That's not how solar panels work

Town worries that solar panels will "suck up all the sun"
The town of Woodland, North Carolina is desperately in need of a reality check. Residents of the town recently voted down plans for a solar panel farm, for the dumbest possible reasons.
 
One resident voiced fears that the panels would "suck up all the sun" which would cause businesses and "all the young people to move out."
 
It sounds like these people should have gone to science class in high school! Like the person who was worried that the panels would block photosynthesis and ruin plants all over town. OH WAIT, that was a retired science teacher who said that.
 
It's hard to say why the idea of capturing free electricity from the sun is so difficult for people to swallow. Many people clearly do not understand how solar panels work. Here is how they work: they just sit there. Like anything else. Yes they block the sun directly beneath them, just like a sheet of plywood would. But they don't suck the sunlight into themselves like some kind of science fiction light-swallowing vortex.
 
This doesn't even count as "fear of the unknown." There are solar panels all over the place. They are pretty known! 
 
Sometimes I despair for our species.

Meet the Saskatoon river monster that isn't

A classic case of perspective mix-up
As soon as I saw the video for this "river monster" in Saskatoon, I knew exactly what it was. This is a classic case of a perspective mix-up, which has caused countless false river monster sightings over the years.
 
If something long and flexible gets snagged in a river, it trails out in the current, and the movement of the water makes it look like something swimming. This happens most often with lengths of rope (as it did here). The rope gets snagged on some branches, and the way that it waves in the current makes it look like it's alive. If the rope in turn snags blobs of trash or vegetation, that just makes it look more monster-y. The same thing ca happen with tarps, plastic bags, and other trash.
 
The key is to watch the "head" of the monster. If the head does not move in the current relative to the banks of the river (either left or right, or forward or back) then it's probably just some snagged trash.

Shadow people: a new paranormal phenomenon

And a freaky one!
Most paranormal stuff has been with humanity for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Aliens and alien-like creatures descending from the skies were mentioned in the bible. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves - all the stuff of ancient stories and fairytales.
 
But shadow people seem to have - well, to have come out of the shadows.
 
To be clear, many cultures have a history of shadowy evil figures. But shadow people as a stand-alone myth is relatively new. In fact, most shadow people lore can be traced back to a single episode of Art Bell's famous Coast to Coast AM radio show which aired in 2001. 
 
There is little agreement as to whether shadow people are good or evil. They rarely actually do anything. They mostly just seem to be… there, in the corners of your vision, flickering around, being creepy. 
 
Most people have had the experience of seeing a flicker of movement in your peripheral vision that was gone when you looked up. Most people probably write it off as a visual glitch or an artifact of being tired or preoccupied. But what if that little flicker really was something? (And what if that something is behind you right… now…?)
 

"UFO" streaks across southern California skies

Quickly debunked
Last Saturday, social media networks lit up (sorry) with reports of a bright light that streaked low across southern California skies. This bright object definitely seemed to be man-made, and was bright enough to photograph well - truly an oddity at night, with so many people armed with crappy smartphone cameras.
 
The reports were quickly debunked by the US Navy, which announced that the light was simply part of a test missile launch. The U.S. Navy Strategic Systems Programs Trident II test missile was launched from the USS Kentucky off the coast of southern California, and landed in Arizona.
 
Because these launches are top secret, the Navy cannot release information about them ahead of time. Too bad, because a lot of people were surprised and frightened by the sight. 
 
And am I the only one who's a little weirded out by the idea of the Navy launching missiles over one of the most densely-populated areas of the country?

English pub catches ghost on camera

Amazing footage!
Is it just me, or are English pubs unusually likely to be haunted? Perhaps it's a residual effect caused by the fact that a pub is many people's favorite place. (Who wouldn't want to spend eternity hanging out at the pub?) Or maybe it's just because so many English pubs are so old, they have had hundreds of years to accumulate ghosts.
 
What makes this bit of footage from the White Lion in Yateley particularly compelling is that it wasn't just caught at random. Pub employees were going through CCTV footage, trying to figure out why the pub's alarm had gone off in the early hours of the morning. As they pored over the footage looking for the culprit, they spotted a pale hooded figure which seemed to be looking out the windows before zipping off camera.
 
The pub's owner, Kate Staniszewska, who also lives in the building, believes that it is the ghost of a woman which has been reported in the pub before. Staniszewska says that she herself has felt the presence of the ghost in the past.
 
The pub dates back to 1856. The original owner, James Rogers, is also said to be haunting the pub, particularly his favorite tankard. When the tankard was moved, the alarm went off in the early hours for no apparent reason. 
 
Employees have reported other odd occurrences. Including the time that the bartender heard a smash, checked the CCTV, and saw that a mug apparently flew off the shelf and crashed to the ground.

Creepy "hag" appears in photo from children's museum

That is a plate of NOPE with some NOPE sauce
On a recent expedition to the local Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, a Redditor snapped some pictures of his son playing in the mock grocery store. Later, as he was going through the photos, the photographer noticed something… amiss. 
 
The gray figure standing in the corner, surrounded by bustling children and families, is basically a lifetime's worth of nightmare fuel. She does not appear in photos taken a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later.
 
For bonus OH HELL NO you might notice that the little boy in the blue shirt keeps staring in the corner - both before and after she appears. In the "Before" picture, he seems to be quite clearly staring at the exact spot where she is about to appear. And he looks anxious, too. He is leaning away from the center, and holding an object up to his mouth. All while the other children obliviously push their carts around.
 
The woman appears to be wearing a gray lace shawl (or maybe it's the shroud in which she was buried). It's hard to tell if she is crouched inside the shopping cart, or standing behind it. She seems to be looking down at her hands, which appear to be holding something - perhaps a handkerchief.
 
