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Mysterious Italian Fires Were Officially Blamed On Aliens
Back in 2004, there were some serious Scooby-Doo hijinks afoot in Italy. Fridges, TVs, and other appliances were catching fire in a small town. That's not typical outside of the odd Stephen King story, so people rightly wanted to know what was up. Experts came in from all over to investigate, because that's what you do when shit randomly lights on fire. What you don't do is blame it on aliens, but we'll get to that.
The first theory was that it was mass arson, but that was quickly ruled out. The next theory, which obviously jumped past Logical Theories 2 through 1,000, was that it was supernatural in origin. Faulty electronics? Power surges? Fuck no, it's the Devil. This was backed up by the Vatican when their chief exorcist said he'd seen things like this happen before. Did you know the Vatican had a chief exorcist? And that he assumes faulty appliances are the devil's handiwork? If you feel your date is losing interest, that's a pretty fun fact to throw out.
Instead of simply accepting that Satan was in your shower radio, the Italian government commissioned a full investigation of the phenomenon. It took two years to conduct, cost $1.2 million, and involved a team of scientists which included someone from NASA. And with all this, they determined that the fires were "caused by a high power electromagnetic emissions which were not man-made and reached a power of between 12 and 15 gigawatts," and thus blamed it on aliens. Over a million dollars and two years of research led to aliens. So this actually was a Stephen King novel.
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