The first widely publicized case of alien abduction was that of  Betty and Barney Hill in 1967. Their supposed memories of the incident were uncovered by hypnosis. It took a while for other cases to come forward, but in the 1980s and '90s, psychologists had their hands full of people seeking to explain their nagging anxieties by regressive hypnosis to retrieve experiences of alien abduction. However, the phenomena pretty much died out by the turn of the 21st century. 

This was the period that also brought us the satanic ritual panic, which was also discovered through repressed memories brought out under hypnosis or other therapies, aided by the power of suggestion over vulnerable witnesses such as children. But the common alien abduction story was less stigmatizing and certainly more entertaining, giving us movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Communion (1989), not to mention the X-Files TV series. It also gave us one great lamp. Read about the rise and fall of alien abduction experiences at Aeon. -via Nag on the Lake 

Everyone wants to be part of the Rebel Alliance, but not everyone can be an X-wing pilot or a Jedi warrior. There are plenty of other jobs for those without extraordinary talents. How would you like to be assigned as a tower guard on Yavin 4? If you don't make your way into the Rebellion, you might end up being Jabba the Hutt's masseuse. It's the same for those everyday guys who are caught in the employment of the Empire. Some jobs, even on the Death Star, are quite specialized and therefore boring.  

In an animation made with Unreal Engine, we get a glimpse at what we might be doing in the Star Wars universe. AFK brings us this short as part of their For the Empire series (previously at Neatorama). You can see all the videos in this series in a playlist. This video is only 2:40 long, the rest is an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Over the last hundred years or so, zoos have evolved from animals in small cages to large parks that give animals space to roam and environmental elements to mimic their natural habitats, while paying customers are more likely to be confined as they observe. While it's not freedom, it's often less dangerous than their shrinking home territories. This innovation is largely the work of German businessman Carl Hagenbeck, who opened the modern Tierpark Hagenbeck in Hamburg in 1907. It took a lot of time and money for his idea to spread to cities across the globe, and they are still not universal. But before you laud Hagenbeck for his humane thinking, you should know how he got there.

Hagenbeck's father was an animal trader who had a private menagerie that people could pay to see. Hagenbeck grew his father's business and founded zoological gardens all over. In 1874, he enhanced a display of Scandinavian reindeer by expanding their enclosure and importing Sami reindeer herders to live with and take care of them. Yes, this was the beginning of "human zoos," in which visitors could observe indigenous people from all over on display with their traditional homes and livestock. He repeated these displays with native people from Africa, North America, South America, and Asia. 

The idea of human zoos is repugnant to us now, but Hagenbeck's human displays were actually a step up from what had gone on before. Read about Carl Hageneck and the evolution of zoos at Smithsonian. 

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons) 

A group of friends in California grew up watching the original Star Trek in reruns and cosplayed as the starship Enterprise crew. As college students in 1985, they made a Star Trek fan film, years before such things became common on the internet. Stan Woo had always admired the character Lieutenant Sulu for bringing Asian representation to TV, and decided to shoot the moon and ask actor George Takei to appear in their movie. Takei agreed! We don't know (yet) why the film wasn't seen for so many years, but the 24-minute film Yorktown: A Time to Heal was finally released in 2022. You can see it at YouTube. 

The story of how Yorktown: A Time to Heal came about 40 years ago and took so long to be seen is the subject of a new feature documentary, featuring Eugene Roddenberry, Jr. as executive producer. Beam Me Up, Sulu will premiere at the Raindance Film Festival on June 25th and then will play in select theaters. 

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835, but the name Mark Twain didn't exist until years later. After working as a printer, typesetter, riverboat pilot, and a miner, Clemens got a job at a newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1862. The newspaper was influential and the staff was young and daring. They often wrote stories that played hard and loose with the facts and rubbed readers the wrong way. Later in life, Clemens made up stories to make a point, but printing hoaxes in a newspaper made him enemies. 

Authors often work under a pseudonym to keep their professional and private lives separate. We don't know if this was the reasoning behind Clemens using the name Mark Twain, but it happened while he was at the Territorial Enterprise. It didn't work, as people hated what Twain published as much as they hated what Clemens wrote, and he was pretty well known on sight. By 1864, an exchange of insults with a rival publisher led Twain to challenge the man to a duel. Read about those days, and how Twain left Virginia City in disgrace, at The American Mind. As an aside, don't get discouraged by the first two paragraphs, which are incomprehensible compared to the rest of the article. -via Strange Company 

Three girlfriends are checking their baggage. At an airport? Well, it looks like an airport, but things are not at all ordinary here. The people in line for inspection are warned to dispose of all bottles, but one woman has a bottle hidden deep inside that she'd honestly be better off without. We tend to cling to what is familiar, even when it holds us back. This wordless story seems scary, but in the end, what is exposed and discarded leaves the characters in a better place. I'm not going to reveal any more of the plot, but do read the signs and small print as you watch this.  

