When I lived in Austin in the late '70s, a WWII bomber with no markings landed on the main runway of the municipal airport and skidded off into the grass. Several (~4) guys with briefcases clambered out of it, ran to and scaled the airport fence, flagged a taxi and disappeared. I never heard anymore about the incident.
How about you? Any stories where you knew something odd was up, but you never heard the rest of the story?
Post it; perhaps another poster might know the last chapter.
sigh i remember that night well - i swore never to fly on a discount airline again after that. Thank God that taxi was there or i’d have missed my meeting…
One afternoon a few months ago, Maple Avenue, a main thoroughfare, was blocked off with emergency vehicles, forcing traffic to detour onto side streets. I never learned what it was all about; neither the Washington Post nor the Fairfax Journal bothered to print a damned word.
Not far from where I used to work, a car drove slowly into the middle of a football field. The driver sat there for a minute and then the car exploded Sopranos style – FOOM! – driver still inside. Just like in the movies.
Not a word from the media.
Not quite with the OP – I did eventually hear an explanation:
I found out from a cop’s relative that it had been a bizarre suicide (local media self-censor’s suicide stories, so they did give it any coverage).
Even so, there were several witnesses – it looked like a mafia hit and scared the hell out of everyone for several blocks – in this case, for peace of mind, I think it would have been preferable for the news to say something.
The only suicides we usually hear about are the folks who throw themselves under Metro trains, because the station has to be closed for several hours while the cops do their work.
Teenage suicides were given big play in the papers twenty years ago, but are never mentioned now.
On a slightly less dramatic level…
We have a high percentage of elderly folks living in our blue-collar working-class neighborhood, and just about every time we hear fire engines come screaming through our neighborhood, we know we’re probably gonna see them park outside an Elderly Person’s house, the firemen will go inside, the firemen will come back out after a few minutes, and they will all drive away.
It’s quite fascinating, actually, to speculate on what it was This Time.
And we get to where we kind of tune it out, so when we hear the sirens at 2 a.m. and we roll over and go back to sleep–“aw, it’s just another grease fire at The Little Green House With The Huge Bushes In Front”–we’re furious the next morning when we find out that someone’s garage really did burn down, and we missed it.
I have no mysterious mystery to add but I just had to chime in and say the first two posts are the funniest things I’ve read all day.
Last year I was going shopping with my Dad. We get to a point about 3 miles from the house, and traffic is stopped dead. It’s raining, and there wasn’t any constuction, so we wondered why. Moreover, we were curious why people from the fire department seemed to be directing traffic. Eventually one of the firemen walks over to the car, and apologizes for the delay. Traffic is stopped because people are trying to catch escaped sheep. Why is this weird? No one in our town owns any sheep (though there is a goat milk farm and someone who sells mini-donkeys, but neither place is within miles of there anyway) so where the hell did they come from? There wasn’t a farm truck as we finally drove by, which was the only explaination we could come up with, so we were stumped. No news mention.
Mine is a historical one – when the US Navy F-14s shot down the two Libyan Mig21s (23s?, whatever) in the “Line of Death” confrontation.
It had been my understanding that the US military policy is not to fire unless fired upon. I saw the press conference, I heard he spokesman talk about the Migs “going for a firing position” or words to that effect. I heard that they activated their their fire control radar, attempting to “lockon” to the F-14s. I heard it said the F-14s were acting in self-defense. But I never heard it said that the Libyan jets opened fire.
And to the eternal shame of the news media, not one of the reporters asked for the specifics of the Rules of Engagement under which the US pilots were operating.
I’d also read that it was a fairly common cold war phenomenom that, when Eastern and Western fighter pilots met in the air, it was fairly common to try and get “position” on one another, and a radar lockon was a nonlethal way of saying “Gotcha”.
I assume if the Libyans actually fired, the US would have screamed it to the heavens. So, was this really a disguised execution to deliver a political message to Colonel Qadaffi?
This has been floating aroung in my head for 15 years or so, and I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it til this thread brought it tp the surface,
One day when I was in college (1985 or so) I was home visiting the family, and I found a box in the living room. A small (maybe 2 inches square by a half an inch deep), black, plastic box. It was on the TV, I think… or maybe a shelf… It had the COOLEST hologram on the cover that I have ever seen (and still is, to this date! A pattern that looks like rows of red pearls lined up against a yellow background. When you move the box, the pearls move back and forth a LONG ways… when you tilt it, the pearls move so far that an entire new field of pearls comes into view!.). I have never seen anything like it!
I picked it up, and said, “Wow! Cool!” and opened it… nothing inside.
I asked my sister where it had come from… she had never seen it before! I asked my father, mother, brother, and other sister… no one had ever seen it before and knew nothing whatsoever about this little box.
Over the course of several months I approached every family friend or acquaintance that might have been in the house at some point, and no one knew anything about it!
I kept it… I’m looking at it right now. It remains the single coolest hologram I have ever seen (although it has since picked up a few scratches on the top from my travels…).
