He claimed to have wandered the woods for five years with his father, living off the land, after his mother, Doreen, had died in a car accident. He said his father had just died, and had told the boy to turn himself in to authorities if that should happen. The boy did as he was told: He put his father in the ground, turned toward Berlin and walked two weeks until he got there.

The boy, who called himself Ray, couldn't remember anything that had happened earlier than five years ago, and spoke terrible German but impeccable English. Imaginations ran wild, with mental images of an English family getting into a car accident in Germany and the father and son bolting into the wilderness to spend the rest of their lives in the woods. Were they secretly spies, like in that movie Hannah? What had Ray's father been hiding him from for five years? Will he lead us against the robots when they eventually rise? Or is this more of a parenting by Jungle Book type of deal?

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"I tried living with the wolves, but the ass-sniffing just got to be too much."

That's what was so great about the story. There was just enough to get you intrigued, but so many gaps in the information that you could fill in your own details. But this is the sort of story you see all the time on News of the Weird that turns out to have a simple explanation -- Ray would end up being a meth head from Florida visiting his sister or something.

And while police have since suggested that Ray's story doesn't quite add up, the holes they've shot in it only deepen the mystery. For instance, linguistics experts determined that English was probably his second language -- not because he had a thick Serbian accent or anything, but because he spoke it too perfectly. Nobody who was from England would speak it without any trace of a regional accent. Then there was his adamant refusal to let them publish his photograph. Authorities pointed out that this would be the best way to find any relatives who might be looking for him. No dice. Is Ray secretly a vampire? Is there someone out there looking for him? If so, why go to the authorities with an elaborate back story? Does the person who's looking for you only check pictures in the newspaper?

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Artist's approximation of "Ray."

Their forensics team also concluded from looking at the tent he carried with him and the clothes he had on his back that Ray hadn't lived in the woods very long, and police were unable to find records of any car crashes that killed a woman named Doreen.

Some speculate that Ray was a really desperate immigrant hoping to get in on some of the EU's sweet, sweet social services. But how is his English so impeccable if he's just some kid looking for a free handout? Why such a convoluted and high-publicity plot with unnecessary dramatic flourishes like his mother's car accident? Why say his amnesia started five years ago when he could have said he just got amnesia and saved himself from having to make up five extra years of story?

Calling it now: He's a Hitler clone.

Perhaps the most curious detail is how the story ends. Despite the fact that they're paying 7,000 euros a month to keep the kid in custody, authorities in Berlin have told the media, "We have nothing more to say on this subject ... There will be no more information forthcoming on this case." The tone suggests that the authorities are also frustrated by the confusing movie premise nobody can quite untangle, or maybe it's just another sign that there's some strange coverup going on, and that's just how severe German bureaucrats say, "Move along, people. Nothing to see here."

Things go from creepy to "OK, David Lynch is officially directing the news" when you learn that the victims may have been targeted by species: All 34 trees were specifically Washingtonia robusta or Mexican fan palms. Like many victims in these stories, they were struck with tragedy just as they had overcome great odds -- they were among the only tree species to survive a recent rash of hurricanes. They had probably just gotten back on their feet and were all set to start tree families and go to tree college when it was all torn away from them. The police began looking into the possibility that hurricanes Ike and Rita had hired a hit man to finish the job they started, but soon realized that was ridiculous, and suggested that all this anthropomorphizing was maybe getting a bit out of hand.

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I heard one of them had a full scholarship from Stanford to start at mascot.

But those 34 trees would be remembered, and life would go on for the other Mexican fan palms. And as one year, then two passed, it seemed like tragedy was far behind them. And then somebody started torching trees again.

They still don't know who it is.

In 2004, Paris police officers went on a training exercise in the catacombs beneath their city's streets -- not the most common exercise in most cities, but routine enough in Paris -- and stumbled upon a mystery. They found a tarp that said, "Building site -- no access" and pushed it aside, finding a tunnel with a desk and a closed-circuit camera pointed at them, as guard dogs started barking ferociously.

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Why do dogs always try to scare you away with the loud barking? Why not a creepy stare?

