4 Recent News Stories That Could Be 'X-Files' Episodes

Yup, they just fucking fell over and died like that scene from the movie Surrogates, if Surrogates starred elk and people actually saw it. Wildlife officials have already ruled out gunshots, anthrax, and pesticide poisoning. Lightning is an outside possibility, but the radius o' death is too large -- Thor would've basically had to get drunk and fry the entire forest.

At this point, the likeliest culprits are either A) an insect-borne illness known as epizootic hemorrhagic disease or B) bear genies. Seriously, the neighborhood apex predators woke up that day to a goddamn free buffet as far as the eye can see.

KRQE
And so Bear Cinderella's Beary Godmother spontaneously murdered all the animals of the forest, and they all lived happily ever after. (Including the elk, who were much happier as bear shit.)

This eerie woodland dweller has apparently been around for a while, but it was only recently that an amateur photographer submitted the above picture to the Swiss news site Le Matin. The photographer allegedly got within a dozen meters of Le Loyon, who responded by briefly staring back, turning around, and trudging away silently.

This run-in echoed other folks' encounters with this eccentric, whose strolls have dissuaded some residents from walking in the woods. Police haven't intervened with this dead-eyed wraith, who so far has minded his own business like a total maniac. Curiously, nobody has considered the possibility that Le Loyon is in fact a masked vigilante who's chosen to patrol the most boring thoroughfare in all of Switzerland.

lematin.ch
"He's the antisocial weirdo we deserve, but not the one we need right now."

Yes, the aerial rats of the Russian capital have been afflicted with a mystery disease that causes them to become comatose, walk in circles, drop through windows, and pull a full-blown Linda Blair. Some residents have dubbed this a total bird apocalypse. (Such hyperbole must be taken seriously, as Russia is the land of shrugging at dashboard camera demolition derbies and meteor strikes.)

Al Jazeera
"YOUR MOTHER EATS CRUMBS IN HELL!"

Ornithologists have confirmed that these creatures are plagued with not one, but a bunch of debilitating infections, as if natural selection was running behind on its monthly quotas. And some of these infections -- such as Newcastle disease and ornithosis -- can also be transmitted to people, so hooray for that.

What the hell are we talking about? In Northampton, England, there's a guy going around dressed like this:

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It's too late to close your browser. He already knows where you live.

As reported by the town's local paper, "He doesn't juggle. He doesn't twist balloons into animal shapes. He just stares."

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Pro Tip: Filling balloons with the souls of your victims gets them to float longer than helium.

And here he is again, just standing around, being a fucking nightmare:

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Those children were real 10 minutes before this photo was taken.

This is his gift to the world -- showing up on random corners of a single town. And he's so elusive that he has only been photographed from a distance. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that he's downright horrifying.

And if you're wondering, no, they have no idea who the fuck he is -- just that he's now a part of life and there's nothing we can do about it. Sleep tight.