From a distance, it looks like a parking lot filled with over-sized television antennae. In actuality it is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program or HAARP, a government research facility focused on physical and electrical properties of the earth's ionosphere. Set against the Alaskan forest, HAARP is, to certain conspiracy theorists, neither a research program nor a TV antennae, but a weather control device, space weapon, and a death ray.

Funded by DARPA, the United States Air Force, and the Navy, HAARP's projects involve superheating the ionosphere with high-frequency radio waves. This incited the suspicions of physicist Bernard Eastlund and a small group of other scientists in the 1990s, who expressed concern about HAARP's possible future use as a weapon. Russia also expressed concern and criticized HAARP as a "new integral geophysical weapon." The Russian government now operates a very similar facility known as the Sura Ionospheric Heating Facility.

Despite the criticism, or because of it, the researchers at HAARP have tried to be more open about their research, stating unequivocally that "there are no classified documents pertaining to the HAARP." They are adamant that the site is in no way a danger to anyone. Among the stated goals of HAARP are studying how the earth's natural ionosphere affects radio signals something of interest to both the commercial and military worlds. 

While there is little evidence to suggest that HAARP has any potential use as a weapon or anything else nefarious, one of the stated aims of the project is to generate VLF and ELF (very low frequencies and extremely low frequencies) for communication with submarines, and possible use in remotely searching for mineral content. HAARP recently bounced low frequency signals off the moon in the "lunar echo" experiment and invited amateur radio enthusiasts to listen in. In the spirit of openness HAARP hosted open house days to try and shake it's conspiracy theorists. 

After two decades of building and three hundred million dollars in spending the site was closed by the US Air Force for lack of funding. As of August 2015 the site officially handed over by the government to the University of Alaska. Whether being a university run research station will lessen the howls of the HAARP truthers remains to be seen.

Choosing the best among Clive Barker's endless supply of monsters is no easy task. (Photo: Hannes Engelbrecht/Flickr) 

Most people consider Stephen King to be the modern master of horror, but his creepy Maine visions look like fuzzy Christmas stories compared to the work of Clive Barker.

Across books, movies and film, Barker has created some of the most horrific and fascinating nightmares ever. And it’s about time his unforgettable monsters got the proper round-up they deserve. Here are the 10 coolest monsters Clive Barker ever created, in no particular order.

Dr. Channard after his demonic transformation. (Screencap by Eric Grundhauser)

10. Dr. Channard

In a movie full of fetish demons and an unknowable geometric ruler of one of cinema’s most surreal visions of hell, it’s not easy to stand out as a villain, but Hellraiser II: Hellbound’s Dr. Philip Channard manages to stand out among the gore. Channard begins as just another madman seeking to unlock the secrets of the Lament Configuration, that gold puzzle box that opens a portal to Hell. As the head of the Channard Institute, he takes one of his insane charges and sacrifices them to bring back Julia from the first Hellraiser film (nearly a candidate for this list herself).

Together the two head into Hell where Channard is eventually transformed into an ultra-creepy Cenobite (a leather-clad torture demon) that shoots horrific snakes from the palms of his hands, and is held aloft by a gross, phallic tentacle that grips the top of his head. With his new powers, he tears through the other Cenobites (see Pinhead below), until his head is torn in half. Classic. But the most terrifying aspect of Channard is his demon voice, which sounds like a malfunctioning vocoder is screaming in pain. Nightmares forever.

Vinnie Jones as Mahogany from the poster for Midnight Meat Train. (Photo: Hannes Engelbrecht/Flickr)

9. Mahogany, the Subway Butcher

The network of subway tunnels underneath the streets of New York is tailor-made for horror stories, and in Barker’s conception, the whole system serves a terrifying purpose. In both the original short story Midnight Meat Train, and the nearly forgotten movie of the same name, the subway network is home to an enigmatic serial killer known only as Mahogany. In the elongated film version, the killer is discovered by down-on-his-luck New Yorker, Leon Kaufman (hi, Bradley Cooper!) who sets out stop the killer before he slaughters another train car full of late-night commuters.

Anyone that has ridden a subway car alone in the middle of the night can attest to the inherent creepiness of the experience, and a silent, unstoppable killer like Mahogany sums up that unease with a bloody butcher’s hook and hammer. But—super spoiler alert—as per usual with Barker, mundane serial killing is just the beginning. As Kaufman finds out in the end, Mahogany was killing people to serve as meat to the underground lizard monsters that truly rule New York City, and now he must take over the job. The Illuminati is real, and very, very gory.

Don't read this entry out loud in front of a mirror. (Screencap by Eric Grundhauser) 

8. Candyman

Read that name out loud five times and see what happens. Hint: it won't be pretty. Candyman is Barker’s take of the Bloody Mary legend, but instead of some creepy ghost appearing, it’s a guy made of bees that likes to tear his victims in half with his hook hand. In the original short story, “The Forbidden,” the violent boogeyman was a pale white man in a candy-colored coat who haunted a British tenement, but in the American film version, the villain's race was switched and the character was given a suitably disturbing backstory involving slavery and forbidden love. The setting is also moved over to Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects, adding a bit of heavy-handed cultural commentary to the proceedings—not necessarily for the better.

The American version’s uncomfortable-for-the-wrong-reasons origin story aside, Candyman, as he is known, to most is still terrifying. Played by Tony Todd, his booming voice and cool demeanor make his blood-encrusted coat and gory buzzing insides something viscerally unsettling. Candyman taps into that same fear of a dark mirror that once kept us all embarrassed and terrified at elementary school sleepovers.

A human monster. (Screencap by Eric Grundhauser)

7. Dr. Decker

As the only regular human (or so it seems) on this list, it takes something really special for Dr. Philip K. Decker to stand out among all of these supernatural monsters. And that one thing is a creepy mask with buttons for eyes. As the central antagonist in Barker’s movie Nightbreed (based his own novel, Cabal), Decker manages to convince hunky lunatic Boone that he is a killer who cannot remember his crimes. Of course, while Boone does turn out to be one of the titular monsters, it turns out that Decker himself has been donning his eerie, button-eyed mask and doing the killings.

Decker imbues the character, played by body-horror director David Cronenberg, with a curious, almost apprehensive gait as he kills. Stalking his victims with a dead-eyed inquisitiveness, Decker kills because he is jealous of the real monsters he wishes he was friends with. He destroys the monster city of Midian, before (maybe) being killed himself. But it’s the ever-staring button eyes over the crooked zipper mouth that make the mask of Halloween's Michael Myers’ look positively soulful.

God is a sadistic rainbow. (Photo: CliveBarker.info)

6. Wick

The newest of Barker’s creations is one his most unsettling, easily his most colorful, and also God. Not a god, but biblical, Old Testament, God. Or as he’s known in Barker’s comic book series Next Testament, Wick. In the short series, Wick is woken from an imprisonment of untold eons by a wealthy disciple who becomes his traveling buddy, and the two set out to see what the world is like in the modern age. Turns out that God, er, Wick, thinks humanity has wasted its potential and he sets to slaughtering countless swathes of people while partying like it’s 1999 BCE.

Unlike the clean old man of Christian tradition, Barker’s God is a swirling rainbow of colors that look chaotic and sort of divine at the same time. He is even known sometimes as the Lord of Colors, a name that doesn’t really imbue the gravitas a fickle, violent, debauched Almighty deserves. Barker’s done plenty of hell, so it’s little wonder that he brought a little along when he took on heaven.

Those worms are coming out of his stomach. (Screencap by Eric Grundhauser)

5. Leroy Gomm

The menagerie of grotesques on display in Nightbreed is an embarrassment of creepy riches, but it’s a monster with the least dialogue that stands out the most. Called Leroy Gomm (not that this is ever made explicit in the film), this tertiary Nightbreed is remarkable for his constant smile and the pair of worms (tentacles?) that slide out of his corpulent stomach and lovingly wrap around his neck. Oh, and they can also be used to gouge people’s eyes out.

As a background character with only a few scenes, there’s not much to know about the Gomm, but he’s one of those momentary members of the Greek chorus that manages to steal the show, simply by being indelibly creepy. He embodies that old Barker mainstay of being both joyously erudite and nauseatingly filthy. By the time Gomm uses his tentacles to rip some hillbilly’s eyes out near the end, he’s already managed to be the stand-out monster in a movie that is entirely populated with them.

A dentist's nightmare. (Screencap by Eric Grundhauser)

4. Chatterer

Another Barker monster that started off as more of a creepy design than a character, the Chatterer was one of the Cenobites that came back to Earth to reclaim escaped creep Frank Cotton in the first Hellraiser movie. The character was briefly described in The Hellbound Heart, the novella the film was based on, but it’s when his eyeless face appeared in the film that he became a horror fan favorite. His name says it all, which is good since the Chatterer never speaks through his constantly clacking teeth, forever exposed by hooks that draw back his lips.

Like with all the Cenobites, Chatterer’s back story is never delved into much, but in Hellraiser II, when the aforementioned Dr. Channard is killing all of the Cenobites, returning them to their forgotten human forms, the Chatterer reverts back to a pre-teen boy, making him all the more enigmatic. 

Mr. Hood and Holiday House from the first edition cover of The Thief of Always. (Photo: Wikipedia)

3. Mr. Hood

One of Barker’s coolest and scariest monsters actually comes from his first children’s book, The Thief of Always. As much of a fairytale as a Clive Barker book can be, The Thief of Always is the story of young Harvey Swick who is whisked away to the magical Holiday House, created by a mysterious warden named Mr. Hood. While everything is magical and fun at Holiday House and Christmas comes once a day, there is a dark side. For every day spent at Hood’s house, a full year passes in the real world. Of course, that only matters if you can escape Hood’s monster lieutenants, and if Hood himself doesn’t steal your soul and turn you into a dead-eyed fish for the forbidden lake in the backyard.