The dogs turned out to be a tape recording, designed to scare people away from an elaborate and fully functional underground movie theater, with a full-sized movie screen, chairs and terraces carved out of the rock and a quality film collection of classics and recent thrillers.

They also found swastikas, Celtic crosses and Stars of David painted on the ceiling, and this whole bizarre mix understandably led them to call in the bomb squad and evacuate the area when they found a fat metal object covered with wires, which of course turned out to be a couscous maker.

Magimix
Terrifying.

Whoever was behind this had done a very sophisticated job of tapping into the city's electricity system so that the police could not make heads or tails of it and had to bring in experts from the utility company to trace it. By the time they returned with the experts, the wiring had been disconnected and everything was gone, except a note saying "Ne cherchez pas," or "Do not search."

It would have remained a mystery if the group involved hadn't spoken up, which they presumably did because they realized that the truth was much stranger than any of the explanations a non-crazy person could have constructed for himself. They call themselves UX, and they not only build secret cinemas for film festivals in the least convenient places possible, but also liked to secretly restore historical landmarks behind the authorities' backs.

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Speaking of which, maybe someone should get around to this sometime.

For instance, the UX decided the historic clock at the heavily guarded Paris Pantheon had been broken for too long, and so they undertook a ridiculously complex Ocean's Eleven style scheme to steal it ... wait, sorry, that was logic taking over. They designed an elaborate scheme to repair the clock over the course of a year, which involved constantly breaking into the museum undetected and setting up an entire secret workshop and lounge with chairs, worktables, an electrical system secretly wired to the city grid and a computer with an Internet connection.

Via UX
Most people don't have living rooms this nice.

Organizations from Boy Scout troops to historical societies are always putting in volunteer time to restore cultural stuff, but for some reason, UX (specifically, UX's restoration branch, Untergunther) has no interest in it unless it involves sneaking around.

And they might have a point, because once UX proudly let the authorities know the clock was fixed, officials fired the Pantheon's administrator for not catching them and broke the clock again, taking away a vital component and locking it up in the office so no one could ever fix the clock again.

Via UX
One of these parts ... somewhere in there.

One big question is why a sophisticated band with enough expertise to rob a bank or steal state secrets has decided to focus their efforts on doing clock restorations and film festivals behind people's backs, but maybe the bigger question is whether someone could really be so cartoonishly villainous as to rebreak a beautifully restored historical landmark out of spite.

At first it appeared to be an open and shut case of identity theft, and then the bottom dropped out and the world began spinning around anyone who was following it. A lot of people like to pretend to be someone else -- usually someone rich, or influential, or prestigious, like a doctor, or professor, or porn star. Not a lot of elderly women aspire to reinvent themselves in the form of an almost identical elderly woman, which is why the Madeleine Mores story was so odd.

The case centered around two 83-year-old Frenchwomen claiming to be the same person, a certain Madeleine Mores, born in 1924 to Albert and Anna Mores in Tellancourt, and given away at age 7. From that point, both claimed to have been given to foster families and lived hardscrabble, uninteresting lives (one worked in a jam factory and one worked in a bolt factory) up until age 83.

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Left: The glamour of a jam factory. Right: The glamour of a bolt factory.

Madeleine 1 ended up moving to Algeria with her husband for 40 years, and returned to France in 2004, after he died. She went to the pension office to fill out her forms and start collecting her pension, only to be told she'd already been collecting it for 20 years. By the time she came face-to-face with Madeleine 2, who was collecting the pension, she was pretty pissed off.

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"It took 83 years of not dying to earn that money!"

And for good reason. DNA tests later showed that Madeleine 1 was the "real" Madeleine Mores. The most obvious explanation would be identity theft for the pension money. They even found a photo of the two women together, giving them a plausible time and place where Madeleine 2 could have swiped Madeleine 1's identity.

But the more the authorities looked into the seemingly straightforward case, the less it looked like identity theft. Why didn't Madeleine 2 flee when the real person showed up, or at least when it came time for the DNA test? Madeleine 2 showed every sign of really believing she was the real Madeleine Mores, and stood her ground just as stubbornly as Madeleine 1. And what about that sweet, sweet pension? First of all, Madeleine 2 had ample doc*mentation of her work history in her adult years, which proved that she would have been eligible for a similar pension on her own merits, without having to steal someone else's.

