The Spider-man is always hungry

The video for "Lullabye" by The Cure bears notable resemblance to common alien abduction scenarios. This brings up all sorts of questions. Just what do we know about Spider-man? Is he extraterrestrial in origin? Does he mean us harm?

PEI UFO

CBC News/Canada - The Ufology Research Centre in Winnipeg has been unable to identify this smoky spiral seen over Prince Edward Island on Boxing Day. (The story includes video.)

Other Headlines:

Gold Coast News/Australia - Experts baffled by orange UFO (No pictures. Damn.)

American Chronicle/America - Did you know that some people believe that the United Nations had a secret meeting regarding UFOs in February of this year?

Jim Sparks: Alleged abductee

Jim Sparks has a very detailed story of being abducted by aliens frequently throughout this adult life. I was listening to Mysterious Universe while cleaning my bathroom a couple of months ago, when I heard him relate some of his experiences and promote his book.

Sparks was also on Coast to Coast AM in 2006, and the C2C website has illustrations of his experience, such as the image above, wherein the greys attempt to extract semen from the prone abductee.

Will we find ETs within the lifetime of our civilization?

From the New York Times, an article about the progress that has been made - and hasn't been made - toward refining the variables in the Drake Equation. The Drake Equation was created in 1961 in an attempt to get some idea of what chance we have of contacting intelligent life from other worlds.

This articles links to an interactive Drake eqution at MSNBC's website. They don't actually write the Drake Equation out for you after you plug in the numbers, but I suppose it's all just multiplying fractions.

Venusian spacecraft hoax, 1952

The Museum of Hoaxes has a fun slideshow that takes readers through the history of photographic hoaxes. Above is an image of a Venusian spacecraft, which George Adamski purported to have taken in 1952, having made contact travellers from our sister planet:

Adamski worked as a soft-drinks salesman, and skeptics have noted a suggestive
similarity between the scoutcraft and the top of a particular brand of soft-drinks cooler.

Also featured in the slideshow: Ghosts, fairies, giant produce, and baby Hitler.

UFO over Portsmouth

Weblog Cosmic Paradigm notes this UFO spotted over Portsmouth in Britain. Interestingly, the Ministry of Defense quote in this article is the same as in The Sun, pertaining to a different set of UFO snapshots from London:

"The MoD examines reports solely to establish whether UK airspace may have been compromised by hostile or unauthorised military activity.

"Unless there is evidence of a potential threat, there is no attempt to identify the nature of each sighting reported."

I would venture to guess there is a document somewhere in the Ministry of Defense where you can cut and paste this quote to respond to journalists' emails.

Thanks to Mysterious Universe, both for calling attention to these sightings on their website and for consistently bringing the weird in their weekly podcast.