Hood is a boogeyman in the classic sense, always existing just outside of view, and when he is finally revealed he is essentially just made of fear. Swick manages to defeat the soul stealer, but not before Hood manages to use the remains of the house to create a creepy body for himself, depicted in its surreal, horrific glory by Barker’s illustrations. Hood isn't the bloodiest of the monsters on this list, but he is one of the most primal.

Torture demon. Superstar. (Screencap by Eric Grundhauser)

2. Pinhead

Easily Barker’s most famous creation, the leader of the Cenobites, Pinhead is one of the coolest and scariest monsters ever dreamt up. Originally just known as a priest of Hell when he appeared in The Hellbound Heart, Pinhead got his more famous name after appearing in Hellraiser (and every sequel). Now he is as famous as a Jason or a Freddy, and about a hundred times cooler and scarier.

Unlike his horror icon contemporaries, Pinhead never became a joke, (okay, the nightclub scene in Hellraiser III notwithstanding), always maintaining that detached air of terror, just waiting to pull anyone foolish enough to call him back to Hell to experience the outer limits of sensation.  

Pinhead is frighteningly mysterious, totally gross, and has some of the most iconic lines in horror history. There is just something super unsettling about the blank-faced excitement he has for flaying people alive. As he once put it, he has such sights to show you. His story may have ended in the long-awaited, recently released book, The Scarlet Gospels, but Pinhead still reigns supreme in the pantheon of horror movie icons.

Nix reborn. (Screencap by Eric Grundhauser)

1. Nix

Okay, Pinhead might be the most famous of Clive Barker’s monsters, but the scariest creep in his stable is Nix, the evil warlock from the little-remembered film, Lord of Illusions. Again loosely based on one of Barker’s short stories, Lord of Illusions tells the story of Barker’s recurring hero Harry D’Amour as he tries to stop the resurrection of Nix, who once sat at the head of a Manson-esque cult, but was banished by one of his followers who nailed a magic mask onto his face.

Nix, played to the absolutely gross hilt by late character actor Daniel von Bargen (Mr. Kruger on Seinfeld), is a growling wizard in a stained terry-cloth robe, ruling over a dilapidated kingdom of filth out in the middle of the desert. His small band of followers mutilate themselves and chow on raw meat for kicks. Nix is the perfect storm of hair-trigger demagogue, supernatural horror, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style sadist. And what might just put him over the top is that he may be the first character in movie history to have his own attack baboon. 

Welcome to No One’s Watching Week, the time of the year when the readers are away and your tireless editors have run amok. For this week only, Atlas Obscura, New Republic, Popular Mechanics, Pacific Standard, The Paris Review, and Mental Floss will be swapping content that is too ​out there​ for any other week in 2015.

A plate originally from The Image of Irelande, by John Derrick, published in 1581. Note the flatulentists on the right side (h/t the Lavatory Reader). (Photo: Public domain)

Roland, court minstrel to 12^th century English king Henry II, probably had many talents.

But history has recorded only one. 

Referred to variously Rowland le Sarcere, Roland le Fartere, Roland le Petour, and Roland the Farter, Roland really had one job in the court: Every Christmas, during the court’s riotous pageant, he performed a dance that ended with “one jump, one whistle, and one fart”, executed simultaneously. 

For this, Roland was gifted a manor house in Hemingstone, Suffolk, and more than 100 acres of land. For farting on cue.

Farts are and have always been funny—an odiferous, invisible thread in the rich tapestry of global comic tradition. They are funny in virtually every culture, every language, every era. The oldest joke in the world, according to the University of Wolverhampton, is a fart joke: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap” would have cracked up the Sumerians of 1900 BC. Master Athenian playwright Aristophanes peppered his comic plays with fart jokes, as did Shakespeare. Geoffrey Chaucer used well-placed farts to puncture pretension in his Canterbury Tales, and at least two stories in the Thousand and One Nights hinge on farts. An ode to a fart in Parliament from 1607 was popular for decades after the fart itself had dissipated; François Rabelais’s stories of Gargantua and Pantagruel reek of farts; Mark Twain’s fart joke, a mock-Elizabethan diary entry titled “1601” or “Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors”, was long considered unprintable, featuring as it did Queen Elizabeth sputtering, “Verily in mine eight and sixty yeres have I not heard the fellow to this fart.” 

The 1942 Bing Crosby and Bob Hope vehicle, Road to Morocco, got big laughs out of a whoopee cushion gag. In a 2007 interview with The New York Times, Sarah Silverman called fart jokes “the sign language of comedy” and her 2009 book is called Eat, Pray, Fart. The World Fart Championships are—or at least were, in 2013—a thing in Finland. Farts are funny and they’re everywhere.

However, most of that kind of fart humor hinges on the unexpectedness of the fart, and the subsequent shock, shame, and giddy embarrassment it engenders. So what about Roland and the rare others like him, the performance fartists?

A 16th-century depiction of a Court Jester. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The historical record of Roland is rather thin, although the bones of it are likely true. Valerie Allen, professor of literature at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, investigated Roland’s story in her 2007 book, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages. Roland’s timeline was, she said, difficult to determine: He was possibly first in service to King Henry I, and then to Henry II; fee ledgers from the era indicate what kind of payment he received and for what, but don’t given dates. A later king, supposed to be Henry III, however, was not as amused by Roland’s talent and, on the grounds that the service was “indecent”, the Crown took his land and manor back.

This, however, is a timeline that has the poor man farting at court over a period of more than 120 years. Allen notes that Roland’s actual history and which of the Henrys actually enjoyed his talents is a matter of mystery. But Roland’s story still captivates; Allen is firm about his appeal (“he’s a much loved figure”) and subsequent historians and chroniclers over the last 900 years have enjoyed retelling the story of Roland the Farter.

Farting in the Middle Ages was a more complicated act than in this century. Then, as now, Allen said, much of the humor in farts had to do with anxiety over uncontrollable bodies and the hilarious reminder that everyone, even the loftiest in feudal society, couldn’t escape their bodies. But there was a more sober, philosophical side to medieval farts, one that isn’t so evident today. “[Gas] is the product of decomposition, so morally, theologically, a lot of the writers in the Middle Ages saw it as the mark of death,” she says, “There was a lot of moralization about farts and shit, that they are the living daily reminder that we are going to die and that’s all we are, we are mortal, and sinful as well.” 

More the stuff of Sunday sermons than mid-winter revels. But Roland’s act was also grounded in a tradition of widely varied entertainment at court. Jugglers, fire-eaters, storytellers, acrobats—some of them, men and women, performed in the nude—comedians, music-makers, and farters were all part of the medieval performance scene. Irish records from the 8th century list “farters” (bruigedoire) as among the types of retainers found at courts, and note that their pay should be the “fat of the shoulder” of hunted prey. At roughly the same time Roland was earning his manor house, a group of Irish farters (braigetori) were described occupying a table at the banqueting hall of the High King of Ireland. 

“Not all performing farters were land-owners,” cautions Allen, but there was an established, if not profession, at least specialty. “I should think that for festive occasions this kind of entertainment was central and necessary and must have involved high degrees of skills, a whole range of performance tricks,” she says, “They’re like circus performers.”

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who supposedly farted in front of Queen Elizabeth I. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The tradition appears to go back even further: St. Augustine of Hippo, writing City of God in the 5th century, noted people who could “ produce at will such musical sounds from their behind (without any stink) that they seem to be singing from the region”. And, like fart humor in general, it’s not limited to Western culture. In her book, Allen mentions an illustrated scroll based on “The King of Farts”, a tale from Japan’s Kamakura era (1185 to 1333), featuring one Fukutomi no Oribe, who “performed fart dances for the aristocracy” and “trumped his neighbor Toda who tried to mimic the master farter, but soiled himself instead.”

That was fiction, but there were actual documented flatulists at work in Japan by the 1700s. During the Edo period, Tokyo streets were full of misemono, attractions that sometimes featured the kind of people who would later populate “freak shows”; one of the more popular misemono stars was a man called Kirifuri-hanasaki-otoko, meaning “the mist-descending flower-blossom man”, who, in 1774, demonstrated his ability to take in quantities of air and release it in “modulated flatulent arias”, according to the late professor Andrew Markus of the University of Washington. (Farts were a bit of a thing in the Edo period: A series of illustrated scrolls from the time, made by artists unknown, is titled “He-Gassen”, or “Fart Battle”, and is precisely, hilariously what is sounds like it is.)

The next biggest name in farting was a fin de siècle Marseilles man who called himself Le Pétomane—literally, “the maniac farter”. Young Joseph Pujol, the son of a baker, discovered his talent when swimming near his home on the Cote d’Azur. According to Retro magazine, he’d just taken a deep breath to dive under the waves when his felt a cold sensation creeping up his back passage—it was sea water, which he’d “inhaled” with his sphincter. At first, Pujol used his talent to shoot water incredible distances (as far as five meters by the time he was an adult), but he soon discovered that he could take in air and release it how he wanted. After a career in the Army, where his talent naturally blossomed, he began performing at local music halls, tooting out “La Marseilles” and “Au Clair de Lune” and doing “impressions”. By the time he made it to Paris in 1892, he was already big enough to book a 90-minute show at the infamous Moulin Rouge.

Le Pétomane performs at the Moulin Rouge theater, late 1800s. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

“He dressed in a tuxedo and announced each sound as if he were presenting a music solo. Of course, the incongruence of a dignified gentleman letting farts only added to the humor,” wrote Jim Dawson, music journalist and self-titled fartologist who is the author of Who Cut the Cheese? (1999) and Blame It on the Dog (2006), in an email. Pujol didn’t only toot songs and impressions of “thunder”—he could smoke a cigarette with his bottom and blow out candles and even the gas jets in the footlights. Some women fainted (lore has it that Moulin Rouge stationed nurses in the aisle) but audience members of both sexes roared with laughter. 