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"I'm not leaving until I get my jam/bolt money!"

Perhaps strangest of all is the photo of the two women together in their 40s, when Madeleine 2 was supposed to be stealing Madeleine 1's identity. Neither woman remembers the photo being taken, and both swear they had never met the other woman.

The authorities are now digging up orphanage records to see if there was some kind of administrative mix-up, on the off chance that they're able to find accurate paperwork from pre-WWII. Even if it does turn out that the two ladies were given one identity as children, they'll still have to explain how those same two women ended up in the same photograph and managed to completely forget about that time they met someone with the same first and last names and identical background. But seriously, good luck with that, guys!

It'd be easier to just blame the Nazis and write two checks.

He isn't mentally disabled, although he sometimes pretends to be to get people's guards down. But that's just one of the tools in his bizarrely effective tool kit. He consistently manages to con his way into locker rooms and other restricted areas, and has actually talked a number of players -- these are high school jocks here -- into voluntarily hoisting his 240-pound frame onto their backs and letting him ride them around like donkeys.

The athletic director of a league he's hit warns that, "He's very smart. He knows how to play the system. He just knows what to say and how to say it." That quote implies that there's a system in place to prevent unearned piggyback rides at high school athletic events, which there isn't, because, and we can't stress this enough, people don't give each other piggyback rides after high school athletic events. It's just not a thing that happens. And yet, where we see a bunch of sweaty kids lining up to shake hands or getting post-game pep talks from their coaches, he sees a bunch of people who should be carrying him around like a baby chimp.

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"Yeah, I was just walking back to the locker room at halftime, when ..."

He's passed himself off as a visiting team manager, a student interviewing athletes for a term paper and countless other fake identities that get him into the locker room, but don't make it any less strange that he's asking to ride people. And that's what's so strange about Shayegan, and why all the stories about him are so goddamn surreal. It's like he's tapped into a weird alternate version of logic where the universal rules of cause and effect have crossed wires, and being a visiting team manager at a high school basketball game causes the players on the home team to let you be physically intimate with them. There's no way for a journalist to write a news story about his universe without being completely sucked into a world where all of this makes sense.

The Standard-Examiner
It's safe to assume he is not making this face when he manages to convince people.

Since he's a giant man, and occasionally just goes ahead and jumps right onto the athletes' backs, he's been banned from attending sporting events in five states and even arrested on assault charges, although he always manages to make bail. He's allegedly been doing this since he was in high school himself, so it looks like he's pretty set on making newspapers write baffling piggyback stories until the laws of reason flip upside down and devour themselves.

Not only were the spiders gross, but they were also blocking the fuel lines with their webs, potentially causing fuel leaks or even engine fires.

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"I can't take that, Mr. Spider. Your web just isn't up to code and that's final."

Nobody's sure why they were choosing specifically the four-cylinder Mazda6 of those specific years, especially since the six-cylinder version offers considerably more power. An entomologist suggested that an infested factory somewhere up the production line was probably to blame. Of course, Mazda would have presumably looked into such a straightforward explanation, since it would be pretty easy to fix and far less of a PR nightmare than simply implying that, "Yeah, our $13,000 car has spiders." Which is basically what they're saying. According to Mazda spokesman Jeremy Barnes, "We really don't know how they're getting in. This is a really strange case, right up there with the more unusual ones, this one takes the cake." So either Mazda has a PR department that doesn't know what those letters stand for, or spiders just have idiosyncratic taste in cars. In contrast, the much more badass wolf spider drives an STI.

RoadAndTrack/Photoshop

Probably the biggest question was exactly whose blood it was. DNA tests so far only tell us that it belonged to a human male and the DNA doesn't match any criminals in the database. The investigative team, known as Strike Force Laundry for some reason, also thinks it was a child because, you know, it's a pretty tiny house.

Original picture from The Daily Telegraph
Only the vast majority of adults could fit in a building that size.

