7 News Stories That Would Be Awesome 'X-Files' Episodes
As we've previously discussed, the news has a habit of obliviously reporting stories that are clearly about ghosts, monsters, or other supernatural entities preparing to unleash their vengeance upon the world of the living, but dashing them off as run-of-the-mill news items, rather than the harbingers of doom that they obviously are. With Halloween just around the corner, there's no better time to take a look at some recent news stories that seem like X-Files cases Mulder and Scully never got a chance to investigate before that terrible second movie chased them out of paranormal detective work forever.
Researchers Find a Shipwreck Where the Survivors Turned Cannibal
Back in 1845, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror went on an expedition into the arctic to collect data, and both ships became trapped in the ice and were never heard from again. This is a turn of events they perhaps should have seen coming after naming one of their goddamned boats the HMS goddamned Terror.
The actual novel about the Terror somehow failed to use this cover.
Partial remains of the expedition's 128 crew members were later discovered buried in graves across several different islands, with scattered bones found with telltale cut marks indicating the crew had resorted to cannibalism. All other evidence, including the boats themselves, had apparently been swallowed by an ice-crowned chrono-demon.
That is, until the other week, when Canadian divers managed to find the Erebus 170 years after its doomed mission.
"When we breached the hull, it released a century and a half of entombed screams."
The expedition's inventory included old-timey cameras, and historians are optimistic that some photographic plates could have been preserved well enough to be developed. We think we speak for everyone when we say that there is no way developing 170-year-old tin-print photographs taken by a crew of stranded cannibals in between frantic sessions of clawing feebly at the frozen wooden crypt around them could ever possibly go wrong.
A Lake of Death Appears in the Tunisian Desert
If Star Wars has taught us anything, it's that luring people into a gaping arid death hole requires either a gangster who enjoys feeding his enemies to monsters or some kind of mass-marketable gimmick that distracts from its resemblance to the Devil's anus.
Nailed it.
For example, why not disguise your murder pit beneath a delightfully refreshing oasis in the middle of a blasted desert?
"And to think just yesterday all of this was the unmarked grave of a coven of witches!"
The earthly paradise before you is the "Lac de Gafsa" -- a welcoming expanse of cool water in Tunisia that has become a haven for locals who regularly deal with daytime temperatures well over 100 degrees. The bizarre thing is, the lake has existed for only a few weeks, its gallons of turquoise blue water having seemingly sprung up overnight. Oh, also, it might kill you in several different and equally horrifying ways, which is a detail that hasn't stopped dozens of people from swimming in it.
No one knows where the hell the lake came from. Theories about its origin range from "magic" to "rainwater" to "underwater ruptures resulting in phosphate contamination and radioactive carcinogenic chemicals with unseen currents that could suck swimmers down into a watery grave." We'll let you decide which it is, but our money is on either "cursed genie tears" or "alien-constructed human trap."
A Naked Devil Statue Mysteriously Appears, Hypnotizes Town
Residents of East Vancouver, B.C., awoke one morning to find a statue of a bored-looking Satan wearing a dancer's belt and stroking the world's biggest erection on a pedestal in a nearby park. We assume behavior like this is what led to his expulsion from heaven.
"Oh hey. Didn't see you there."
The artist responsible for the 9-foot sculpture of the Prince of Darkness rocking out with his pitchfork out remains a mystery. Predictably, the Boner Devil was taken down by the city mere hours after its discovery, the process of which was probably just as much a part of the original prank as the statue itself.
"Boy, I sure am glad I went back and got that GED. Otherwise the entire world might never have seen me
almost squeeze the devil's crimson dick pouch."
However, due to what we can only believe is some kind of black magic penis spell woven into the statue's material, locals have created a 1,500-signature petition demanding that Beelzeboner be put back. The entire town is seemingly under the hypnotic control of this dark totem, and it's going to take a plucky young investigator on vacation with his parents to get to the bottom of it.