When not performing at the Moulin Rouge, Le Pétomane did private shows in the nude for curious wealthy gentlemen who wanted to know what was going on under his tuxedo tails. Pujol became one of the best paid performers in Paris, if not the world, and his exceptional ability was studied by curious physicians; one published a report on Pujol in 1904 fantastically entitled "An Extraordinary Case of Rectal Breathing and of Musical Anus." Three years after his first performance at Moulin Rouge, however, the club’s owner sued Pujol for “breach of contract” for giving an impromptu performance at nearby gingerbread stall. Pujol settled and opened his own nightclub, but his celebrated career was cut short by World War I. He died in 1945, at the age of 88. The story of his life was made into a short film in 1979 starring British comedian Leonard Rossiter.  

Beloved though Le Pétomane was by nearly everyone, this wasn’t sophisticated humor. “Obviously, in the comedy hierarchy, farting is near the bottom (ahem), along with cat jugglers and clowns,” says Dawson. “I don't think a farter can sustain a regular legion of fans. Once you've seen the act, your primary motive for going back is to take your friends and watch their expressions.”

 And still does. The tradition of the flatulist didn’t die with Le Pétomane, although it is struggling.

 Paul Oldfield, known professionally as Mr. Methane, has been a performing flatulist since 1991.His Facebook fanpage—nearly 4,000 likes—features video clips of his 2009 performance on Britain’s Got Talent (Oldfield didn’t win, which would have meant he performed at the Royal Variety Show for the Queen; one wonders how modern royalty would react to his talents); the cover picture features lanky 6-foot-7-inch Oldfield in his purple and green super hero costume, his arms around several attractive young women.

Mr Methane blows out candles in an unusual way. (Photo: Courtesy Mr Methane) 

Speaking on the phone from his home in the north of England, Oldfield can’t seem to stop himself from making fart-related puns. He tends to be long-winded (sorry), but he’s got a good story to tell and a kind Northern accent.

Oldfield, like Le Pétomane before him, is able to “inhale” air into his sphincter and then push it back out again in, he says, “three tones” (and without smell, given that the air is not coming from digesting food in his stomach). How exactly he “inhales” is hard to explain, he says—it’s a combination of relaxing and tightening his sphincter and diaphragm that he can just do. “You’re going in reverse, so to speak, you draw the air into your colon, and then you trap it off, then you tighten the sphincter muscle. You then squeeze it out, and you can alter the sound,” he says. “A bit like blowing raspberries with your mouth.” It’s physically demanding work, which means that he exercises frequently, usually doing yoga and stretches: “You need to stay farting fit, don’t you?” he deadpans. “The puns are endless, aren’t they?” But you can’t laugh, he cautioned: “You’re using your diaphragm, once the top end is laughing uncontrollably, there’s no control downstairs. It’s hard enough as it is when you’re being serious.”

According to Oldfield, he discovered his talent doing yoga in his teens—“in the full Lotus position,” he adds—and used to pull pranks at school during lunchtime “for pocket money”. After a brief career as a train engineer, he had the eureka moment: “What the hell, wouldn’t it be good, I’ll see if I could make a living as a professional farter”

Oldfield adopted a super-hero persona, Mr. Methane, complete with green cape and mask, perfected his pun-filled patter, and began performing at friends’ parties, university end-of-year bashes, and corporate events. One of his first big gigs was at the Screaming Beaver in Macclesfield in Cheshire, a club that had seen the likes of Steve Coogan perform. “For some reason they kept getting these different ground-breaking acts, and they thought I would be one of these ground-breaking acts, but as it was I was just a wind-breaking act,” he says.

Gigs led to other gigs, and soon Mr. Methane was on TV, doing the late night chat show circuit around Europe. He, like the few other professional farters, was a favorite of shock jock radio hosts, including Howard Stern, throughout the late ‘90s and early 2000s. He’s done television shows across the world, appeared in adverts for Cadbury’s chocolate and guest-starred on sit-coms, performed at the Reading Festival and Edinburgh Fringe, even made a Christmas album. Sinead O’Connor was reportedly a fan and ordered 20 copies each of his mrmethane.com album, Merry Methane and his Let’s Rip DVD.

But in many ways, he’s a performer from a long-past era, when variety shows and music halls were thriving, jazz came in trios, and pubs and clubs were willing to take a chance on a performer with an outré talent. “I’d probably have had a lot more live work in the ‘60s and ‘70s and maybe the ‘80s, so maybe I have come too late,” he agrees. And now, while the odd TV gig still comes in, much of his bread-and-butter work has dried up—due in some part, he believes, to YouTube.

Though Oldfield’s act is almost tailor-made for social sharing, the new Internet era hasn’t been a positive. The constant stream of crazy online streaming clips has eliminated the need for clubs to book him.  “While we’ve been chatting there will be all these people who’ve watched clips of me and that’s the mind-blowing thing about the internet—you’re being watched much more than you’d ever have been in the past,” he reflected. “Now you’re being watched and you’re not earning any money. It’s not even being exploited, it’s being consumed, and you’re not earning any money from it. It’s a strange one.”

What he’ll do next, he doesn’t know. In the short term, at least, he’s been asked to make a video of himself farting along to “Macarena”, a request with several layers of tastelessness. Long term, he might be about the hang up his green mask and purple fart shorts. “I’m 49, I’ll be 50 next year, may be it’s time for a new Mini-Methane, who can take it into the new era,” he muses. “I’ve been telling a joke basically with one punch line and somehow I’ve been able to tell it for about 25 years as a performer, so I don’t think I’ve done too bad.”

Welcome to No One’s Watching Week, the time of the year when the readers are away and your tireless editors have run amok. For this week only, Atlas Obscura, New Republic, Popular Mechanics, Pacific Standard, The Paris Review, and Mental Floss will be swapping content that is too ​out there​ for any other week in 2015.

Made in Naukratis (Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia)

More than 2,000 years ago, the city of Naukratis was a major Greek trading port on a branch of the Nile River. Archaeologists had thought that they had found everything there was to find in the ruins of this ancient city. But a new excavation by the British Museum has turned up thousands of new artifacts and revealed an even bigger, bustling city, of "tower houses" that stood three to six stories tall.

Naukratis was "a mud-brick Manhattan" with a population of around 16,000, the project's leader told the Guardian. Among the new finds were wood from Greek ships—evidence backing up Herodotus' description of the city as a port served by cargo ships, even though it's far inland from the Mediterranean Sea. The excavation also turned up construction materials, two temple sites, and revealed the city's harbor location. To top that off, the team found Egyptian figurines associated with a "festival of drunkenness," the Guardian says.

Naukratis was first rediscovered more than 130 years ago, by British Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie. The city was one of the most sought after ancient places, but no one was quite sure where it had been located. Petrie found it essentially by accident. Setting out from Cairo, he happened upon the right spot, where, he wrote:

The whole ground is thick with early Greek pottery, and it seemed almost a sacrilege to walk over the heaps with the fine lustrous black ware crunching under one[’]s boots. Pieces with fret pattern, honeysuckle pattern, heads, arms, legs of figures, horses, & such like lovely things were soon picked up; both in black figures on an orange ground, & red figures on a black ground, mostly with incised outlines. It seemed as if I was wandering in the smashings of the Museum vase-rooms.

After extensive early excavations, it seemed like most of those treasure had been gathered up. But as the new excavation proved, there was plenty more to be discovered.

Bonus finds: Gold coins in a 2,000-year-old Chinese tomb

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

(Image: Screenshot from ANN video/YouTube)

Japan’s Toyama Bay, located around 190 miles northwest of Tokyo, is known for its bioluminescent firefly squid, which make the pre-dawn water glow a brilliant blue when they gather. But on December 24, these cephalopods' spotlight got snagged by a distant relative—a giant squid.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the 12.1-foot giant squid was floating around beneath fishing boats at Mizuhashi Fisherina, a Toyama marina, when a fisherman spotted it. It was a surprising sight—ordinarily, giant squids are found at a depth of between 1,650 feet and 3,300 feet below sea level. A few turn up in Toyama Bay's fishing nets each year, but all are either dead or very close to expiring. Post-mortem squids are white, whereas the very-much-alive giant squid spotted last week was a vibrant orangey-red.

The squid's underwater meanderings in Toyama were captured on video and broadcast on Japan's All-Nippon News Network:

It is not clear what made the squid surface to say hi to the boat owners of Toyama, but it seems to have had a grand old time—after a full day of swimming around the bay, it was escorted out to the open ocean.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

From the John Birch Society Coloring Book, 1962. (Photo: The New York Times archive)

In 1962, Barbra Streisand channeled all the emotional turmoil and lyric despair of an abandoned lover into what must be the strangest four minutes of pop music ever written. “Crayons ready?” she croons, “Begin to color me.”

The opening lines of the song, “My Coloring Book,” refer to that year’s fevered interest in coloring books for adults, much like the trend that has taken off recently. “For those who fancy coloring books/As certain people do,” Streisand sings, before asking listeners to fill her sorrowful life with equally sorrowful hues. When the song came out, coloring books for adults permeated pop culture, as Mort Drucker’s JFK Coloring Book spent 14 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list in 1962, and sales of adult coloring books reached $1 million. Today, coloring books are perhaps even more profitable: Johanna Basford’s Secret Garden and Enchanted Forest were the two best-selling books on Amazon in April, responsible for some of the year’s recovery in print sales. (Basford has sold nearly 10 million coloring books since Secret Garden was published in 2013.)

But their powerful appeal—enthusiasts say they are a “great way to de-stress”—has very little in common with adult coloring books from the 1960s. Where today’s titles offer consumers a neat package of therapy, escape and nostalgia, 1960s coloring books were both genuinely novel and subversive.

