]]>Police: New York couple’s apparent abduction was a hoax
An apparent abduction involving a couple in New York City was a hoax, part of a surprise birthday party, New York police said Monday.
The people involved came forward, police said. Since a police report was never filed, there will be no charges, police spokeswoman Sophia Tassy said.
The “abduction” on Friday was captured on surveillance video, and led to police searching for the couple.
In the surveillance video, a man in a mask races around a corner near a park. He is followed by a person who appears to be a man with a plastic bag over his head.
CNN affiliate WABC reported two young girls told police that they saw one of the men point a firearm and force the woman into the vehicle, which sped away.
But no one was reported in missing in the area.
Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne of the New York Police Department said Sunday night that the incident in the Washington Heights neighborhood “may have been a hoax staged amongst friends to celebrate one of their birthdays.”
Another person told WABC that three men were camped out in the minivan before the incident took place. She said she thought they looked suspicious because it wasn’t cold enough for someone to be wearing a mask.
In 1985, rumors arose in the obscure London borough of Brentford that there had been a number of sightings of a griffin. Rather a small one, about the size of a large dog, but still a griffin. It’s worth noting that the coat of arms of Brentford features a griffin, so there’s a lot of griffin symbolism in and around Brentford - the first sighting, which allegedly took place in 1984, and was reported by one Kevin Chippendale (who was responsible for most of the other eye-witness accounts too) was in Braemar Road, which has at its corner a pub called the Griffin, with a sign depicting a creature absolutely identical to the one he saw. Which, by the way, was flying past a tower-block called Green Dragon Apartments.
Several other locals confirmed that the creature existed, and somehow the detail was added that it had a nest in one of two locations: either a gas storage facility (since demolished) next to Waterman’s Arts Center, or a tiny island in the River Thames officially known as Brentford Eyot or Brentford Ait, but unofficially known as Cider Island, due to its use by underage drinkers, or, more recently, Griffin Island. Which is next to Waterman’s Arts Center - can you see a pattern developing here?
It quickly became apparent that it was all a stunt to drum up publicity for a Fortean convention being hosted by the humorous author Robert Rankin at - well, do I really need to tell you where it was taking place? But by that time, the TV cameras had already shown up, and it made the national news. The interesting thing is that, as Robert Rankin himself states, he’d planted several well-rehearsed friends to recount their sightings to the press, but they never got a chance to, because the moment the cameras arrived, people who had nothing to do with him popped up and claimed to have seen it, some of them apparently in all seriousness.
Andrew Collins, who subsequently wrote many, many books about the wilder aspects of the paranormal but was at the time utterly obscure, turned up and wrote the only published work entirely about the Brentford Griffin, a slim pamphlet which is now extremely collectible. He has since claimed that, even though Robert Rankin admits that he made it up, the fact that independent witnesses came forward proves that it was in some way made real by collective belief, and it wasn’t silly of him to write a booklet implying that he believed in it. A thinly-disguised but clearly identifiable version of Andrew Collins called Danbury Collins has appeared in many of Robert Rankin’s novels - he’s a failed psychic with severely limited intelligence and an uncontrollable compulsion to play with himself in public. Interestingly, the early part of Andrew Collins’ writing career consists almost entirely of people with blatantly fake psychic powers revealing amazing but totally made-up things in the hope that he’d write a book about them, and him actually doing so. This resulted in the creation of the Black Alchemist, an occult supervillain who has subsequently had his ass kicked by both Lara Croft and Green Arrow, but poor Andy can’t claim any royalties because the two books in which this guy originally appeared were supposed to be non-fiction.
In 1998, the story was revitalized when somebody called “Martin Collins” (bit of a coincidence, that) sent a letter to Fortean Times revealing that long before 1985, legends existed in Brentford about a pair of griffins that had been presented to Nell Gwynn by Charles II and housed in the pagoda at Kew Gardens (just across the Thames from Brentford). This amazing tale goes into a lot of detail and was subsequently confirmed by several other people, but needless to say, no mention of it exists anywhere prior to 1998.