I have wondered ever since I found it: where the heck did this come from? And how did it get into our house?
I have only one clue: on the bottom of the box it says, “Made in England”.
My current favorite theory: some time in the future, I will polish the scratches out, and time-travel back to the past, where I will leave this box in the living-room so that I can find it later (in the past that is… my past self will/has founding it… err… yeah!).
Several years ago on a Sunday night I looked out the upstairs back window of our house and it looked like our garage was on fire. I called 911 and then ran to check it out. It turned out that someone had parked a car between our garage and the alley and it was on fire. It didn’t look like anyone inside, so I got out my hose and started spraying water all over the car, my garage, and our van (which was parked next to the garage. A neighbor from across the alley brought his hose over too. Then the fire department showed up and took over. Eventually they put the fire out, then they just left without even talking to me. Tuesday the burnt-out wreck was still sitting there, so I called the police and they said they’d see that it was removed. Nobody ever asked me any questions, and I never did find out if there had been any investigation or anything.
Interestingly enough, a few weeks about 1:30am I was wakened by a loud boom, and looked out the window to see a car parked by the corner was on fire. In this case the wreck was gone the next day (I presume because it was on the street instead of off the alley). Never heard anything more about that, either.
Tale One
My freshman year in college, end of fall term, I had to stay later than most because I had a Tuesday morning final exam (the last round of finals, IIRC). Probably 85-90% of the student body had left campus.
I don’t remember if I had already turned off the TV and just hadn’t fallen asleep yet, or if the events prompted me to turn off the TV, but I do remember the gunshots. Loud, clear, and unmistakable in the late December night. POW … POW … … … POW.
By this point, I know for sure the TV was off, and my heart was pounding. I heard footsteps running, the door to my dormitory building swing open, and then silence disturbed only by my breathing.
I didn’t sleep much that night, and I never heard what happened.
Tale Two
Same me, same college, different dormitory.
Coming back to school from some off-campus activity or other, I was on the loop that surrounds the men’s dorms and came around the corner to see an ambulance backed up to one of the ground-floor windows of an upperclassmen’s dorm, a frat hall in fact. Backed all the way up to the wall, presumably so that someone could be transferred from inside the room through the window directly into the ambulance.
Alcohol poisoning? Certainly possible, given the location. But why the cloak-and-dagger of the transfer? There’s nothing (to my knowledge) all that visually distinctive about alcohol poisoning. My imagination became filled with visions of a lifeless body wrapped tightly in sheets, which were slowly soaking with blood from various wounds.
I’ll never know. There was no information about it, no acknowledgement that it ever happened at all, to my knowledge.
Go here—
http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~wingman/
I dentify aircraft, please.
As for the reason, consider smuggling. Old bombers were in use for moving “grass” at least until the 70’s.
A couple of weeks ago, I had an appointment with a division of the NYC Health Department for a job interview (communications type stuff). Moments before it was to start, their phone rings… my would-be interviewer takes the call, says a few things like “You’ve gotta be f*ckin’ kidding me,” hangs up and dashes out to where I’m waiting.
He cancelled the interview because “there’s a public health emergency and we have to do a press release right now.”
A public health emergency?! What? No further explanation, nothing in the news over the next few days, no one I mentioned it too had any idea what it was except for some speculation about lysteria. But sheesh, as revved up as the guy was I was expecting a cloud of gas that was turning people inside out or something.
About 12 years ago, I was coming back frm Baltimore to DC on I-95 and there was somebody hanging in a noose from a tree. :eek: There were several cop cars there. Not a peep in any newspaper or on TV. I guess what folks were saying about local media not covering suicides is true; however, people who drove by that (me, my mom & my wife included) scene that day would have liked to have known if it was a suicide or a lynching (it appeared to be a black man on the rope)…
May have been a suicide - IIRC, colleges try to hush up suicides because it makes the college look bad.
Late '50s, maybe 1958, Eastern Oregon. Word gets passed around that “something fell” into the hills east of town. Some people decide to go search for it. But then a convoy of army vehicles show up. The little road leading to the area where it “fell” gets closed off. A couple hours later they all leave. No one is told what happened.
This was 30 SW of the Boardman area. Well outside the old bombing range.
Driving thru the area much later, I spot a hole in the ground that looks exactly like a nose cone would leave. Perfectly symmetrical. Childhood imagination runs wild.
About a year ago, I had just been woken up by the alarm. I usualy allow the radio to play for a few minutes before I get up. They were talking about traffic being backed up in Nashville because someone had jumped off one of the buildings downtown.
There was nothing about it on TV.
I assume the only reason they mentioned it on the radio, was because it affected the traffic.
Wow. I’d like to see a picture of that. That is a perfect submission for www.foundmagazine.com
I won’t argue with that. And FWIW, that possibility had occurred to me as an explanation for the first event as well. But my school was so small (student body 2200 or so) that I can’t imagine something as significant as a suicide would have gone completely without gossip.
Hell, you should have heard us all talk about Angel Myers.