Staff at the museum have reported unusual phenomena in the past, particularly when the museum was hosting a Titanic exhibit.
 

Airplane passenger bites his seatmate, then dies

And 28 days later…?
Over the weekend, many were treated to a headline straight out of a zombie apocalypse movie: a 24 year-old Brazilian man on an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin bit a fellow passenger, then keeled over dead.
 
Autopsy reports - which I'm sure have not been faked in order to keep the public calm - showed that the man had swallowed eighty pellets of cocaine (10 grams of coke each) and that at least one of them ruptured in his stomach.
 
It's still unclear why the Brazilian man bit his seat mate, and the Irish police have detained another passenger without comment on her connection to the dead Brazilian man.
 
Also no word on the passenger who was bitten. I'm sure they were treated for a minor bite and released into the public. Where surely they will not cause the spread of the zombie virus into the general public, right? RIGHT?

Skeletons of giants found in Romania?

There were giants in the earth in those days, or so they say…
Genesis is pretty unequivocal on the subject of the existence of giants. But then again, Genesis says a lot of wacky stuff. It's not a textbook, is my point: it's a religious text. (Also, there is a lot of argument over the word "giants," which many Biblical scholars feel is just a mistranslation of a Hebrew word that means "apostate.")
 
Regardless, there are a lot of claims coming out of Romania these days that giant skeletons have been found in the Romanian countryside. These stories are made far more confusing because most of them have been illustrated with pictures that were taking from a Worth 1000 Photoshop contest to Photoshop in some giants. 
 
According to Romanian lore, there were giants living in the far inaccessible mountains, as proven by giant thrones carved into the mountain sides. The remains of the giants have turned up from time to time, but the CIA keeps suppressing the information. (Why?)
 
Incidentally, put away your thoughts of a giant the size of a five-story building. According to reports, the giant skulls were only 2-3 times larger than that of a modern human.
 
Most cultures have giants in their mythological catalog of lore. It doesn't take much to imagine a monster that's "a person, only bigger." These may also be stories that linger from the ages-old oral traditions, from a time when humans coexisted alongside Neanderthals, back in the Ice Age.
 

Ghost smells

Keep your eyes peeled and your nose open!
October is the month for the smells of fall: burning leaves, baking pumpkin pies, caramel apples - but it's also the month for ghost-hunting. One under-appreciated facet of ghost-hunting is paying attention to smells.
 
Most people do not pay very much attention to their sense of smell. Stop what you are doing right now and list all the things you can smell. You will no doubt be surprised at all the smells you have been tuning out as a matter of course.
 
When investigating a haunting or paranormal experience, the wise ghost-hunter will be paying attention to all their senses, including smell. In fact, many apparitions come with reports of phantom smells. 
 
Of course, it can be difficult to discern between a true phantom smell, and one that merely lingers at the location. The smell of perfume can remain for decades inside the drawer of a bureau where it was once spilled. Cooking smells never quite leave a kitchen. And the smell of pipe, cigar, or cigarette smoke can be notoriously stubborn.
 
However, many ghost reports include smells. Perfumes and tobacco smells can be so intertwined with a person's sense of self that they return along with that person's spirit after their death. Or it could be that smells can somehow imprint themselves on a location the same way a spirit can. 
 
And then there are the spirits (?) which announce themselves with very bad smells of rotten flesh and decay. Perhaps these are better left alone, to say the least!

Poltergeist videos: the good and the bad

Is it fake or not?
 
The video has a peppy, up-tempo soundtrack, thanks to Kygo's "Firestone" playing on a stereo in the background. In fact, that's the first thing I noticed about this video: it conveniently begins just as the song starts up. Almost as if it was staged.
 
In real life "random stuff caught on cameraphone" videos in houses, I notice that 99% of the time, the television is blaring in the background. It's as if people don't even hear their televisions anymore, as though they are just unavoidable background noise, like street noise. No one ever turns the television off, apparently. So that was the first thing that seemed wrong - rehearsed - about this video. No television, just a very popular song that "happened" to start just as the video did.
 
Next, the camera captures an escalating pattern of things being harmlessly knocked over. Although quite a lot of force is shown, nothing is broken. This too is convenient. If you were faking a video, you wouldn't want to break any of your own stuff, would you? But any entity violent enough to push all that stuff around would no doubt make some sort of mess.
 
The camera also pans just ahead of whatever is going to happen next. Again, as if the whole thing was staged.
 
But the final straw was the bucket that slid across the floor towards the camera. First of all, they over-played their hand. It would have been more convincing if the bucket had only moved a few feet. Second of all, no one in their right mind would just stand there while the bucket slid towards them. Even the professionals will yelp and jump backwards if something like that happens. But Murphy calmly films the whole thing as the bucket zips across the floor straight towards her.
 
The next bit of film comes from a paranormal investigation team working at a house in Tyne and Wear, England. The homeowner brought the team in because he thought his house was haunted.
 
This footage is just a small clip from a much longer chunk of footage shot with night-vision camera. The investigators are sitting in the living room, asking the spirits to reveal themselves.
 
In the background, we see a kitchen chair move about a foot. Both of the investigators sit bolt upright and look over towards the chair. (It was dark, so they didn't see it happen - they only heard the small sound as it moved.)
 
Part of what's so convincing about this footage is that it is so underwhelming. The chair doesn't levitate or shoot across the floor. It only moves about a foot, but it does so for no apparent reason. It would take sophisticated string work to make the chair move like that, too - it doesn't simply slide out from the table, it pivots on one leg. 

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