User:Brookie/The bizarre

Bizarre Adjective - very strange or unusual, especially so as to cause interest or amusement [edit]

Flying frozen chickens
In Newcastle (north of Sydney, Australia) the town has been suffering from the strange phenomena of being bombarded by flying frozen chickens.

Premier Bob Carr said of the event, "Sometimes the unexpected happens...and frozen chickens hurtling through the stratosphere, then smashing through roof tiles into people's houses, is just one of the mysteries of existence. I can't explain it, I had no role in it."

There had been a number of recent incidents in which frozen chickens have been seen plummeting earthwards at high speeds and punching their way through the roofs of local houses. Senior police constable Tony Tamplin said, "...the carcasses are hitting these homes with great force. I don't want to make light of this, but these are battery hens in more senses than one."

[Source: AFP 10 Feb 2005; Private Eye issue 1130] [edit]

Flying Frozen Sausages
The Times on 20 April 2005 reported that a motorist from South Woodham Ferrers, Essex, England was recovering from a broken nose after being hit by a flying frozen sausage. The projectile apparently attacked him after coming through his open window. [edit]

Mike the headless chicken
Mike the headless chicken lived for 18 months in America, in the 1940's after his head was chopped off by his owner Lloyd Olson. The lack of this organ did not appear to have been noticed by Mike, who carried on much as usual until he choked to death one day.

Fishing boat sunk by flying cow
It is reported that the dazed crew of a Japanese trawler were plucked of the Sea of Japan clinging to the wreckage of their sunken ship. Their rescue, however, was followed by the imprisonment of the boat's crew once authorities started to question the sailors on their ship's loss. They all maintained that a cow, falling out of a clear sky, had struck the trawler amidships, shattering its hull and sinking the vessel within minutes.

No one believed them, suspecting them of drunkenness or worse and so they remained in prison for several weeks, until the Russian Air Force reluctantly informed Japanese authorities that the crew of one of its cargo planes had apparently stolen a cow wandering at the edge of a Siberian airfield, forced the cow into the plane's hold and rather rashly then taken off for home. Unprepared for live cargo, the Russian crew was ill-equipped to manage a now rampaging and fed-up cow within its hold. To save the aircraft and themselves, they pushed the animal out of the cargo hold as they crossed the Sea of Japan at an altitude of 30,000 feet.

The cow story is an urban legend that may have started as long ago as 1965.