In recent years, celebrity Brentford resident Rat Scabies, former drummer with the Damned, has claimed that be had a brief glimpse of something which might possibly have been the Brentford Griffin. By the way, his parents are prominent members of a tiny, mad cult which worships a Frenchman who is the self-proclaimed direct descendent and second coming of Jesus Christ. And they meet in the upstairs room at the Griffin.
Now how’s that for a nested set of hoaxes and general weirdness?
]]>Video games? Nope. Television? Nnnnooope. Comic books! Maybe not those, either.
After a few decades, some old records are being unsealed. Including those of the psychologist responsible in part for bringing about the infamous ‘Comics Code’. It turns out the guy was wildly exaggerating his claims, making his data fit his results, that sort of thing.
http://io9.com/5985199/how-one-mans-lies-almost-destroyed-the-comics-industry
]]>]]>TV station hacker warns of zombies in US
A Montana television station’s regular programming was interrupted by news of a zombie apocalypse.
The Montana Television Network says hackers broke into the Emergency Alert System of Great Falls affiliate KRTV and its CW station on Monday.
KRTV says on its website the hackers broadcast that “dead bodies are rising from their graves” in several Montana counties.
The alert claimed the bodies were “attacking the living” and warned people not to “approach or apprehend these bodies as they are extremely dangerous.”
]]>Iran’s new stealth fighter jet under fire from critics
Fresh from controversy over a suspicious space-faring monkey, Iran is now under fire over a suspect stealth fighter jet breakthrough that one Australian defence analyst said “looks like it might make a noise and vibrate if you put 20 cents in”.
Unveiling the Qaher F313 (Dominant F313) earlier this month, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad described it as “among the most advanced fighter jets in the world” with features including the ability to evade detection by radar and hit both ground and air targets.
Aviation experts have questioned whether the jet shown can even fly as it was too small to accommodate a real pilot and the controls and wiring looked too simple. It also lacked the bolts and rivets found on all aircraft and offered wonky aerodynamics.
“It looks like the Iranians dumped some rudimentary flight controls and an ejection seat into a shell moulded in what they thought were stealthy angles,” wrote Foreign Policy.
Andrew Davies, senior defence analyst and director of research at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the jet was a “laughable fake”.
“It looks like it might make a noise and vibrate if you put 20 cents in,” he told Fairfax Media.
http://urbanlegends.about.com/
Since the updates here have been few and far between, I was glad to see that Emery is still updating his site on a regular basis.
]]>Ever heard of the Bicholim Conflict? The undeclared war between Portugal and the Indian Maratha Empire lasted from 1640 to 1641, but there was little damage and few casualties. It was significant largely for its peace treaty; the settlement between Portugal and India helped pave the way for Goa as an independent state.
There’s one little problem with this whole narrative—none of it actually happened. The Bicholim Conflict is a 4,500 word Wikipedia hoax, an article that achieved “good article” status for its “thorough” treatment of a war that never existed, Techcrunch reports. The page was even nominated for “featured article” status by probable creator “A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a.” Luckily, the Daily Dot reports, Wikipedia editors did not give the page a “featured article” status, saying it was based too heavily on “a few weak sources.” The article’s reviewers appear not to have noticed that the “weak sources” were as fake as the conflict itself.
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...but is a fake, apparently:
]]>The “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” video, uploaded to YouTube on the evening of December 18, was made by Normand Archambault, Looc Mireault, Antoine Seigle and Filix Marquis-Poulin, students at Centre NAD, in the production simulation workshop class of the Bachelors degree in 3D Animation and Digital Design.
The video shows a royal eagle snatching a young kid while he plays under the watch of his dad.
The eagle then drops the kid a few feet away.
Both the eagle and the kid were created in 3D animation and integrated in to the film afterwards.
– Centre NAD, Montreal