The first adult coloring book, published in late 1961, mocked the conformism that dominated the post-war corporate workplace. Created by three admen in Chicago, the Executive Coloring Book show pictures of a businessman going through each stage in his day, as though teaching a child what daddy does at work. But the captions, which give instructions on how to color the image, are uniformly desolate. “This is my suit. Color it gray or I will lose my job,” reads a caption next to a picture of a man getting dressed for work. Another page shows men in bowler hats boarding their commuter train. “This is my train,” it reads. “It takes me to my office every day. You meet lots of interesting people on the train. Color them all gray.” The rare appearance of a non-gray color is even more disturbing: “This is my pill. It is round. It is pink. It makes me not care.”

From The Executive Coloring Book, 1961. (Courtesy: Ad to the Bone)

The coloring books that followed managed to cover, between them, a selection of the decade’s neuroses: national security, the red scare, technology, sex, mental illness. Two popular books took aim at President Kennedy: Drucker’s JFK Coloring Book and Joe B. Nation’s New Frontier Coloring Book. There were coloring books that made fun of communists and coloring books that made fun of people who were scared of communists. Khrushchev’s Top Secret Coloring Book: Your First Red Reader caricatured Soviet leaders and life under communist rule, but was still deemed “objectionable” and banned in the United States Military. Meanwhile, the John Birch Society Coloring Book, which ridiculed conspiracy theorists and extremists, stretched the coloring book concept to its limits with a blank page, captioned: “How many Communists can you find in this picture? I can find 11. It takes practice.” In August 1963, theWashington Post reported on a doctor who proposed using a 12-page coloring booklet “as a diagnostic tool…to classify patients by their types of disorders” from schizophrenia to brain damage. The Post called it the “Psychotic’s Coloring Book.”

 

From the New Frontier Coloring Book, 1962. (Photo: The New York Times archive)

As the trend wore on, the books’ targets became more predictable. Publishers ridiculed occupations and lifestyles that already looked ridiculous without their help. The Bureaucrat’s Coloring Book, for instance, made fun of government commissions and regulations. The Hipster Coloring Book made weak jokes about the flatness of a supposedly daring lifestyle. The captions became more knowing and metaphorical. A picture of a smoking jacket-clad young man says: “He has a fun time… Color the gleam in his eyes brightly.” 1963’s Programmer’s Primer and Coloring Book made complicated jokes about bugs and core dumps with bizarre instructions to “Color me Mickey Mouse” and “Color him naïve.” They lacked the straightforward sadness ofThe Executive Coloring Book’s instruction—made sadder because so plausible—to “Color me gray.” 

The captions, of course, didn’t need to be particularly clear, since they were never intended as real instructions for a reader with a set of crayons. The point of the sixties coloring books wasn’t to sit down and do some coloring, but to read their message and take a stand; they were more like a specialized form of political cartoon. (Supporters of Robert M. Morgenthau, in fact, used coloring book-style panels to lampoon Morgenthau’s opponent in the race for Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, in fall 1962—Daniel Moynihan’s idea.) An article in The Daily Illini in September 1962 explains that although “the hottest item in publishing these days” is the coloring book for adults, they “aren’t expected to color it, however; just to look and laugh.” Similarly a New York Times’s trend piece from August 1962 reports that adult coloring books haven’t boosted sales of crayons. The only adult they spoke to who “insisted he colored every one of the books he could get his hands on,” it is drolly revealed, “works for a crayon company.”

Why, if people didn’t actually color them, did coloring books for adults exert such a pull on a generation’s imagination in the early sixties? One consideration is that coloring books—a nursery activity adopted by adults—exploded just as interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, and with it child development, was gaining unprecedented levels of popularity. Not only did coloring books show adults a childishly simple view of a corrupt world, they also showed how a child could be corrupted in the process of learning. When the child is instructed to color the executive gray, she sees the absurdity of conformism, but ultimately learns to take part in it by following the instructions. For adults, the conceit of a return to childhood offered the chance to reject the system and embrace entirely new principles; this questioning of the norms of America society would also stoke the emerging civil rights, anti-war, and women’s liberation movements.

Perhaps just as important though is that the generation that came of age in the early sixties was the first generation that grew up with wax crayons. Although crayons were invented at around the turn of the last century, they were expensive and not particularly sophisticated. A 1909 article in the Christian Science Monitor describes them as “one of the luxuries of the schoolroom.” It was in the 1930s that coloring with wax crayons really took off. By 1935, the manufacture of crayons and pencils was a $20 million industry—one that had grown by nearly 40 per cent in the two years since 1933. In 1934, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported on the crayons’ “gain in size color and tricks,” commenting on the assortment of “blue violets, yellow oranges, and other delectable colors” now available. Art education, a young discipline that was bolstered during the Depression by the Federal Art Project, hadn’t yet rejected coloring books as a useful tool in the classroom. That would come in the late 1950s when Viktor Lowenfeld, one of the most influential scholars of art education, claimed that coloring books had a “devastating effect” on children, by preventing them from “developing their own ideas.” The 1930s and 40s remained a golden age for coloring. 

This fact might also have something to do with the demise of the political coloring book by the 1970s. Although newspapers would periodically announce revivals of the adult coloring book craze through the seventies and eighties, the “New Coloring Books,” as one writer called them, dealt in nostalgia more often than dissent. A 1974 Times article found Classics majors producing designs based on Greek vases and The Canterbury Tales. Their story also contains a lovely example of 1960s counterculture remnants being subsumed into consumer culture, as the Classics major explains their project’s origins: “When the underground comics scene sort of faded out here in San Francisco, we fell heir to some of the young artists working on them.” In the 70s, as today, the market for adult coloring book was driven by interest in simple, artsy pastimes. Recent politically-themed coloring books—Hillary: The Coloring Book and Trump 2016: Off-Color Coloring Book among others—have been relatively late additions to the latest crop, but neither their sales nor their cultural impact can match their therapeutic, decorative counterparts. 

From Hillary: The Coloring Book, 2014. (Photo: Ulysses Press)

It’s improbable that coloring books will ever be truly subversive again—but that much has been clear since Barbra Streisand sang mournfully of “the heart that thought / he would always be true / Color it blue.” The fathers of the first coloring book craze were, after all, advertising executives, who knew that a gimmick was only good for one season, and had moved on by the next year to satirical cook books. Meanwhile, the activism of the twenty-first century has found its outlets more often online—in video and social platforms—than in the behemoth of print media. And it’s unlikely that future satirists will look back on coloring as something that was ever an innocent or uncomplicated activity. One of the most popular children’s books of recent years—it has spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list—is called The Day The Crayons Quit.

Welcome to No One’s Watching Week, the time of the year when the readers are away and your tireless editors have run amok. For this week only, Atlas Obscura, New Republic, Popular Mechanics, Pacific Standard, The Paris Review, and Mental Floss will be swapping content that is too ​out there​ for any other week in 2015. This article originally appeared on the New Republic.

Erebus. It's a good name for the volcano. In Greek myth Erebus was the son of the god Chaos, and his mother was Gaia, or Earth. Erebus was made of darkness and shadow, and he filled the corners of the world with his darkness.

Currently the most active volcano in Antarctica and the southernmost active volcano on Earth, the Mt. Erebus volcano features a 1,700-degree Fahrenheit lava lake, a swirling pool of magma that may be many miles deep: one of only five such lava lakes that exist in the world.

While the inside of Mt. Erebus may be extremely hot, outside of it, one would quickly freeze to death in the Antarctic temperatures. Riddling the side of the snow-covered volcano are ice caves, carved out by the escaping volcanic gases. Because of the gas, the ice caves stay a consistent 32 degrees, making them a likely spot for undiscovered extremophiles. The volcanic gases heat their way through these ice caves and escape into the air to form enormous 60-foot chimneys of ice, or "fumaroles" with deadly volcanic gases pouring out from their tips.

Discovered in 1841 by polar explorer Sir James Clark Ross, it was easy to identify Mt. Erebus as a volcano as it was erupting at the time. (Ross Island, which Mt. Erebus is on, is named after him as is the Ross Ice Shelf.) Later, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton would make the first ascent of Mt. Erebus in 1907 on the Nimrod Expedition.

One of the things that makes Erebus significant - and the reason it is the location of the Mount Erebus Volcano Observatory, or "MEVO" - is that Erebus is one of only a few consistently active volcanos in the world. Rather than lying dormant and then spectacularly erupting once every few hundred years, though it does that on occasion too, Mt. Erebus is always on, bubbling, releasing gas and flinging ten feet wide "volcanic bombs" - hunks of molten rock which sometimes explode on landing - through the air. For a vulcanologist, Mt. Erebus is a dangerous but dreamy research site.

Mt. Erebus is also the site of a famous and tragic air disaster. A New Zealand plane on a sightseeing flight became lost in a whiteout and crashed into the side of the volcano, killing all 237 passengers and 20 crew on board. Famed explorer Sir Edmund Hillary was supposed to have been on board, but canceled at the last moment.

Debris from the crash is still visible on the volcano, despite an extensive recovery and clean up mission. The unclaimed remains of the crash victims are entombed at a memorial at the Waikumete Cemetery in West Aukland, New Zealand where every year a wreath is laid in memory.

A hawk is captured on camera, zeroing in on a drone. (Photo: Day Donaldson/flickr)

Recently, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, two red-tailed hawks were spotted swooping and diving above one of the meadows, screaming in agitation. They appeared to priming themselves to attack, although at first, it wasn’t clear who or what. And then the offender floated into view, buzzing and flashing its lights like a giant mechanical insect.

"I'm going to report them," said a man who was squatting nearby, wielding a camera with a telescopic lens. "What they're doing is illegal." He was referring not to the hawks, but to three men who stood on the opposite side of the meadow, where they were manning the remote of a flying drone. Adjusting his lens, the man said if the hawks attacked the drone, they could injure their talons or wings on its whirring propeller. He had an aura of expertise.

