Eldritch Crank's List: weirdness

Three in Four Americans Believe in Paranormal

CHICAGO — The FBI said Wednesday it is reopening its investigation into the 1964 kidnapping of a newborn boy from a Chicago hospital, after recent DNA testing revealed that a boy found in New Jersey more than a year later and returned to the elated parents wasn’t actually their son.

Paul Fronczak, 49, is a married father of his own now and works as a college administrator and living in Henderson, Nev. He told the Chicago Sun-Times in June that he had long wondered why he didn’t resemble his parents, Chester and Dora Franczak, so they underwent DNA testing earlier this year to see if he was their biological son. He wasn’t.

A Virginia man claimed to be a Navy SEAL to talk his way out of a gun possession arrest on Thursday, and the New York Police Department committed him to a psych ward thinking his claims of elite military status were the rantings of a lunatic.

Navy Seal

Turns out the guy was in fact an elite Navy SEAL.

But as the New York Post put it, telling the NYPD "I'm in an elite military unit, you can't arrest me," doesn't help much when the city's draconian gun laws are at issue.

There are more than 700 curious tunnel networks in Bavaria, but their purpose remains a mystery. Were they built as graves for the souls of the dead, as ritual spaces or as hideaways from marauding bandits? Archeologists are now exploring the subterranean vaults to unravel their secrets.

In a nearly unbelievable chapter of Oregon history, a guru from India gathered 2,000 followers to live on a remote eastern Oregon ranch. The dream collapsed 25 years ago amid attempted murders, criminal charges and deportations.

Yvette Vickers, an early Playboy playmate whose credits as a B-movie actress included such cult films as “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” was found dead last week at her Benedict Canyon home. Her body appears to have gone undiscovered for months, police said.

old pulp-fiction covers

Father Euteneuer does not speak as a theorist. Since 2003 he's had extensive experience ministering to those possessed by demons. His introduction to the demonic world happened when a family asked him for help for one of their members, and he eventually asked for permission to perform the rite of exorcism. He has been doing them ever since.

more than 100 fads in ten categories

The Return of High Weirdness By Mail

20 years ago, Rev. Ivan Stang and others wrote the book on kooks, visionaries and rogue weirdos of every stripe. That book is out of print.

Recently, however, the great SubGenius, Rev. Modemac, mastered wikipedia technology to begin the new, ongoing, ever-expanding HIGH WEIRDNESS PROJECT -- an interactive encyclopedia of the Differently-Saned to which you can add your own favorites!

CLICK HERE TO INVESTIGATE THE NEW HIGH WEIRDNESS PROJECT.

Also, the noble Friar Synapse took upon himself the Herculean task of tracking down the various entities listed in the original book to see if any might still exist and even have websites.

Almost all did.

Next step: the rebuilding of the book, using these links plus new ones discovered by SubGenius researchers. Friar Synapse also corrected our old SubSITE kookweb listings -- see end of this long long page. We have our Slack cut out for us.

This was the "long leash". The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travellers" in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in Abstract Expressionism. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favourable to the new American painting; and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.

After conducting two reports, the prominent Catholic theologian Johann Auer said he believed Bitterlich's beliefs were a result of "paranoid schizophrenia".

The sect established itself in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Brazil and Portugal and today counts between 80 and 100 priests and around 400 nuns among its members.

"HARRY STEPHEN KEELER (1890-1967) is one of the strangest writers who ever lived. In his time, he was pegged as a mystery novelist who also wrote some science fiction. Today, if you've heard of him at all, it's as the Ed Wood of mystery novelists, a writer reputed to be so bad he's good. Actually, no genre, nor "camp," can much suggest what Keeler is all about. Take some typical Keeler situations:"

"Use Google talk by entering three or four words below. The system will search for this sentence at Google, find the next word and print that. Than it will remove the first word of the search string, add the found word and repeat. The result seems to be meaningfull sometimes. Other times it is giblish."

"Genome-sequencing technology is advancing at a rate comparable to computer processing power. "Six years ago if you wanted to sequence E. coli [a species of bacteria], which is about 4 million base-pairs in length, it would have taken one or maybe two million dollars, and it would have taken a year and 150 people," says Jarvie. "Nowadays, one person can do it in two days and it would cost a few hundred dollars." "

"The federal Bureau of Land Management says the number of wild horses and burros on public lands in the West stands at nearly 37,000, about half of them in Nevada. An additional 32,000 wild horses already live away from the range in federal-run corrals and pastures, and those are nearly full."

I say sell them to France.

"A German trucker suspected of driving under the influence of drugs crashed his vehicle near Borås in western Sweden on Tuesday. He subsequently admitted to masturbating at the time of the accident.\n\n
The trucker, apparently unable to reach a satisfactory climax, then proceeded to continue to pleasure himself while in the midst of a police interrogation, according to the local Borås Tidning newspaper."

Does the writer believe this? Is it an elaborate joke?

During the 17th century in England, someone urinated in a jar, added nail clippings, hair and pins, and buried it upside-down in Greenwich, where it was recently unearthed and identified by scientists as being the world's most complete known "witch bottle."