Baggage is a stop-motion short written and directed by Lucy Davidson at The Aardman Animation Studio Academy. After a round of film festivals, which won this short some awards, the rest of us finally get to see it. -via Nag on the Lake 

The movie Jaws opened on June 20, 1975. Directed by 27-year-old Steven Spielberg, Jaws was filmed on location at Martha's Vineyard, Edgartown, Chilmark, and Menensha, all in Massachusetts. The 50th anniversary is bringing tourists to all those places, with a huge celebration taking place in Martha's Vineyard. Hotels and events for this weekend are sold out, but events will continue through the summer.

Unlike other films at the time, Jaws opened nationwide in 409 theaters at once and made $7 million in its first weekend. It was the first movie to reach $100 million at the box office, and that only took 59 days. Jaws' success is often attributed to the fact that the monster shark wasn't actually seen for most of the movie, raising the suspense factor. That was because the mechanical shark prop rarely worked, forcing Spielberg to work around the problem. A lot of credit must also be given to John Williams' musical score featuring that familiar two-note motif. 

Jaws was based on the novel by Peter Benchley, who came to regret writing the book because of the shark frenzy that it sparked. Great white sharks were not only feared, but mercilessly hunted. Benchley spent the rest of his life advocating for sharks and for other marine conservation projects. -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Roger Kastel) 

We read about TikTok challenges in which everyone tries to outdo each other in something outrageous and sometimes dangerous. But that's not really new, because children have been doing this kind of thing forever. I remember when kids were dared to chew on cinnamon toothpicks. In the 1990s, it was Warheads. It seems that Warheads were the result of a candy manufacturing challenge to make the sourest candy on earth, since those types of candy were growing more popular all the time. Warheads lent themselves readily to a schoolyard dare. How many could you eat before they burned a hole in your tongue? No one found out, because you gave up before that happened. But are Warheads really as dangerous as they are rumored to be? Tom Blank of Weird History Food explains how Warheads came about, what they are made of, the controversies they sparked, and why kids are both attracted to and frightened by them. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

These lovely handmade glass vessels get their distinctive color from crushed quagga mussel shells. Quagga mussels are an invasive species in the US and most of Europe, having originated in Ukraine. The mussels tend to clog pipes and must be removed, but they aren't fit to be eaten, so they end up in landfills by the ton.  

Glass artist Lulu Harrison has spent years studying and experimenting with waste products in order to turn them into beautiful new objects. Her Thames Glass project uses artifacts removed from pipes in and out of the River Thames such as quagga shells, local sand, wood, and metal to make glassware and tiles. She collaborated with glass blowers Sacha Delabre and Rosie Power to make the Thames Glass collection, which will be shown at the Design Museum in London June 24th through August 25th. The museum has recently awarded Harrison the Ralph Saltzman Prize for the project. 



See more of the Thames Glass project at Harrison's website and at Instagram.   -via Nag on the Lake  

A truly ridiculous scenario was submitted to the What If? series (previously at Neatorama). What would happen if you tried to send all the water going over Niagara Falls through a straw? That's 50,000 to 100,000 cubic feet of water per second! Randall Munroe and Henry Reich gamely explain why you can't do this with some of the finer points of fluid dynamics, and how this attempt would trigger some bizarre effects, like water "boiling" under pressure in a pipe. 

Most of that went over my head, but I wondered how they knew that the flow was 50,000 to 100,000 cubic feet per second. It turns out that's the mandated minimum amount of water regulated by treaty. A lot more Niagara River water is diverted for power generation. The preservation of Niagara Falls is overseen by at least five different organizations- or else the falls could be dry a lot of the time. You can learn a lot from a stupid question. 

Jaws was the movie that gave us the word "blockbuster" in 1975. Of course, they made Jaws 2, without Steven Spielberg. Producers David Brown and Richard Zanuck thought making another sequel after that would be stretching things unless they came up with a different idea. How about a comedy? They approached National Lampoon, which had a hit in 1978 with Animal House. National Lampoon writers John Hughes and Tod Carroll started working on a script for Jaws 3, People 0. 