Drones are illegal in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. (Photo: Robyn Jay/flickr)

The man turned out to be Rob Bate, president of the Brooklyn Bird Club, board member of New York City Audubon, and he soon followed through on his promise. A few days later, dnainfo.com, a website covering local Brooklyn news, ran a story on Bate’s encounter, along with a photograph showing the hawks in “stoop” and “attack-mode” positions. It was part of Bate’s personal and public mission to raise awareness about what rogue drones do to the winged creatures of New York who were there first.

But drones are only one of the dangers that can befall a bird in the city.

New York City, beyond being a hub of finance and culture, is also a major hub for migratory birds who stop here every spring and fall on their bi-annual migrations. Millions of these migrants land in New York City’s parks, where they rest their wings for a spell before they continue on their journeys. But thousands of others die here, killed off by the very things that make New York’s skyline so striking–all that twinkling light and glass. 

A red-tailed hawk in Brooklyn. Hawks will defend their territory against drones. (Photo: David Bone/flickr)

“NYC is devastating with the lights and the glass because we’re right on the Atlantic flyway,” Bate says. “Birds are just kind of motoring up the Atlantic seaboard, as they go up into Canada, and they come to a kind of in a crossroads in New York City before they fan out into Ontario and Nova Scotia.”

The journey is especially hazardous for songbirds, which fly by night, using nocturnal cues such as the moon, stars, and the earth’s magnetic waves to find their way. Not only does artificial light wash out these cues, it also draws birds into its orbit, where they can fly around in circles until they exhaust themselves or crash. Lighted cell towers, airports, suburban schoolyards, and beams of light that poke up into the sky are some of the worst offenders. But it was the World Trade Center, followed by the twin beams of light that replaced it in the wake of 9/11, that topped the list of the city’s most lethal bird sites. It also helped galvanize a movement to reduce the city’s light.

“New York City Audubon started monitoring the beams of the site around 2001. That’s when we saw the strong connection between light and bird migration,” says Susan Elbin, Director of Conservation and Science at New York City Audubon. “We’d see birds circling around and around and around in the next morning, I’m not sure if those were the same birds, but we'd find their bodies on the ground.” They died from exhaustion.

Artificial light of New York City can confuse migratory song birds. (Photo: Christine Wagner/flickr)  

New York, of course, is not the only culprit. To put the problem into perspective, the Fatal Light Awareness Program, a Toronto-based conservation society that spearheaded the lights-out movement in 1993, offers a chilling analogy: “Across North America, more birds die from collisions each year than succumbed to the Exxon Valdez oil spill.” Scientists estimate that anywhere between 365 million to 988 million birds die annually after crashing into buildings and houses; using data collected from NYC Audubon volunteers, who have been counting carcasses and monitoring the skies for nearly two decades, Elbin estimates that 90,000 to 200,000 of those annual deaths occur in New York City.

Governor Cuomo recently took steps to reduce these collisions when he announced in April that the city would participate in the New York State Lights Out Initiative, joining the Audubon Society’s mission to dim urban glow in cities across the country. Under the program, state buildings will turn off “nonessential” outdoor lights from 11 p.m. through dawn during peak migration periods. Since the program was launched in 2005, iconic landmarks like the Chrysler building and Rockefeller Center have also turned off their lights. After years of writing letters and lobbying the state legislature in Albany, Elbin calls it a major win for the city’s bird advocates.

“People used to not to take us seriously, they thought it was just a couple birds dying. We’ve shown it’s a huge conservation issue with population level impact,” Elbin says. Dimming the glow, she says, can make a substantive difference. In Chicago, where the Audubon Society has a collision monitoring program, a landmark study conducted by the Field Museum showed that by turning the lights off in one building, the number of bird kills dropped by an average of 83 percent.

The glass exterior at New York's Javits Center prior to renovation. This year new panels were inserted that have reportedly cut the bird death rate by 40%. (Photo: Rebecca Wilson/flickr)

Glassy buildings are another major killer, especially when they reflect rivers, parks, anything that a bird could mistake as habitat. That’s why the Javits Center, wrapped in glass that mirrored the Hudson, was one of the deadliest spots in the city. That changed this year, when a new renovation turned a building once known as “Darth Vader” into one of the more bird-friendly spots in the city. Designed with the knowledge that some birds see light in the ultraviolet spectrum, the architects chose panels embedded with patterns–wide stripes, or spiderweb-shaped designs–that are less noticeable to us, but visible to birds. The panels have reportedly cut the bird death rate by 90 percent.

Similar results have been reported at the Center for Global Conservation at the Bronx Zoo, a glassy building situated near the open aviary, where bird-safe windows appear to be saving lives. “It could be a disaster/death zone,” Elbin says. “But birds aren’t dying there.”

With New York City Audubon, the American Bird Conservancy, and the University of Fordham collaborating on research into make glass safer for birds, awareness and incentives are rising in other cities. San Francisco and Toronto have adopted bird-safety building standards and the U.S. Green Building Council has introduced a bird-safety credit as part of its environmental certification, called LEED. 

Birds in Prospect Park. (Photo: Christopher Eliot/flickr)

Still, there’s plenty more work to be done. According to Elbin, one of the most lethal sites in New York these days is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where thrushes, warblers and other kinds of birds are smashing into the gorgeous, reflective windows. Elbin says that while the museum is open to cooperating, no solution has yet been reached.

“Write a letter!” she says enthusiastically.

Back in the park, with the Audubon’s annual Christmas Bird Count now underway, it’s a moment to asses the skies in a quieter season. As the longest-running citizen science bird project in history, this annual wildlife census, fueled by volunteers, has provided scientists with robust data on birds and another major anthropogenic threat: climate change.

“Some people just think it's a backdrop for their about their drones,” Bates says of Prospect Park. "But really we live in a very high-quality habitat with a very high concentrations of birds, migrants especially.” Considering the duel between hawks and drones and the presence of a rare and unexpected visitor, the painted bunting, whose arrival this year caught birders by surprise (it rarely makes it north of Arkansas), Bate says, “There are lots of exotic things going on here.” It would be a shame for the city to kill them. 

Roughly 23 million years ago, a large rock hit the earth near in what is now Northern Canada.

The Haughton Crater is one of the world's northernmost impact craters, and about the closest thing to Mars on Earth. For NASA, and anyone interested in a mission to Mars, this crater is an excellent practice ground for what one day may be the first human voyage to a neighboring planet.

The crater itself wasn't found until the 1950's when it was spotted in aerial photographs. Named after Reverend Samuel Haughton, a British naturalist who wrote the first geological account of the Arctic Archipelago, the crater lies in a type of polar desert environment called a "frost rubble zone". It is the only impact crater known to exist in such an environment, and despite being 23 million years old, has undergone little erosion due to the lack of liquid water and vegetation in the area.

These factors, along with the crater's geology, make the freezing, desert-like landscape one of the closest approximation to the Martian environment that can be found on Earth. Beginning in 1997 the location became the base of the Haughton-Mars Project, and attempts to begin practicing for a future Mars mission.

Among the research there is FMARS or the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station created by the Mars Society, a non-profit volunteer organization devoted to space advocacy and the settlement of Mars. Here a crew of six, dressed in full spacesuits, simulate various missions and emergency scenarios. Among the research is "Low Level Laser Light Therapy" a way to keep the astronauts "limber and flexible and limber during long exposure to cold temperatures," and "Crew Safety in Simulated Emergency Situations" which simulates emergencies such as "habitat depressurization, habitat fires, toxic chemical leaks, EVA suit leaks, power failures, and medical emergencies."

Researchers inhabit the crater only during the summer months, as winters at this latitude are too cold and sunless, for even the likes of the FMARS crew.

Like Manhattan, the high-rises of Shibam were built on a rectangular grid of streets and squares. Unlike Manhattan, the skyscrapers are made of mud, date back to the 16th century, and the dusty streets are often overrun with goats.

Shibam, in the desert of central Yemen, is home to about 7,000 people. Located at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the small town was once a stopping point for traders traveling along the frankincense and spice routes.

The walled city of “skyscrapers” was built on a hill in the 1530s after a mighty flood destroyed much of the existing settlement. Its 500 huddled buildings, ranging from five to 11 stories high, are the tallest mud buildings in the world and provided protection against the elements and deterred potential attackers. They continue to shelter the residents of Shibam.  

The tower houses, however, are not immune to damage — fresh layers of mud must be applied to the walls regularly to replace sections eroded by wind and rain. A tropical storm in October 2008 brought disastrous floods, causing some of the buildings to collapse. An Al Qaeda attack in 2009 brought further damage. 

Walking down a hall lined from end to end with skulls and one gets the unique sense that they ought to be on their best behavior. 

Housed in a historic building at the oldest still-operating university in the world, the  Istituto di Anatomia Umana Normale has a collection of some of the first wax anatomical models ever made. Bologna University was the first institution to create a series of wax anatomical models for their medical students.

The Bologna school of wax modeling was distinct in that they would model wax directly onto real bone. Particularly excellent are the oversized wax models of brains, skulls and heads. Many of these remarkably beautiful works of art are still on display for students and visitors alike. However, the museum is not limited to anatomical waxes. The museum now also displays the collections of the Museo di Anatomia e Istologia Patologica or the Museo Cesare Taruffi.

In a room adjacent to the exposed muscles and veins of the anatomical waxes is an extraordinary collection of pathological specimens and models. Amazing and not for the faint of heart, it includes numerous delicately posed fetal skeletons and models of babies born without various organs. Be sure not to miss the wicker basket holding a dozen apple sized fetal skulls.

Also of note are the twisted frames of the pathological fetal skeletons and the strange wax model of an albino with a mutton-chops and mullet.

This Romanian museum of hunting arms and taxidermy trophies is often found quiet and empty -- all dark wood, fur, horn, and tooth.

Most of the trophies are from the late 19th and early 20th century. Entire foxes hang upside down by their feet, while mounted vulture heads stare out over rows of chamois horns. The walls of the museum are entirely covered with animals. In the second room, a huge bear is mounted, batting at the air with an enormous paw. Just to his left, the mounted head of a hunting hound is snarled with equal fierceness; the dog was killed by the bear, the bear by the dog’s owner. Both were mounted, one as trophy, the other as homage.

