Forteana

Strange Events Everyday People Observe. Forteana covers a wide range of unexplained events and unusual happenings. It deals with things that do not follow common ideas about how nature should work.Forteana means records of strange events that everyday people observe. These cover odd weather, unexpected lights, strange animal behavior, and unusual natural occurrences.Many who study Forteana take a factual approach when writing what they see. They leave out opinions and stick to details. This styl

The Paranormal Database

A List of Hauntings, Folklore and Strange Places, from The Paranormal Database

Faceless figures and mysterious music: ghost stories from English Heritage sites - Feddit UK

Figure caught on camera at Chester Castle among accounts of eerie goings on at historic properties

Office worker finds endangered spotted handfish dead on Hobart street

The handfish looked as if it had just "flopped out of the water" when it was discovered by an office worker in central Hobart.

The day UFOs stopped play - Feddit UK

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33205229 [https://lemmy.world/post/33205229] > It was 27 October 1954, a typically crisp autumn day in Tuscany. The mighty Fiorentina club was playing against its local rival Pistoiese. Ten-thousand fans were watching in the concrete bowl of the Stadio Artemi Franchi. But just after half-time the stadium fell eerily silent - then a roar went up from the crowd. The spectators were no longer watching the match, but were looking up at the sky, fingers pointing. The players stopped playing, the ball rolled to a stand-still. Play was suspended because spectators saw something in the sky, according to the referee’s match report. The incident at the stadium cannot simply be interpreted as mass hysteria - there were numerous UFO sightings in many towns across Tuscany that day and over the days that followed. According to some eyewitness accounts a ray of white light was seen in the sky coming from Prato, north of Florence. It is a fact that at the same time the UFOs were seen over Florence there was a strange, sticky substance falling from above. In English we call this ‘angel hair’.

A peculiar, short-lived office at the Smithsonian once explored reports of bizarre natural phenomena - Feddit UK

> Something was wrong with the squirrels of Appalachia. It was the fall of 1968, and they appeared to be making a sudden pilgrimage: attempting improbable swims across lakes, sprinting over highways and bursting into buildings. One squirrel, while fleeing, climbed into a critical piece of infrastructure and reportedly short-circuited power to much of Clarkesville, Georgia. “The squirrel,” the wire services reported, “was also extinguished.” The highways were lined with hundreds of dead squirrels. One scientist spotted 13 squirrels swimming due north across the reservoirs of North Carolina. Nothing could make them turn around. Assuming the squirrels must be starving, concerned citizens began sending boxes of acorns and hickory nuts to the afflicted areas, and grocery stores put up signs encouraging shoppers to feed the squirrels. > > The problem was that the squirrels were, by and large, well-fed. There was no shortage of food. Yet by some estimates, 20 million squirrels were on the move. Wildlife officials were flummoxed. So they notified the Smithsonian Center for Short-Lived Phenomena. > >The CSLP was a kind of clearinghouse for news of intriguing phenomena that scientists might want to study as they occurred—from volcanic eruptions to oil spills, meteorite strikes, sudden islands, unusual migrations and explosions in the populations of non-native species. Every day, an odd phenomenon occurred somewhere, offering a priceless natural experiment. But researchers worried they were missing most of them. > > “For years, scientists have been aware of the almost total lack of the essential research information on the very earliest beginnings of natural events,” Sidney Galler, then assistant secretary for science at the Smithsonian Institution, told Newsweek about how the idea for the CSLP had come about. “We come in the middle and have to go back and attempt to reconstruct what actually happened.” > >But now the Smithsonian had built an unprecedented network to help scientists get fast, accurate information about developing situations. “We have our finger,” said Robert Citron, the director of the center, “on the pulse of planet Earth.” > > In its seven years of existence, the CSLP logged oil spills and ashened snowfalls, chased still-warm meteorites, laid the foundation of an essential global database of volcanic activity, and heralded the (erroneous) discovery of at least one prehistoric sea monster. And it left, in the archives of the Smithsonian, a rather large paper trail. Decades later, those archives are a window into a moment of epistemological uncertainty at the dawn of the environmental age, when nothing quite seemed to make sense anymore and concerned researchers were starting to piece it all together, one strange event at a time. Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Short-Lived_Phenomena]

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