Upcoming on Sunday is the eightieth anniversary of the first modern sighting of the Loch Ness monster, which occurred April 14, 1933 when a couple claimed to have seen what they described as an enormous animal in the loch. In honor of the occasion, yesterday at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in Scotland, Nessie scholars held a symposium debating the creature’s existence. The photo above, shot by Robert Wilson on April 19, 1934, remains arguably the most famous Nessie image, and for years was touted as proof something large lived in the loch, until 1984 when the British Journal of Photography published an analysis by Stewart Campbell concluding that the object in the water measured three feet—not nearly long enough to be the famed Nessie. Years later, a big game hunter named Marmaduke Wetherell, just below, was fingered as the brain behind an elaborate hoax resulting in the photo. But true believers have disputed the account.

Subsequent sightings and photos have all been inconclusive, which means of course that nothing was decided at the Edinburgh symposium. Those who believe in the creature have no hard evidence to prove their position, and those who disbelieve can’t prove it doesn’t exist. The latter isn’t a surprise, as it’s logically impossible to prove anything doesn’t exist, whether monsters and deities, Kang and Kodos of Rigel IV, or the chair you're sitting on right now. Doubtless those involved in the symposium knew that, which means the event was probably just a good excuse to shoot the shit for an afternoon then adjourn to the raucous Edinburgh bars. From there it’s just a few pints until someone drops his pants and screeches, “Watch out! The monster is out of the loch!” So be forewarned—the next Nessie photo you see will probably be someone’s pale cock, and if photo analysis proves it’s three feet long that’ll be one proud scientist.

Partying was the lure, but robbery was the motive. In the town of Joilet, Illinois in mid-January four people—Joshua Miner, Alisa Massaro, Bethany McKee, and Adam Landerman, seen from clockwise above, invited two acquaintances into Massaro’s house where they strangled them. When police arrived on the scene they found the bodies of Eric Glover and Terrance Rankins, below, face down inside the house with plastic bags tied around their heads. Local police chief Mike Trafton said at the time, “After the homicides were committed, [the killers] continued the party atmosphere, I guess I would say, without getting into it any further.” Yesterday the public found out what he didn’t want to get into back in January—at least two of the killers had sex atop the bodies of the victims. Joshua Miner told police after his arrest that his girlfriend Alisa Massaro said “years back that she wanted to have sex with a dead guy.” She can cross that off that bucket list. Problem is, if prosecutors get their way she and her cohorts may be kicking the bucket sooner than any of them ever imagined.

The above photo shows an interesting looking model circa 1920 demonstrating the usage of a violet ray machine, which was a personal electrotherapy device first invented by Nikola Tesla around 1890. Tesla was way ahead of his time, and some of his electrical applications were simply amazing. For instance, he successfully generated wireless power—i.e., he lit phosphorescent lamps by sending electricity through the air. Think about that next time you trip over one of the twenty power cords you have snaking around your place. Of course, genius occasionally comes wrapped in a bit of lunacy, so in the interests of full disclosure we should probably note that Tesla also spent many years trying to build a teleforce weapon, which he claimed would “bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation’s border and cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.”

Tesla’s violet ray device became a major fad during the Great Depression. The contraption consisted of a portable box encasing a discharge coil that produced a high frequency, ozone-generating electrical current. That current was channeled into a bakelite-handled, glass-tipped wand, the business end of which was applied to the recipient’s skin. One company that manufactured these devices was called Renulife, and their pitch went like this: Electricity from your light socket is transformed into health and beauty-giving Violet Ray—powerfully effective, yet gentle, soothing, perfectly safe. Voltage is raised from ordinary lighting current to thousands of volts, giving tremendous penetrative force. The irresistible revitalizing powers of Renulife Violet Ray are carried at once to every nerve, cell, fibre and part of the body.

We would love to have been part of this. Yesterday Mexico City had their annual La Marcha Zombie, or Zombie Walk, with the goal of setting a new record for the number of zombies (held by Buenos Aires, which had assembled 25,000 shambling undead just a few days earlier). As you might deduce, zombie walks are growing more popular globally, and have been staged in places as far flung as Vancouver, Pittsburgh, Mar de Plata, Exeter, Santiago, and Singapore. According to Wikipedia, the first walk was held in Sacramento, California in 2001, and now hundreds of cities have them. Perhaps in a decade or two, social scientists will tell us the complex reasons behind the rise of zombie walks, i.e., the trampling of individuality in the modern world, the rise of ravenous greed and the death of caring, etc., and that, ironically, one day sooner than most people think, the masses will rise up and destroy the elite few that have enslaved them. Okay, maybe that last part is just what we think. But complex reasons aside, from our non-scientific perspective, we’d do a zombie walk just because it looks fun. And do you think there’s any zombie sex going on afterward? Why of corpse there is.