The large game room features "impressive trophies of large, Carpathian game (stag, bear, wild boar, chamois) most of them awarded at national and international contests of the period between World Wars, reflecting the exceptional value of the Romanian game."

The museum is named after a well-known personality of Sibiu in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries: Colonel August von Spiess, the Keeper of the Royal Hunting under the King Ferdinand I of Romania. Not just named for him, the museum also has a whole room dedicated to von Speiss; the memorial room is full of photographs from African safaris and Speiss' own arms and trophies.

Those with an interest in natural history museums and Victorian taxidermy will be fascinated by this unique collection, trophies of a time, and mindset, long past.

In a beautiful old building on the Hanoi University grounds, the Zoological Museum consists of three rooms located at the top of a set of stairs. A looming elephant skeleton lets visitors know that they've come to the right place. 

Mr. Vu Ngoc Thanh, the director himself, acts as a guide through the rooms, and is delighted to answer questions about any of the specimens on display. All three of the rooms are stuffed to the gills with, respectively, mammals, fish/amphibians, and birds. 

The collection is quite old and has barely been touched since the early 1900s. Though Mr. Thanh would like to see the collection updated, the crumbling, ramshackle specimens have a distinct charm for visitors who are accustomed to bright modern displays. 

The mammal room is set up in an especially unique manner - a parade of big cats, monkeys, bears, deer, rodents, a baby elephant, and others appear to be stampeding toward the door together.

This little-known museum isn't listed in any guide books and does not have open hours. At the time of this writing, it can only be visited by setting up an appointment with the director.

When the water running off of Victoria Falls is at a certain level, a small pool with almost no current forms which adventurous tourists have dubbed the Devil's Swimming pool.

Formed by a rock barrier at the edge of the falls, the water hole welcomes any daring swimmer the opportunity to wade right up to the edge of the falls themselves. However a small amount of deaths have occurred when people are swept over the edge.

The Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library) is a breathtaking baroque masterpiece, finished in 1726.

Formerly the court library to the Hapsburgs, it is one of the world's major libraries, with an extraordinary collection that dates back to the 14th century. The current collection contains around 2.5 million books.

Visitors can visit many special collections in addition to the main halls, which include prints, maps, papyri, portraits, music, and theater. But the magnificent library itself is the focal point here. Among the exhibitions are two exquisite Venetian baroque globes — one for the Earth and one for the sky, each with a diameter of more than one meter.

Keep your eye out for library employees slipping through concealed passages hidden behind certain bookcases.

(Photo: Vic/flickr)

I've done a lot of strange things to make money. I've picked strawberries, mopped the floors of a McDonald's, waited tables at a stuffy family restaurant, and passed plates of tiny appetizers at Robert De Niro-hosted charity events. I've barbecued chicken over a fiery pit, deep-fried Twinkies at dusty county fairs, and painted park benches in sweaty summer heat. I've been a secretary (not an assistant, as I was constantly reminded) to a musty insurance adjuster, and a computer lab assistant who knew very little about computers.

But the worst job in a long line of worst jobs was the cookie factory. I found myself there one college summer, when I was too broke to stay in my college town but not connected enough in my hometown to score a gig at one of the good factories. But at $10.50 an hour, the cookie factory paid better than waiting tables or picking strawberries. Plus, my cousin had an in.

A week before my first day, I had to pee into a cup. After that, a Laotian woman wearing heavy make-up and multiple hairnets used pliers to remove my earrings. The factory, I was promptly told, did not allow piercings. On the policy of plastic gloves, the factory was quite lax.

If I said which packaged snack food company's products I packaged, I would probably run into trouble because of some ridiculously one-sided contract I signed shortly after peeing into the cup. Let's just say it's a very popular one.

It's now been 10 years since I worked at the junk food mill, and I still won't eat another [Very Popular Cookie].

On my first day I was assigned to a sorting line, where I, along with one other woman, leaned over a waist-high vibrating tray designed to sort and arrange the freshly baked cookie halves. All I had to do was reach in and pull out any broken ones before they were paired off into sandwiches. Within minutes, the warmth of the ovens caused my partner's arms to moisten with sweat; a few hours into our shift and it was everywhere: her brow, her pit stains, the underside of her belly. A healthy amount of that sweat made its way onto the cookies.

The first rule of the cookie factory: Don't think about anything, ever. Letting my brain run on autopilot became an essential defense mechanism. Robots did the hard work; us humans mostly waited around for one of the various machines to hiccup. That meant staring at the same spot for hours, like a living, breathing failsafe. Little bags of cookies zipped by on a conveyor belt; we grabbed the ones that didn't seal properly. Graham crackers fell into line for their plastic sleeves; we pulled out the broken bits. Only five packs of fruit snacks were dropped into a six-pack box; we jammed an extra bag in before it was sealed.

I daydreamed. The lonely monotony of staring at plastic packaging and moving belts of junk food fueled an inner dialogue that was hard to turn off. For the first hour or so or each shift, I'd sing the chorus of "Dark of the Matinee" by Franz Ferdinand. It was bouncy like a kid's song, and it mentioned a factory. Find me and follow me through corridors, refectories, and files, you must follow, leave this academic factory! Then I'd make up dumb metaphors: On the packaging line, I am an industrial earthworm, encountering and fertilizing the dirt for the next earthworm to do their wormy thing with it.

I'd also do a lot of math. How fast were we churning out these little snack cracker bags? If I maintained an average of seven boxes with 10 single-serving bags every minute for eight hours straight, at what rate was I imparting these packs of [Popular Snack Crackers] to the world? Furthermore, if there were six people on the line and my rate was the average, how many crates would go out in one shift? If the first shift had twice as many workers and the third had half as many, what is the approximate rate of [Popular Snack Cracker] production in one 24-hour period? Furthermore, if my factory provides cookies, crackers, and snack foods for the entire nation, and approximately 295,734,134 people live in America, what is the country's daily rate of [Popular Snack Cracker] consumption?

The answer, I found, is 0.000382. Individual Americans consume single serving bags of [Popular Snack Cracker] at a daily rate of 0.000382. (I like to think my calculations produced reliable approximations, despite having not exposed myself to any sort of mathematics since high school geometry, circa 1999.)

There's a very real and very isolated sadness to factory work. I found my soliloquies increasing in idiocy by the day. I'd even taken to drinking a PBR tall boy on the drive home, and a few more once I got home, just to shut off my silly, rambling, autopilot mind. At least in my other monotonous low-wage jobs, I got to interact with other human beings. Here, my brain was rotting.

At one point I tried to teach myself Japanese. I thought if I carried an index card with new phrases each day and practiced them for the full eight hours, I'd be fluent by the summer's end. So simple! It was the perfect plan to make my life at the junk food mill somehow productive. Before I clocked in, I sounded out Ogenki desu ka ("How are you?"), repeating it as I walked to my spot on the snack cracker line. But wait, was it desu ka or deku sa? My hands were too occupied sorting bags to pull out the card and peek again.

I tried again during my lunch break, and gave up by the afternoon break. I'd already spoiled my mind with too many moronic mental tricks. There was no way a few foreign phrases could hold my attention for eight hours, even if I made them into songs.

After that I just stared, as mindlessly as possible, at whatever was in front of me. Some days, it was cookie bags with "Healthy Living Tips" printed on the packaging. Apparently, and incredibly, [Packaged Food Conglomerate] believes low-fat cookies are an integral part of a balanced weight-loss regimen. The first tip I read was "Park farther away so you can burn more calories walking from your vehicle." I once tried to point out the irony of health tips on a cookie package to the woman next to me. Because of the noise, and our earplugs, and a language barrier, her answer was like charades: OK, she's pretending to eat the cookies, OK, now she's grimacing, I think she's saying the cookies taste bad. Nod like you understood. She's nodding and smiling too. Congratulations, you have communicated with someone!

On the chewy cookie line, I'd entertain myself by squishing stray cookies under my shoes. They were gooey enough to congeal and stiffen, forming a sort of cookie moon boot that made me three to five inches taller by the end of the shift. The goo had to be painstakingly scraped off like gum under a table, and the factory even had a designated cookie moon boot pick-axe tool for this purpose. Congealed cookie goo never leaves a shoe's crevices though. It is unwise to wear cookie factory shoes around dogs, mice, or raccoons.

I liked to guess the exact minute when my line operator, Lu, would walk over and make the "break" sign, a pantomime of snapping a stick in half. Break time meant 10 timed minutes off the line, but first, you had to clock out. To milk the opportunity, I would saunter slowly, in a roundabout path, toward the clock, hitting all three bathrooms located on opposite ends of the facility on my way. En route I'd cross two metal bridges, with swift currents of cinnamon graham crackers rushing along on a treadmill below. 

I got used to the stench of baking and chocolate and syrup. At first I felt like a sugar princess. My eyelashes and sneezes and wisps of hair would sparkle and pulse with sweet granulate as I moved. But once I started to sweat, the sugar sand on my brow would mix with the hot sweetness hanging in the air to produce a sort of sheen of all-over sticky that covered every exposed inch of me. A gnat actually got stuck in my forearm hair once.

I thought I'd return to college in the fall a needy mess, desperate for human interaction and mental stimulation. But the summer spent inside my own head had a strange effect on me. I zoned out in class. I bored easily in conversations with friends. I got caught up in my own thought-digressions, and I frequently sang to myself. The factory had embedded static-y fuzz over my brain, like I was slightly high all the time. It took me a month to snap out of my funk. But at least when I did, I had a few good party stories to tell. They all began: "Never eat [Very Popular Cookies]. Let me tell you why."

Welcome to No One’s Watching Week, the time of the year when the readers are away and your tireless editors have run amok. For this week only, Atlas Obscura, New Republic, Popular Mechanics, Pacific Standard, The Paris Review, and Mental Floss will be swapping content that is too ​out there​ for any other week in 2015. This article originally appeared in Pacific Standard.

