Some great historical images:

http://yeinjee.com/discovery/strange-russian-tractor/

BEEBE, Ark. – Wildlife officials are trying to determine what caused more than 1,000 blackbirds to die and fall from the sky over an Arkansas town.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission said Saturday that it began receiving reports about the dead birds about 11:30 p.m. the previous night. The birds fell over a 1-mile area of Beebe, and an aerial survey indicated that no other dead birds were found outside of that area.

Commission ornithologist Karen Rowe said the birds showed physical trauma, and she speculated that “the flock could have been hit by lightning or high-altitude hail.”  ~news.yahoo.com

This is reminiscent of reports about fish and animals falling from the sky and other seemingly impossible and unlikely happenings. In August of 2000 the BBC reported that it rained fish over a town in Norfolk saying that, ”Reports of falling fish, frogs, tomatoes and even coal date back to the dawning of the millennium.”

A quick search on google turns up dozens of news stories about the phenomenon of dead birds falling from the sky all over the world.

• It’s raining birds on Western Australia
• ‘Raining Dead Birds,’ Resident Says (Phoenix, AZ)
• NJ Residents: ‘It Was Raining’ Dead Birds
• Dead birds rain down on towns half a world apart

Obviously this seems like it’s not an isolated incident:

[January 2007] Three weeks ago thousands of crows, pigeons, wattles and honeyeaters fell out of the sky in Esperance, Western Australia.

Then last week dozens of grackles, sparrows and pigeons dropped dead on two streets in Austin, Texas.

As birds continue to die in Esperance and the town’s dawn chorus remains eerily silent, vets in both countries have been unable to establish a cause of death – despite carrying out a large number of autopsies on the birds.

Wildlife officials from Western Australia’s Department of Environment and Conservation said they were baffled by the “catastrophic event” but emphasised the deaths had nothing to do with a severe storm which recently struck the area, as the birds had started dying before then. District nature conservation coordinator Mike Fitzgerald said: “It’s very substantial. ~dailymail.co.uk Jan 2007

Is there an underlying order in the universe? Bedford’s law says yes.

Benford’s law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 about 30% of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than 5% of the time. This distribution of first digits is the same as the widths of gridlines on the logarithmic scale.

This counter-intuitive result has been found to apply to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants, and processes described by power laws (which are very common in nature). It tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude.

The graph to the right shows Benford’s law for base 10. There is a generalization of the law to numbers expressed in other bases (for example, base 16), and also a generalization to second digits and later digits.

It is named after physicist Frank Benford, who stated it in 1938, although it had been previously stated by Simon Newcomb in 1881. ~http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford’s_law

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edBECTO677c&feature=related

Thuban (α Dra, α Draconis, Alpha Draconis) is a star (or star system) in the constellation of Draco. A relatively inconspicuous star in the night sky of the Northern Hemisphere, it is historically significant as having been the north pole star in ancient times. ~http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Draconis

When I was a kid I had recurring dreams about an alligator man. This was before the 1980′s TV series V mind you. But it was a vivid and scary dream for me. The alligator man had the body of an alligator with human arms and half human legs with a fully human head of a nerdy guy with glasses. He wasn’t friendly however.

I’d usually see him in the dream before he saw me, but as I looked at him he would suddenly turn and look right into my eyes and begin to chase me. I always ran. Sometimes I was able to fly very slowly by flapping my arms. It was a tortuous half-escape that always ended with me waking up just before getting caught.

Alien spacecraft on the moon.

New Rocket Engine Could Reach Mars in 40 Days

Future Mars outposts or colonies may seem more distant than ever with NASA’s exploration plans in flux, but the rocket technology that could someday propel a human mission to the red planet in as little as 40 days may already exist.

A company founded by former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz has been developing a new rocket engine that draws upon electric power and magnetic fields to channel superheated plasma out the back. That stream of plasma generates steady, efficient thrust that uses low amounts of propellant and builds up speed over time.  ~space.com