In northwestern Montana a night ago, a forty-four-year old man was run over while trying to stage a Bigfoot sighting. He had donned a Ghillie suit—a military camouflage outfit resembling foliage but which could be mistaken for coarse fur—and was standing either on the shoulder or in a traffic lane of State Highway 93. Instead of being seen and mistaken for a sasquatch, he went unseen and was just plain squashed when hit and run over by first one car, then, for good measure, another. Needless to say, the man, whose name was Randy Lee Tenley, died on the scene. Tragic, unfortunate, family is in our prayers and so forth, but let’s not even pretend this isn’t funny. Even the most moral among us (our girlfriends) have to smile morbidly at this. Picture this poor guy lurking by the highway, probably giggling inside his Ghillie suit, feeling quite clever and doubtless picturing the next day’s headlines—which you can be sure he did not think would read “local idiot fatally flattened.” We know, we know—tragic, unfortunate, family is in our prayers and so forth. You know what the worst part is, though? Not only did the guy die in brutal fashion, but his death was completely in vain—no Bigfoot sightings were called in that night.

You can add Norway to the list of countries with a mysterious sea serpent. Or not. Last week Andreas Solvik and two friends were in a small boat on Lake Hornindalsvatnet in the southwestern part of country when they saw a disturbance on the water. Solvik snapped the photo you see above. We’ve taken a good look it and we gotta say, what we think Solvik saw was a disturbance in his bank account and he cooked up a hoax to make a few kroner on the side. Lake Hornindalsvatnet actually does have a legend about a kjempeorm, or monster, associated with it, and because it’s the deepest lake in Europe, there’s a feeling among some locals that a monster might be able to survive uncaptured, but only among laymen. When a local scientist was asked for his take, he theorized that because the area has an extensive logging industry, what Solvik photographed and what people have seen for many years are probably either logs, or masses of sawdust that sat on the lakeshore for a while collecting algae before finally floating into deeper water. That's an interesting theory, but we don’t think Andreas Solvik photographed something that turned out to be wood. We think he Photoshopped something that he hoped would turn into money. Check below and see what you think.

This photo appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers this month in 1942 after West Coast anti-aircraft batteries opened up on a mysterious aerial object supposedly seen hovering in the skies above L.A. The object was sighted in the early morning of February 25 and fired upon for about two hours. The next day Army spokesmen said the barrage had been the result of a false alarm caused by war hysteria, which leaves you to wonder what sort of non-existent object could be pinned by multiple searchlights as it moved across the sky.

Another official explanation was that the object was a weather balloon, which of course raises a completely different question, namely, how did more than 2,000 exploding artillery shells fail to bring down something so flimsy? These shells caused three deaths on the ground, and they weren’t even aimed there. UFO aficionados, of course, say it was an alien craft. That’s debatable, not for any scientific reason, but based on simple logic. Consider: we puny humans have already made major advances in stealth tech, yet we think we’d be able to detect an alien craft that came from the gulfs of space to observe us? That’s called pure hubris, and we don’t subscribe.

So that leaves one other explanation. It was a deliberate Army drill involving a weather balloon, an exercise designed to test anti-aircraft capabilities, shock Los Angeles residents and thus gauge the potential for mass panic, and ram home the idea to the masses that the Japanese were lurking out there somewhere. In order to believe this scenario one has to assume the anti-aircraft gunners had the shittiest aim in the historyof hurled projectiles, however the three obvious benefits we’ve listed for conducting such a drill make this by far the most logical scenario. Of course in the end, we weren’t there, so we’re only speculating about this obscure historical event. Others have different theories, and some even have eyewitness accounts. If you’re inclined, you can read one of those here. 

Twice within a week in Great Britain horses were mutilated in the dead of night in a manner that has been described by some authorities as ritualistic. The two horses—one in Carmarthenshire, Wales and the other in Stithians, Cornwall—were killed on nights bracketing a Satanic holiday known as St. Winebald’s Day, which falls on January 7. The Carmarthenshire horse, which was attacked January 5, had its eyes gouged out, an ear cut off, its stomach cut open, and its genitalia removed. The Stitihians horse, a large stallion named Erik (above), was killed on January 8 in similar fashion, but had only one eye removed, along with its teeth, while its ears were left intact. The Carmarthenshire crime is particularly intriguing, because when the owner of that horse was unable to remove the corpse immediately, the killer or killers returned that night—January 6—to further mutilate the animal. Because of the dates of the crimes and the fact that St. Winebald’s Day is considered by some Satanists to be an occasion for animal as well as human sacrifice, police have admitted that cult involvement is a strong possibility, though they are also considering more conventional motives. So far, searches of both crime scenes have turned up no clues. 