Since losing 1.5 liters of blood would put an adult male in shock, prospects looked even more horrifying if it was a child's blood.

That said, children don't usually get murdered without anyone noticing. If this was a murder, the victim has been gone since about January 13, and to this point, not one person has come forward and said, "You know, come to think of it, I haven't seen Tommy for a while."

"Jim's been wearing the same bag and overalls for months now. Should we call CPS?"

Considering how the public spazzes out every time the phrase "child murder" hits the news, it's puzzling why they would go straight to tossing that phrase around with no evidence other than the playhouse being small. But who are we to question Strike Force Laundry?

Orfield Laboratories built this room for some very practical reasons, like doing acoustical product testing on engines and hearing aids, but nobody cares about that. The important thing is how long a person can stay in there, like on a dare or something, and nobody's been able to last more than 45 minutes.

StarTribune.com
Expected it to have more tentacles, didn't you?

Some people freak out, some people even hallucinate. According to lab founder Steven Orfield, even walking becomes impossible after a while, and you have to sit down, because you rely on echoes and sounds to orient you when you walk.

In describing the phenomenon, people who have been in the room talk about hearing the sounds of their own heart, lungs, digestion and even blood running through their blood vessels. While that all does sound pretty freaky, it doesn't seem like it would be hallucination-inducing or run-out-of-the-room freaky.

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"OH GOD I CAN HEAR MY OWN LUNGS!"

What is it about losing echoes that weirds humans out so much? Obviously, both people born deaf and recently deafened people don't freak out and run into walls, so it's not total silence itself that does the trick. It's when you take away just the echoes and surrounding sounds and leave a person alone with nothing but their own sound. Maybe it's like putting your subconscious into solitary. Or hey, maybe there are evil spirits in the room attacking people. Who knows.

Thieves in Kansas City stole 30 of these heavy, monetarily worthless lumps of concrete last year. To be specific, they weigh 250 pounds each, and are worth $25 apiece.

KMBC TV
They weren't even painted.

Well, parking stops can be annoying, you might think. Maybe some people were pissed at not being able to roll their car forward out of parking spaces and finally snapped and decided they all needed to be destroyed. Well, these thieves weren't out to vandalize or destroy these things -- they were carefully loading them into a pickup truck, which we know because they were caught on surveillance video.

KMBC TV
They were serious about this.

The trio -- two men and a woman -- went about their task very deliberately, stacking the stops neatly, and didn't seem to be pulling some weird alcohol or drug-fueled stunt on a whim. Even weirder, the business the parking lot belonged to was a cabinet design company with a showroom full of expensive cabinets and fixtures the thieves could easily have gotten a lot of money for.

Maybe they just needed the exercise.

Obviously, some artist created this character and makes art based on it, and dropping giant Lego men in the surf of his home country and the country he's exhibiting in makes sense as a publicity stunt.

But then in 2011, three years after the Lego man washed ashore in England, a new one washed ashore on Siesta Key Beach in Florida, which represents an entirely new level of logistical problem. If this is the same guy, how did he get "Ego Leonard" across the Atlantic? It's unlikely that he just pushed it into the ocean from Holland and it drifted across and found a shore somehow, so he would have had to ship it across, which seems like a pretty monumental task that's hard to do unnoticed.

Jeff Hindman, HeraldTribune.com
It's a little big for carry-on.

And for what? Washing it ashore in or near Europe makes sense in order to boost publicity for his art, but nobody in Sarasota County, Florida, cares about some wacky Dutch artist. It seems like a lot of work for a pretty small payoff.

However, one really weird thing noted by a blogger was that the three locations were all points on the same diagonal line. If this Ego Leonard person is really nutty enough to be following a pattern like that, apparently we can expect the next Lego man to wash ashore on Puerto Vallarta in 2013.

Map by Apt46.net
It is kind of eerie.

Which means it'll be passing through the old Mayan territory of central Mexico during the predicted Mayan apocalypse of 2012. Coincidence? Probably.

For more from Christina, check out 6 Famous 'Frivolous Lawsuit' Stories That Are Total B.S. and 7 B.S. Sports Stories for When The Media Has Nothing to Say.