The Mistletoe Drone, from Hammacher Schlemmer. (Photo: Courtesy Hammacher Schlemmer)

I’m not sure if this is a popular or an unpopular opinion but: Mistletoe is both corny and desperate and I love it. It’s a parasitic plant you hang from a ceiling and then stand under, hoping some poor sucker will venture forth to kiss you.

In my mind, it is associated with two things: meet cutes in (non-tragic) Lifetime movies and my childhood. 

I have some fond memories of my parents hanging it for their annual Christmas party and me subsequently trying to trick everyone in the house to stand under it with me. A fun game, to be sure. My mom needed no convincing, but my younger brother was a little trickier (why I was so hot to kiss my brother is a story for my therapist). According to her, my technique was simple but effective. I would tell him there was candy in the living room and when he greedily ran to devour it, I would block him in the door and plant a big one on his cheek as he tried to run away. (“YOU BELONG TO ME NOW!” is what I imagined I screamed, but nobody can confirm this.)

Fast forward 20-plus years and I still have a little leaf-shaped hole in my heart that can only be filled by that magical poisonous plant, so when my editor asked if I would would be interested in bringing a mistletoe drone to holiday parties, there was only one answer. The drone keeps mistletoe creepy and rude and potentially actionable while somehow also removing whatever serendipity came from “accidentally” pushing someone under the tiny leaves. Yes.

But where does one even find a mistletoe drone? Who would make such a thing? I procure the flying contraption from Hammacher Schlemmer— the bizarre gadget emporium with the impossible-to-spell-without-Google name that you only know about because you were on an airplane in the ‘90s. The mistletoe drone will, according to their website, “impart whimsical cheer to holiday gatherings when hovered remotely over celebrants’ heads (requires six AA batteries).” 

The video on their site should be required viewing for all humanity. Seriously, just scrap our subpar sex education and replace it with this video and nobody will ever procreate again. 

Look at that thing. Just look at that fucking thing.

I can’t get over it! It’s like a crown of thorns, only bigger and levitated on its own as if possessed by the devil. Glorious.

Before I attend any parties, I decide I need some rules and general guidelines because this isn’t Sodom and Gomorrah: 1. I must swallow all pride and fly it with the blind confidence of your average inebriated frat bro. 2. Even though I double check to make sure my drone isn’t the same design of the one that cut a man at TGIF Fridays, I decide I still need to keep it safe and only fly mine outdoors. No blood will be shed in the name of a holiday puff piece, my friend. A line has been drawn and I am a hero.

Before the first party of the winter season, my husband/co-pilot and I decide we should practice with the drone. Unfortunately for all involved with this experiment, we both find it nearly impossible to operate.

I push the remote control gently to the left, the drone shoots into orbit. I push the remote control ever so slightly to the right, the drone zig zags in a triangle shape. I try to make the drone hover, the drone crashes to the ground. Like my college boyfriend (zing), it’s somehow both too sensitive and not sensitive at all. Also like my college boyfriend, this shit is straight-up difficult. 

I quickly learn that if I ever want to master the drone, I must train like [Star Wars spoiler] Luke Skywalker; living in a swamp and only hanging out with a very wise Gremlin. Would it be worth it? Maybe, but I’ll never know because I’m only willing to practice for like 10 minutes before it’s time to hit the first party with whatever meager skills I already possess.

And “hit” is the appropriate verb because at my first holiday party, I hit someone on the head almost immediately upon activating the drone in my friend’s back yard. I profusely apologize to the woman, starting to explain that it’s for a story I’m writing but I stop mid-sentence because, well, that’s a cop-out and I want to own this stupid decision, you know? Thankfully, the victim is more annoyed than actually hurt and I can tell she just wants to get the hell away from me, so that’s fine.

Kiss count: negative one.

However, looking around at the other partygoers after the accident and I’m overcome with embarrassment, suddenly realizing I’m the Sad Weirdo With a Mistletoe Drone at a Gathering Where People in Their 30s Just Want to Drink Wine and Talk About Bernie Sanders. I’m pretty sure this isn’t worth it, but I soldier on because that’s what drones do.

Why the angst? I’ll tell you what flying the mistletoe drone feels like. It’s like being a dude with a parrot on his shoulder or a snake around his neck, but without any of the exhibitionist pride from creating a whole personality around the live animal affixed to your torso. Some folks are looking at me and grimacing; I’ve never had so many people avoid eye contact as when I’m holding this remote control. And yet, I continue on. This must be what believing in yourself is all about?

 I fly it around the party for a minute trying to get it to stay still in one place. It refuses. I then bump it into a tree and it careens to the ground. I run up to it and find it still in working order, but when I try to fly it again, it again refuses to make it off the ground. It’s useless and I don’t have the mini-screwdriver present to make it work. Ugh!

I spend the next hour asking people to just hold it over their heads and see what happens. This doesn’t go GREAT and eventually the host invites me to return the drone to its packaging and to stop making everyone feel uncomfortable. 

Not ready to give up, I grab my drone and go outside where I make some people heading into the party hold the drone over their heads. I convince a few people to do it out of a pity or maybe because they think they’re on the hidden camera show, What Would You Do?, and this is some ill-conceived social experiment designed to test the limits of compassion toward your fellow man.

Either way, empathy will only get you so far and nobody lasts more than a few minutes with drone atop head.  It’s a cold night and there’s no real incentive to ruin their evening.

Outside the party with the mistletoe drone. (Photo: Courtesy Laura Hooper Beck) 

The rest of the party is me standing near the entrance of the shindig, holding the drone over my head, and praying that none of my exes show up to see the bullet they so clearly dodged.

That said, I’ve been to worse parties. Maybe the next one would be better, and hey, at least I tried to have the blind conviction of an underwhelming bro for one night. That’s not nothing! Maybe I’ll look at parrot rescue when this is all through. 

For the drone’s second outing, I select a smaller affair with younger adults (a pizza party with kids) and so hopefully the littles will be less disdainful of my special brand of funk. After all, the drone is basically a shittier, rounder remote control plane and kids are all about that garbage.

(It should be noted that at this point, I scrap my dumb second rule when it’s proven that this thing cannot actually fly outdoors without either going up forever and ever to join the moon in congress or, alternately, hover approximately a foot above the ground which is fine if this is mistletoe for ants but it’s not! It’s for humans!) 

As I take the drone out of its box, the kids circle around me. Already the situation is better—these kids are picking up what I’m putting down! “What’s that?” one asks. “Oh, it’s just a DRONE,” I respond smugly. “Like the ones they use for war?” another child asks. “Yes! But this one is for ROMANCE!”

This elicits “ewws” all around because romance is way worse than war when you’re a sociopath or a six-year-old. Still, I have their attention.

I place the drone on the ground and flip the on button. I slowly attempt to hover the drone but I’m not getting much air; with each sputter, I can tell I’m losing the crowd. I panic as one kid gets distracted by a Storm Trooper Lego (Fucking Star Wars! I can’t compete with that!) and the others turn to see what she’s doing.

In a last ditch effort to re engage the children, I grab the drone with both hands by its sides and immediately regret it. “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Fuuuuuuuck!”, I scream at the kids.

The blades whirl past my fingers again and again, attempting to slice off my digits. Luckily, it’s plastic so we don’t have another TGIF Red Wedding-situation on our bloody hands, but I’m not gonna lie and say it didn’t make me cry a little. Because it did make me cry a little. (And also curse, for which I received several hostile glares from various parents.) 

This is when a mom friend invites me to return the drone to the box. Party’s over, kids.

Kiss count: negative 10, at least.

At this point, I’ve given up on bringing my fickle drone around people who could (and probably would) invite me to never return. The only logical next step? Inflict this mess upon my family.

When I arrive at my parents’ house, the drone and I are slightly worse for wear, but basically functional. I hand the remote over to my mom, my dad, and random other family members, to little effect. None of us are able to get this thing to straighten up and fly right!

My mom even volunteers to sit in a chair while my niece crouches nearby, ready to pounce the second my husband is able to maneuver the beast into position. 

Here’s my mom excitedly waiting for the mistletoe drone to work:

Waiting for the drone to work. (Photo: Courtesy Laura Hooper Beck) 

Here’s my mom bored waiting for the mistletoe drone to work:

Here’s my mom, giving up:

No dice! The drone refuses to stay aloft, and my dad tells me the sound of the drone is interfering with his Christmas viewing of Bones. Nobody cares about this stupid thing anymore, and I’m starting to think I’ll never feel the same flush of mistletoe magic that I experienced when I trapped my brother under it in the ‘90s. 

That might be because I’m no longer so craven for attention that I need to physically trap someone in a doorway to beg for affection (again, definitely gonna cover this in therapy) and/or it might be because I'd have to be an actual sorcerer to operate this drone.

My question for Hammacher Schlemmer is this: Do you need to be Poe Dameron to fly this thing? Or am I just so inept at a working a remote control that I can’t even get a mistletoe drone (the lowliest form of drone!) off the ground? As someone who is VERY good at Super Mario Kart, I think the former may be more correct. And even if it flew like the Millennium Falcon (relevant), the humiliation of being the clueless goofball who walks around a party flying a green plastic mistletoe drone is too much even for me. 

Next year, I’ll stick to the analog version. It’s bad enough.

Welcome to No One’s Watching Week, the time of the year when the readers are away and your tireless editors have run amok. For this week only, Atlas Obscura, New Republic, Popular Mechanics, Pacific Standard, The Paris Review, and Mental Floss will be swapping content that is too ​out there​ for any other week in 2015. 

