It followed on the heels of a highly successful radio series starring William Conrad.  Apparently Conrad was ever so pissed off when the lead role of Marshal Matt Dillon on the TV version went to James Arness.

Nobuo Fujita

The floatplane that took off from the sub flew over a heavily wooded area near the town of Brookings.  Its mission was to drop two incendiary bombs on Wheeler Peak in hopes of igniting a massive forest fire.

Thankfully the areas in which the bombs landed were damp due to recent rains.  The fires were quickly contained and nobody was hurt.

Despite the fizzled-out fires, the Japanese took great pride in this first attack of its kind.

Two decades later, the citizens of Brookings invited the Japanese pilot, Nobuo Fujita, to serve as the Grand Marshal in their Azalea Festival.  Fujita brought along a samurai sword that had been in his family for 400 years.  He offered it to the people of Brookings as his “gift of regret.”

Fujita would return to Brookings 3 more times before his death in 1997, and the following year his daughter buried some of his ashes at the site of his famous bombing.

Georgi Markov

The attack happened as Markov walked across Waterloo Bridge in London.  He stood at a bus stop waiting to catch a ride to his job at the BBC.  Suddenly he felt a sharp sting in the back of his right calf.  When he turned around he saw a man pick up an umbrella then scrurry across the street to a waiting taxi.

Later when Markov arrived at work he noticed that the spot where he felt the sting had developed a small pimple.  By that evening he was running a high fever and checked into the hospital.  He died three days later.

He had been poisoned with the powerful toxin ricin.  Doctors had fished a tiny metal projectile out of Markov’s leg and investigators from Scotland Yard determined that the object matched a similar pellet that had recently been plucked from the back of another Bulgarian defector named Vladimir Kostov.  In Kostov’s case the pellet was retrieved quickly and only a small amount of the ricin had been released into his bloodstream.

Both pellets were extremely sophisticated.  They were made of platinum and each had 2 holes laser-drilled into them.  They were designed to only release their poisonous payloads once the pellets were inside the victims’ bodies.  Each of the incidents had all the trademarks of a KGB hit.

The platinum pellet that killed Georgi Markov.

Many years later, KGB defectors would confirm the theory that Markov was killed for his vocal criticism of the Stalinist regime in Bulgaria.  He had become a very irritating bee in the bonnet of the Bulgarian President Todor Zhikov.  Some conspiracy theories pointed out that the attack on Markov came on Zhikov’s birthday.

A little over 10 years after Markov’s death, the regime of Zhikov would finally collapse.  As the new administration took over the interior ministry they discovered a stack of specially designed death umbrellas.

Nobody has ever served time for the murder of Georgi Markov.

Big Snow died of natural causes and I haven’t been able to determine whether or not he wound up on anybody’s dinner plate.  I can tell you that the world’s largest chicken fried steak (no chickens involved) is available in Forth Worth, Texas at the Cowtown Diner.

World's largest chicken fried steak.

This ridiculous meal consists of 4-pounds of beef that’s been deep-fried and buried in gravy.  The fully-loaded plate weighs about 10 pounds and will set you back $70…or get it for free if you eat the whole thing.  Actually you have to also polish off 4 pounds of mashed potatoes and 10 slices of Texas toast.

Good luck with that.

LaRue landed a left to Pancho’s jaw at the exact moment that Pancho connected with a right to LaRue’s chin.  Both boxers hit the mat and that was that.

The proper scoring in these instances is to call the fight a “technical draw.”

Double knockouts are very rare in boxing, but in mixed martial arts there are more limbs flying around and more opportunities for impact.  Here’s a simultaneous knockout captured on video:

Mysterious object photographed over Lake Cote, Costa Rica.

The UFO was only discovered after the film was developed.  None of the four people on the plane noticed anything odd during the flight.

The shot has been examined extensively but nobody has come up with a reasonable explanation for what that weird disk thing is.  It’s not a double exposure, and the orginal negative shows no sign of tampering.

Maybe it’s a flying hubcap?  If so, it would have to be a very high-flying one.  The plane was at 10,000 feet when the photo was taken.

Pope Gregory XIII, the guy the calendar is named for.

The reason for the change was that the Julian calender (introduced by Julius Caesar) was like a bad wristwatch.  It assumed that a year was 365.25 days long.  In order to stay on track a leap year was thrown in every 4 years with 366 days.  The only problem was – a real trip around the sun takes 365.2422 days.  This minor difference gets magnified over a few centuries and after a while you start to see the months getting out of sync with the actual seasons.

The Gregorian calendar offered a more accurate solution that fine-tuned the occurrence of leap years.  The correction required that century years (like 1800, 1900, 2000, etc) could only be leap years if they were divisible by 400 (instead of 4).  That means the years 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not.

In order to make the transition to this new math, Londoners in 1752 would have to skip September 3rd through the 13th and go straight to the 14th.  So according to the historical record, for those eleven lost days nobody was born and nobody died.

Carrington Event as recorded by Kew Observatory in London.

It’s also known as the Carrington Event after British Astronomer, Richard Carrington.  He was watching the sun when he saw an unbelievably large solar flare.  The cosmic blast headed straight for the earth and arrived in only 17.5 hours.

Brilliant aurorae were seen all across Europe and North America.  The shimmering, dancing lights in the night sky were so bright that miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up and started making breakfast at 2 in the morning.  They thought the sun had already come up.

It looked pretty but the power-packed space waves also wreaked havoc.  Telegraph poles sparked and burst into flames.  In some areas the telegraph operators realized that they were still able to send and receive messages, even though their batteries had been blown out or turned off.

The following is a transcript from September 2, 1859:

Boston operator (to Portland operator): “Please cut off your battery [power source] entirely for fifteen minutes.”

Portland operator: “Will do so. It is now disconnected.”

Boston: “Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?”

Portland: “Better than with our batteries on. – Current comes and goes gradually.”

Boston: “My current is very strong at times, and we can work better without the batteries, as the aurora seems to neutralize and augment our batteries alternately, making current too strong at times for our relay magnets. Suppose we work without batteries while we are affected by this trouble.”

Portland: “Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?”

Boston: “Yes. Go ahead.”

Scientists believe that geomagnetic storms like this have hit the earth about every 500 years.  Smaller events came our way in 1921 and 1960, and those resulted in major disruptions of power and phone systems.

If an event as large as the blast of 1859 were to hit the earth today, one can only imagine the turmoil it could cause due to our greatly increased reliance on eletrical grids and satellite communication.

Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons.

Upon Martha’s death the zookeeper froze her inside a block of ice and shipped her off to the Smithsonian.  That’s where she’s been ever since, but she’s not currently on display.

The extinction of the passenger pigeon is one of the most disturbing examples of just how destructive humans can be to other species.  It wasn’t too long ago that the passenger pigeon made up more than 25% of the total bird population in the United States.  Early settlers wrote about their massive migratory flights that would blacken the sky.  Amazingly, by 1900 there were none to be found in the wild.

One of its closest relatives is the mourning dove, but passenger pigeons were larger and more colorful.  They depended on vast forests to provide roosting areas in which they could congregate in huge numbers.  When they migrated, the parade of passing birds would sometimes last for days.

The beginning of the end for the passenger pigeon was in the 1800s when professional hunters started trapping and killing the birds for food.  They were easy to catch in big groups using nets.  One popular nesting area in Michigan saw 50,000 birds killed every day over a 5-month period.

By the 1880s people started noticing that the passenger pigeons were disappearing.  Some futile attempts were made to protect and rebuild the population, but farm-raised passenger pigeons were never good at breeding in captivity.

Once Martha was gone, that was the end of it.