A Deadly Car Crash Possesses Google
On the morning of Aug. 26, a portion of Internet users searching Google Images for "cat pants" or "robot sex fiesta" were instead bombarded with eyefuls of mechanized death when a strange glitch caused every search to result in a mysterious photograph of a car accident ...
...and nothing else. Just pages of the same wreck, over and over again, burning into your monitor like the world's most haunted desktop background. So what happened? According to Google, an unspecified bug was causing random searches to come up with a single never-ending photograph of a 2012 car crash that killed three people. It is unclear which one of the deceased victims has risen from beyond the grave to digitally reveal their true killer -- but until this all blows over we might want to consider switching to Bing.
This ... this is actually worse.
A 3,000-Year-Old Sarcophagus Is Found in Someone's Wall
Going through dead relatives' stuff is the ultimate gamble. On one hand you might find some hilarious vintage porn, but you run an equal risk of discovering a shoe box labeled "Germany, 1943" that no one was ever meant to open.
Of course, there's always door No. 3 -- an ancient sarcophagus.
"Sorry. Better luck on the Showcase Showdown."
What you're seeing is the lid to a mummy box older than the freaking Bible. It just sold for 12,000 pounds at auction after being found hidden inside the walls of a renovated country home in Essex, England, that once belonged to a world-traveling journalist, since deceased. It is unclear whether his death was related to the secret mummy coffin, but it is our responsibility to assume that it was.
How and why a dusty old pharaoh bone shuttle wound up inside the walls of a British mansion can't be explained, not even by the dead globetrotter's relatives. However, we have no doubt some kind of ancient sun-blackening curse was put upon all of mankind after the previous owner crudely attempted to repaint the coffin's face.
"Eh, I did better on this than on the Jesus painting."
So Many Human Skulls Get Donated to Goodwill
Recently, Goodwill has received numerous anonymous donations of human skulls, because apparently there exists a demographic of person who just has way more skulls lying around the house than they know what to do with.
"The sales receipt was signed, 'G. Danzig.'"
Back in August, someone in Austin, Texas, dropped a skull into a Goodwill donation bin, presumably patting themselves on the back for heroically providing some underprivileged goth kid with a new candle holder. The police understandably began an investigation into the kind deed, because skulls aren't baseball cards or old Huey Lewis tapes. Unless it's discarded medical school property, dropping human remains into a public bin is less "making a donation" than it is "disposing of evidence."
Two more skulls were found the month before at a Goodwill in Seattle, along with the ancient bones of a Native American child for some reason. This is another way of saying that there is now a Goodwill in Seattle that is super fucking haunted.
The International Space Station Is Possessed
Apparently, the J-SSOD, a satellite deployer cannon in charge of spitting out new CubeSats (tiny satellites) on the International Space Station, has been getting a bit overzealous about its job, and has begun shooting those little bastards out into the abyss without any human instruction whatsoever. In the ISS's defense, shooting a giant space cannon is probably awesome, and if we had one, we would keep firing that thing until we were out of satellites.
It's like if Michael Bay programed HAL.
According to NASA, "No crew members or ground controllers saw the deployment," nor did any camera manage to capture footage of the ISS performing an operation entirely by itself. It's almost as if it waited until the exact moment it knew nobody would be watching because it didn't want anyone to see what it was up to.
To be sure, it isn't uncommon to encounter glitches from time to time, especially with new equipment, but it is important to note that this is actually the second time this has happened -- the station "accidentally" released two other satellites the month before. After two failed attempts to troubleshoot the situation, the flight crew is now considering bringing in the cannon to assess the problem, which should probably be done sooner rather than later. We can't say for certain what the ISS is up to, but blanketing the upper atmosphere in tiny surveillance drones is definitely Phase 1 of some kind of plan.
Dave is on the Twitter if you feel like following him. No biggie.
For more real-life horror stories, check out 5 News Stories That Are the First Minutes of a Horror Film and 3 Dark Facts Cruise Lines Don't Want You to Know.
