as legend has it, it was a swamp where a dreadful dragon lived and ate local maidens. Three boys with beautiful singing voices drowned it, saving the town. Wiskow became fascinated by the dragon as a child and thinks it would fit nicely with other touristic sights of the region. The artificial “monster”, which is called Nessi (without the ‘e’), will occasionally surface in the lake and then submerge again. “To achieve this, I will make a rotating hump on its back,” says Wiskow. He plans to build three individual models, which will sit below the surface and be moved by water hoses that turn large wheels with fibreglass scales. If the monster of Dargun catches on, he plans to make his next model dragon on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, “where we have a similar legend.”
Ostsee-Zeitung, 15 Oct 2021.
CAPTURE THE FLAG
The idea of the false flag attack has been a staple of the Conspirasphere for more or less ever. Equally, in the eyes of the mainstream media, false flags are, well, false from the start. So it was something of a surprise to see major US media outlets speculate on the possibility that the Russians were planning precisely such a nonexistent gambit in Ukraine.
The sabre-rattling contest that has gone on around Ukraine (almost exclusively in the West, it has to be said) has provided a space for all kinds of exotic theorising. Not conspiracy theorising, of course; political wonks and hacks alike are clear that they deal only with realities on the ground. So the resemblance of the ‘Russian false flag’ theory to conspiracism is obviously coincidental.
The idea seems to be that Russia is preparing ‘crisis actors’ (yes, respectable media outlets did use that phrase without a trace of irony) to stage a fake attack on the autonomous enclaves in eastern Ukraine, which they will use as a pretext for invasion because, as everybody knows, the Russians really want to start World War III. Apparently, such attacks can be distinguished from the regular attacks by Ukrainian forces (the real Ukrainians, not the crisis actors) that have taken place on a regular basis since Donbass et al declared autonomy. This is the kind of ontological perspicacity that distinguishes political realists from conspiracy theorists; when people with their digits on the global pulse see what looks like an illusion to the rest of us, they know it’s really happening.
An outside observer might think that this shift in the imagination of the media – or shift in the media’s idea of their readers’ imaginations – is ultimately rather damaging to the idea of the news as an objective, fact-based analysis of world events, which might further undermine a level of trust that was reportedly rather low to begin with. Like the story itself, with its oscillating aura of reality/fiction, it leaves the reader with an unsettling feeling that their sense of the real world is being played with. Perhaps it’s a try-out for a new school of journalism that eschews verifiable facts for something more evanescent and dependent on the beliefs of the reader, a form of ideological infotainment (and perhaps that’s not so new after all).
The resultant outrage in the C-sphere is both amusing and instructive. Along with the avalanche of posts crowing about the MSM finally admitting the existence of false flags (at least when it suits them), there is a small but growing tide of awareness that a different kind of invasion is taking place. A few commentators have drawn attention to the mainstream use of terms and concepts usually reserved for – and
Sometimes, though, you can stretch a good villain too far
roundly vilified because of – conspiracists. They see it as lying somewhere between Damascene conversion and outright theft. And ‘lying’ is an interestingly operative term here; the overwhelming consensus is that the story is a lie, a species of false false flag story, as opposed to the real false flag stories that conspiracists favour. I’ll leave the reader to follow that thought down a rabbit hole lined with mirrors.
As readers of this column are aware, I have been banging on for years about the migration of conspiracy theory into the mainstream. It has come as a surprise to me to be writing about a reciprocal shift, where the mainstream migrates into the Conspirasphere; but there is a certain inevitable logic to it.
There is of course a similar inevitability about stories in the media that resemble conspiracy theories; in shady tales of dubious veracity, one can more or less guarantee that the punchline is: the Russians are behind it. Whether it’s propelling reality TV populists into power by warping the minds of the American electorate (and for a surprisingly modest investment), or paying bounties to terrorists to shoot at the Americans they already seem to be shooting at (once they’ve elbowed the cashtoting Iranians and Chinese out of the way), the Russians in general, and Vlad the bearslayer in particular, can be dimly perceived lurking in the background.
This level of venomous devotion is another trope that looks for all the world like it’s borrowed from the C-sphere: think Hillary Clinton and body counts (or disappeared babies or sinister pizza toppings); George Soros and colour revolutions (every shade but red). Sometimes, though, you can stretch a good villain too far, as the good people of Canada might attest.
Recently Ms Nil Koksal, the evening news anchor of Canada’s national broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, floated the idea that the Russians were actively supporting the Freedom Convoy (the protest by truckers against the vaccine mandate), and in fact were suspected of instigating it, in retaliation for Canada’s support for Ukraine in the not-quite-real, false flaginfested confrontation one can only see if looking east. The parliamentarian asked to comment on the theory, Marco Mendicino, looked every bit as flabbergasted as the overwhelming majority of viewers probably were.
In any version of the world where reality was on the front foot, this might be considered strangeness of the highest water; a home-grown protest vilified by no less than Justin Trudeau – the missing man of Canadian politics who tested positive for Covid and promptly disappeared when the truckers got within 50 miles of his front door – as a bunch of red-neck neo-Nazis (no resemblance to the current Ukrainian regime intended, presumably) was actually yet another Russian false flag.
It was heartening to see the Daily Mail, that bastion of British journalistic integrity, express its incredulity and use the term ‘conspiracy theory’ about the curious broadcast. But it begs a bigger question: reality, where are you?
SOURCES https://edition.cnn. com/2022/02/03/politics/usalleges-russian-false-flag-ukraine/ index.html; https://off-guardian. org/2022/01/24/pandemicnarrative-over-false-flag-in-ukrainenext/; www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-10468751/CBC-spreadingconspiracy-theory-Russian-actorstrucker-vaccine-mandate-protests. htmlwww.bbc.co.uk/news/world-uscanada-59854916