This January 1957 cover of The National Police Gazette introduces America to Javier Pereira, a Zenú Indian from Colombia who claimed to have been born in 1789, a birth year that would have made him 167 at the time the magazine hit newsstands. Pereira had been unknown to the world until he crossed paths in 1955 with a Colombian journalist named Suarez Santander Branger, who ran a paper called Ecos de Córdoba. Branger announced his stunning discovery and very quickly everyone in Colombia wanted to meet the world’s oldest man. Branger orchestrated public appearances for Pereira all over the country, where he was feted alongside the likes of Miss Colombia titleholder Luz Marina Zuluaga, and acclaimed author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Around this time, Douglas Storer, the president of Believe It Or Not, Inc.—which was the parent corporation of Ripley’s—was touring South America looking for strange and unexplainable oddities for the Ripley's Museum in Florida. Storer caught wind of Pereira and swung by Colombia to have a gander at the old man for himself. He must have liked what he saw, because shortly thereafter, Storer flew Pereira to New York City for what he said would be a medical examination. But by “examination” Storer also meant spectacle. He had hordes of press waiting on the tarmac for Pereira when the plane landed, and later paraded him down Fifth Avenue atop a Rolls Royce as New Yorkers turned out to gawk.

Though international fame seemed to suit Pereira just fine, it wasn’t okay with Suarez Santander Branger, who’d received no advance notice of Pereira’s sudden departure from Colombia, and feared losing control of his discovery. Leaving aside the presumptuousness of Branger considering another person to be his property, it's worth noting that he wasn’t just being paranoid. U.S. papers labeled Pereira as Douglas Storer’s discovery. Branger’s name was nowhere to be found. He retaliated by writing an editorial entitled “Javier Pereira es mío,” or, “Javier Pereira Is Mine,” which appeared in most of Colombia’s dailies. In the editorial, he threatened to sue Storer for $167 million—i.e., one million dollars for each year of Pereira’s life. Whether Storer was cowed by Branger or was simply finished with Pereira we don’t know, but he sent the old man back to Colombia and a crisis was averted.

During all of Javier Pereira’s travels he was, of course, asked one question over and over: How have you lived so long? Pereira had a simple answer—he said he chewed cocoa beans, drank lots of coffee, smoked the occasional large cigar, and didn’t worry too much. As to whether he was really 167, the youngest any doctor ever estimated his age to be was 120, and even that doctor prefaced the estimate with the qualifying phrase “at least.” However, the anecdotal evidence for Pereira being older was interesting. For example, though he could not read or write, he had detailed knowledge of historical events that had taken place when he would have been in his twenties and thirties. And many third parties confirmed his age, for example an eighty-six-year-old woman from his town, who recounted meeting him when she was a little girl and he was already an old man.

Pereira's stint in the spotlight had faded by the end of 1957. For a time he resided in a nursing home, but we can’t confirm his whereabouts or the exact circumstances of his death, in March 1958, of heart failure. Today, age-wise, he falls into the inconclusive category. But whatever the actual number, for a while he amazed the world. In Colombia he was sorevered that the government even introduced two 1956 postage stamps bearing his likeness. For those who’d like to see Pereira in action, here's a video clip of his 1955 arrival in New York City, and at this link you can see a silent film of him smooching a flight attendant—the very moment the Police Gazette used for its excellent cover photo-illustration. 

We usually approach the items in our Mondo Bizarro category with a certain amount of playfulness, but some events defy any attempts to be humorous. On Monday an actual two-headed, un-Photoshopped baby was born in Anajas, Brazil to 25-year-old Maria de Nazare (which would translate to Mary of Nazareth). The mother received no ultrasounds during her pregnancy, and only learned of the infant’s condition minutes before the birth. Despite the surprise, the new arrival has been welcomed into the de Nazare family with an outpouring of joy. Named Emanoel and Jesus, the children cannot be separated and will live their lives conjoined. It’s difficult yet to predict how long those lives will be—another pair of Brazilian twins fused in exactly the same way died earlier this year due to lack of oxygen to one of the heads—but thus far doctors say these children are healthy, managing to functionally share heart, lungs, and digestive tract. Whether one, both, or neither twin controls the body’s movements is a question for the future. And of course, beyond that, you have to wonder what happens when one twin hogs the Xbox 360 or one of them decides to go Vegan, but here’s hoping they actually get the chance to have those arguments. Because somewhere down the line we think maybe, just maybe, Emanoel and Jesus can teach the rest of us a little something about ourselves.