Friday, August 04, 2023

The X-Files of Paranormal Activity

I can't decide if the Anomaly Observatory is a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek parody or the work of genuine lunatics. Whatever it is - it is wonderfully weird.

According to Google Bard - "Beobachtungsstelle für Anomalien (Anamoly Observatory) is a website that reports on paranormal activities. It was founded in 2008 by an anonymous team and has since collected reports of paranormal activities from around the world. The website contains reports of ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and other paranormal phenomena."

Whether Anomaly Observatory is intended as a knowing joke or is in fact deadly serious in its intent the site's interactive map is full of some of the most wonderfully bizarre reports of weird and anomalous observations. Some of the observations are undoubtedly real, such as this video of a man and a bicycle falling from a willow tree. Some of the observations may not be as unusual or anomalous as the observers believe, for example these 'crop circles' in Berlin. Other observations just seem to be entirely nondescript and entirely normal, such as the wall of this building.

Anomaly Observatory declares that "Normality monitoring focuses on "strange" situations that deviate dangerously from the expected normal distribution". If you have observed any deviations from the norm in your neighborhood then you can report them to the Anomaly Observatory by completing a short form.

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