Angel Hair in Florida Keys

All too often when something really weird and unexplainable happens, the lone witness is some guy with a drinking problem or a gambling debt or a police record, and the skeptics inevitably try to impugn his character. And if the witness has no skeletons in his past to mock, then they simply shrug and say, "Well, you don't know what you're talking about because you are not a scientist."

And so it was fortunate indeed that when a Fortean rain of weird gelatinously stringy "angel hair" substance fell from the sky on May 28, 1957, the main witness was... a scientist. Dr. P. Craig Phillips, who worked for the Miami Seaquarium (and eventually became Director of the National Aquarium), was on a boat around Biscayne Bay near the start of the Florida Keys when the strange skyfall occurred. He and his team immediately began saving as much of the stuff as possible in Mason jars, but when they arrived back to port in Miami, the substance had disappeared from every jar without a trace. Though the evidence had vanished, people nevertheless had to give Dr. Phillips and his team the benefit of the doubt, for they had no reason to conspire to lie about such a thing.

Project Blue Book, the US Govt bureau tasked with investigating UFO sightings, looked into the matter and, as was their modus operandi, assigned a plausible-sounding but unprovable explanation. The material, they insisted, was a "side effect" of military planes firing chaff during routine operations. Chaff is a term applied to a variety of materials designed to be expelled by planes to create a radar-confusing cloud in their wake. (Wait, isn't that, by definition, "chemtrails"?)

However, this concocted official story does not explain why the gooey gossamer filaments disappeared and left absolutely no residue in the jars. And the fact that the Government felt the need to put the matter to rest with such an obviously bogus story leads one to suspect that disinfo was definitely being seeded. The incident was never solved - at least, not in any way that makes sense - but similar incidents continue to happen in places as far away as Italy and China.

(Unfortunately, very few photos of alleged angel hair even exist. The one above is not from the Florida sightings - they apparently didn't have cameras - but of a different proposed fall of similar so-called star-stuff.)

Underwater Cemetery

Okay, you want weird? I'll give you weird. Off the coast of Key Biscayne, if you go scuba-diving at just the right point, you'll be presented with the baffling sight of what at first glance might appear an Atlantis-style "lost civilization", with elaborate statues, paved paths, and a pair of grand insect-wing-like opening gates to this mystery city.

So what is it? It's an underwater cemetery. And though it may look ancient, it's actually quite new. Is it, as with the cemeteries at the bottom of two Kentucky lakes, a pre-existing graveyard that somehow became submerged after the fact? Nope, it was deliberately placed on the ocean floor.

It's the Neptune Memorial Reef, started up by some wacky folks called The Neptune Society who spent years finagling with permits and bureaucracy to fulfill their dream of setting up a cemetery at the bottom of the ocean that could be seen by almost essentially nobody.

But wait, it gets weirder: the cemetery really is intended to be an artificial reef, and reef-building coral have already taken root and started to form there. But doesn't that mean that eventually all this beautiful stuff will be completely covered up? Even now, like a shipwreck, the normal expected amount of surface encrustation with undersea gunk is already taking place. Plaques down there are already becoming unreadable.

And weirder still: in a first for any cemetery above or below the ocean, the bodies aren't just buried here, nossir. They're cremated, and the ashes are mixed with the cement that forms the whole shebang.

I'm not much on diving, so I probably won't be checking out this place anytime soon, unless they open an underwater saloon where drunks get in underwater fist-fights like in Val Kilmer's Top Secret and have underwater duels and send each other to the underwater cemetery next door.