Hundreds of Pa'oh people dressed in traditional clothing walk down the streets of Taunggyi holding a lantern to celebrate the Tazaungdaing Festival of Lights, which happens to coincide with the full moon. (All photos: Dene-Hern Chen)

Seven men, each wielding a flaming bamboo stick, circled a giant paper balloon and worked quickly to fill it with hot air. A small band of people played clangy music and danced exuberantly as the 30-foot-high balloon slowly billowed out before it lifted off into the night sky. The men cheered, the music swelled, the crowd danced.

And then, the pitch-black sky lit up into a dazzling display of a multi-colored shower of sparks and flames.

The crowd ran for cover as sparks whizzed down onto the ground. As the balloon gained more altitude, its undercarriage began emitting a symphony of pyrotechnic prowess—red, blue, green and white explosions arched across the night sky as spectators watched on, pulling on blankets to protect their hair from wayward sparks.

A man waves a Pa'oh national flag as a hot-air balloon takes off. Fireworks attached to its base shoot down onto spectators, showering them with fire and flames. 

This amazing display was just one of hundreds during the week of the Tazaungdaing Festival of Lights in northeastern Myanmar’s Shan State. Held every year in November on the week of a full moon at the end of the rainy season, the festival attracts thousands to Taunggyi city. The beautiful—and dangerous—event is held next to fair grounds that feature hundreds of food stalls, games and local liquor promoters as well as a carnival that appears to be entirely powered by youngsters swinging on Ferris wheels or pushing pirate ships to create momentum. Last year, a balloon lift-off that went awry left two dead and injured 14. 

Firemen are on standby in case any of the hot-air balloons come crashing down with spiraling fireworks. The Tazaungdaing Festival of Lights may be beautiful, but it can also be dangerous, resulting in burns and welts when fireworks shower upon spectators. 

Working months in advance to create these massive hot-air balloons, local teams also experiment with explosives to create the colorful fireworks that are attached to the balloon’s undercarriage. The experimentation is often ad hoc, done with few safety precautions, and can sometimes lead to fatalities. But the people making the balloons are rarely persuaded to leave the craft.

The Festival lasts for a week. 

“I won’t ever want to stop doing it,” said 39-year-old Ko Moe, who is one of many “firemasters” in charge of creating and experimenting with the explosives. “If nothing really bad happens, I will continue to do it. I will continue to guide the younger people to learn the craft and pass it on.”

Team members hold candles for a hot-air balloon.

Ko Moe is part of a team of roughly 200 men who make the balloons each year. This year, the team, called Royal Kyar Nyo, made three hot-air balloons and entered them all into the Tazaungdaing competition. Ye Lin, 26, said that their first entry ended in great disappointment: While the fireworks planning and display went off without a hitch as the structure gained altitude, the wind changed abruptly at the last moment, causing the paper that the balloon was made out of to catch fire.

Ahead of a hot-air balloon's launch, team members prepare for it by attaching candle holders to its end.

“It just crumbled up and fell out of the sky,” Ye Lin said. “Our firemaster was so sad, even though the fireworks was actually perfect; he couldn’t speak to anyone that night.”

Team members work together to manually set a balloon afloat during the Tazaungdaing Festival of Lights, held in November 2015 in Myanmar's Shan State. 

But the Royal Kyar Nyo team had high hopes for the second-to-last night of the festival, where they would launch their final creation—a sunflower-yellow hot-air balloon with a happy purple Buddha painted on it. Hours before lift-off, four men sat in a dark, musty room working quietly to prepare mini “rocket launchers” which would glide through the air and explode into fireworks when sparked.

Buddhism, the pre-dominant religion in Myanmar, shows up often in the hot-air balloon designs during the week-long competition, such as this Buddha-like drawing. 

To an untrained eye, the men looked like they were working with a variety of colored powders and metal bits, stuffing the powder with their bare hands into small paper structures. The powder included potassium chlorate—an explosive that “adds strength” to the fireworks, though it is more typically used to make bombs. Some feature potassium nitrate, which causes the fire to burn green, while scandium nitrate produces red sparks, and magnesium mined from airplane bits, is generally used to make flames burn hotter and brighter.

A hot-air balloon floats gently up into the night sky carrying a tail embellished with a design created using candle holders. This type of balloon while beautiful, is not as popular as the ones that hold home-made fireworks at its base.

While the health ramifications of working on these explosives are unclear—Ye Lin said that the team wears face masks to protect themselves, but not much else—the balloon makers' dedication to their craft appears to be all-encompassing. Members allocate their time, money, and resources to the process—which can cost up to $4,000 for a single hot-air balloon—despite all the potentially fatal setbacks.

Team members work together to manually set a balloon afloat.

Ye Lin, for example, said that his parents did not approve of him being part of a balloon team. “I still do it because it is my passion,” he said. “You can get injured or maimed from it but I don’t really care and I’m very careful anyway.”

A hot-air balloon with a design featuring the famed temples of Bagan float up into the night sky.

He added that his older brother used to be part of a team but was involved in an accident that left him wounded. “He can’t really walk now because his waist and hand are injured and he also can’t carry heavy things,” Ye Lin said, adding that his brother still attends the festival every year.

“Two of my friends have died in the past,” he said. “There is a sadness at first, but after a while, we cannot give it up so we go back to it.”

55 Main St: professional building with UFO statue on the porch. (All Photos: Kate Truisi) 

“Have you ever seen a UFO in the Pine Bush area?”

The question is printed in large type, on paper that has been stuck on the walls of the Pine Bush barbershop. In red pencil, the word “you” has been underlined. It forms part of the UFO ephemera collected by Butch, the barber and local UFO historian. Although Pine Bush is a small hamlet in upstate New York with a population of 1,780, it is big in the world of ufology. Pine Bush is, in fact, the UFO Capital of New York .

Pine Bush appears to have embraced this very distinct moniker. The local diner is called ‘Cups and Saucers’. There is an annual UFO Parade. Depictions of aliens peek from doorways, and are painted on windows. Photographer Kate Truisi was living in the Hudson Valley when she first heard about Pine Bush. Intrigued, spent time photographing Pine Bush and Butch’s collection of alien ephemera. We chatted to Truisi about her experiences, and the appeal of believing that something is out there. 

How did you hear about Pine Bush, the “UFO Capital of New York”?

I was living in the Hudson Valley at the time in a town about 45 minutes away from Pine Bush.  I had heard of sightings here and there from various people including friends that had lived in the area their whole lives.  Having always been interested in the paranormal I was instantly intrigued.  

Sign for Pine Bush diner, Cups & Saucers. 

A storefront on main street in Pine Bush, NY.  

What are the origins of Pine Bush’s UFO history?

The area has been host to activity since as early as the 1950s but not until the 1980s did it start gaining attention as a hot spot.  Between 1983 and 1987 about 2,000 sightings were reported and around this time a hotline was created for the public to call in sightings from all over the Hudson Valley.  The phenomenon was documented in 1991 with Ellen Crystall's book Silent Invasion: The Shocking Discoveries of a UFO Researcher.  Her research and investigation put Pine Bush on the map as it became an attraction for enthusiasts hoping to get a glimpse of the mysterious occurrences.  Today, the activity has died down but not gone away.  Residents of the area still claim seeing strange things in the sky. 

Ephemera on the walls of Butch's barber shop. 

Why did you choose to focus on the Pine Bush barber?

The first time I visited Pine Bush I had breakfast at the town diner Cups and Saucers.  Based on its name I figured it was a good place to start if I wanted to talk to the locals about the UFO stories I had been hearing.  I didn’t know what would come out of it but everyone I talked to seemed to mention Butch the barber. 

Later on, I found his barbershop and was amazed at what I saw.  The walls were covered with an array of news clippings, photographs, drawings and signs; all UFO themed.  

Butch, the Pine Bush barber, in his shop. 

Butch showing his UFO-related bulletin board.

What kinds of UFO stories did he share, and what was your favorite?

Butch has a lot of stories.  He is like an archivist/historian/spokesperson of the Pine Bush phenomenon.   He told me one story about a sighting that a friend of his had at a field just outside of town.  His friend saw a figure much taller than any of the brush in the already overgrown stretch of land.  This would put the figure at 9-10 feet tall.  It was nighttime and its silhouette stood out in the field.  After a few seconds it disappeared into the trees.  

Newspaper clippings and photos on Butch's wall.

Pine Bush seems to have a “UFO culture” – did you get the sense that locals believe in the sightings, or is there a dose of skepticism? 

I think there is a mix of both.  There are definitely those that do believe something is out there and actively search to experience it.  Then there are those that have never seen anything but don’t discount what they hear.  Either way I think most of Pine Bush has embraced the uniqueness of it; after all they do have a UFO parade every spring. 

Butch holding a drawing describing a UFO sighting.

Alien painted in the window of a store in town.

Did you hear any first-hand stories of the paranormal or of abductions?

I heard many different descriptions of odd lights and shapes in the sky but no one in Pine Bush told me about abductions.  I would love to talk to them though!

Did you do any skywatching yourself?

I would occasionally drive up in the mountains at night with friends to look at the stars or watch a meteor shower.  I’ve gone to spots in Pine Bush where there are reports of a lot of activity but only during the day- I’m too spooked to go at night.  

The field outside of town where many sightings take place in the sky and on land. 

The ram statue (Photo: Vered Sarig/The Caesarea Development)

In a Byzantine church that dates back to the sixth or seventh century, archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority have found a remarkably preserved statue of a ram. It's about 1 foot long and 1.3 feet tall, and the detailed carvings of its fleece and horns are still intact.

The ram was found in Caesarea Harbor National Park, an archaeological site on the Mediterranean Sea, about 25 miles south of Haifa. The ram might have been carved for use in a church there, or it might have been a Greek or Roman statue, repurposed as a church decoration.

What's really remarkable about the statue is when it was found, on December 24. In the context of a church, the ram's likely a symbol of Jesus Christ. "It may or may not be a coincidence, but the statue was uncovered on Christmas Eve," the directors of the excavation told Israeli news. 

Bonus finds: Crazy spiral coral in Iraq's first reef, castle wall

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.