The premise of the film was that a Jaws sequel was being filmed at a beach when an executive producer was eaten by a real shark. The shark continued attacking the cast and crew, while the movie executives fought amongst themselves. Oh yeah, and the shark was from outer space in at least one version of the script. The film was announced and the roles were cast, but Jaws 3, People 0 was never made. The reason it was canned varies depending on who you ask, but there could have been many reasons. Ultimately, there were two other Jaws sequels released (Jaws 3D and Jaws: The Revenge) that were not intentional comedies. Read the story of Jaws 3, People 0 at Mental Floss.  

According to the available statistics, there are 13,162 nuclear weapons in the world today. That's a lot, considering how we know from experience that the most you need to defeat an enemy is two. However, that experience comes from 80 years ago, back when no other country had the means to respond in kind. There have been times when the number of nuclear weapons was staggeringly large, peaking at more than 64,000 in 1986. What did we think we were going to do with all that?  

Sasha Medin of Data Is Beautiful put together an animated timeline to show how many nuclear weapons existed in each year since they were developed. For a statistics video, this actually has some dramatic moments, like in the 1950s when the Soviet Union raced to build their nuclear arsenal. In the late '80s, both superpowers began pulling back their numbers. In 1991, the Soviet Union suddenly disappears from the timeline, as Russia became the world's biggest nuclear power, with Ukraine and Kazakhstan just below the US. Ukraine and Kazakhstan gave up their nuclear weapons in 1994. In the 21st century, the US and Russia have achieved parity as they cut back, while other nations are still building their arsenals up. -via Laughing Squid 

In 1878, the American Neurological Association was informed of a strange phenomena in the lumber camps of northern Maine. A visit to the camps proved the stories to be true. Many of the lumberjacks and their family members were extremely sensitive to being startled, and they reacted by jumping to extreme heights. Not only that, but they would unthinkingly and immediately obey any command given to them during the startle. Those afflicted became known as "the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine," since many of them were of French-Canadian heritage. 

Later studies proved that the condition was not limited to any ethnicity, nor to the state of Maine. Experts thought it might be genetic, but it only appeared that way because the affected logging camps contained families. At first you might think the jumping reflex might be related to the dancing manias of medieval Europe, but then it also seems akin to the physical condition that affects the fainting goats of Tennessee. Then in the 1960s, yet another possible cause arose from sociological studies in isolated lumber communities. We still don't know the exact cause of the jumping syndrome because it doesn't happen anymore, but you can read what we do know about it at Amusing Planet. 

You would have a hard time finding entertainment franchises as different as the sitcom It's Always Sunny inPhiladelphia and The Lord of the Rings. But that's exactly what makes this mashup so funny. Danny DeVito's character Frank Reynolds is rude, crude, and socially unacceptable. He frequently pulls a gun for the slimmest of reasons, or for no reason at all. Putting him in LOTR, among characters regarded for their loyalty, bravery, and honor is totally antithetical to the ethos of Tolkien's tales. YouTuber Your_Kryptonite7 edited Reynolds into Middle-Earth, using clips from both The Lord of the Rings movies and The Hobbit films. Frank is just Frank, in all his psychopathic glory, while Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, and the other characters can't hide their feelings of bafflement, disgust, and shock. What Galadriel is shocked by is blurred out, but you get the point. Yeah, it's a deranged idea, but you will be impressed by the editing and timing. -via Cracked 

Remember when you first watched Star Wars on the big screen back in 1977? The movie blew you away because the special effects were way beyond anything else movies had at the time. Then the years went by and George Lucas kept fiddling with the original, bringing us Special Edition after Special Edition with his improvements. Fans hated the changes, like making the puppet Jabba into a CGI Jabba and having Han shoot Greedo only in self-defense. Eventually, Hayden Christensen became a Force ghost even though he wasn't even born until 1981. Meanwhile, George Lucas refused to allow the original print to be shown. 

Until now. A group of movie critics and avid Star Wars fans were invited to see the 1977 print screened by the British Film Institute as part of their Film on Film Festival. That's when fans learned that a lot more has changed besides Jabba and Greedo. The 1977 special effects that were so groundbreaking at the time now look laughably amateur. The sets appear cheap. The sound effects are tinny. The audience realized that Lucas had changed so much more than just the scenes they recalled, and that's why watching A New Hope on TV looks almost as good as watching Rogue One. Read how the 1977 version of Star Wars went over at The Hollywood Reporter. -via Fark