CFZ-USA

On This Day in Weird, January 14....

1699: Massachusetts holds a day of fasting for wrongly persecuted "witches."

1902: An eight-foot-tall hairy creature, armed with a club, chases young skaters from a pond at Chesterfield, Idaho.

1933: A giant squid washes ashore on the coast of Scarborough, Yorkshire.

1943: Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans, author of The Great Sea Serpent (1894) and The Loch Ness Animal (1934), dies at Arnhem, in the Netherlands.

1945: Witnesses report an orange UFO, five feet in diameter, over Ingweiller, Germany.

1950: Workers at the nuclear research facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, watch a "fiery ball of light" hover over the restricted area for two minutes.

1951: Private pilots report UFOs over Jolon and Big Bear Lake, California.

1953: The CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence convenes a four-day conference on UFOs.

1954: Radar operators at Kelly Air Force Base, in Texas, track three UFOs for 110 minutes, scrambling fighter jets whose pilots see nothing. Five hours later, a B-47 crew passing over New York City reports that a fiery object has struck the plane's wing, causing no damage,

1955: An airline pilot en route from Virginia to Kansas sees a dark UFO leaving a contrail.

1965: A witness in Thaxton, Virginia, watches a B-52 bomber pass overhead, followed by a cigar-shaped UFO. Nine other witnesses report UFOs over Dooms and Staunton, Virginia. Luminous, humming objects hover above Wilmot, New Hampshire, disrupting electrical devices.

1972: Two sheriff's deputies watch a six-foot biped covered in gray hair cross a highway near Drexel, North Carolina.

1997: A spherical gray UFO with red and yellow flashing lights swoops toward witnesses at Bloemfontein, South Africa. They report a gray face with large dark eyes peering from one of its portholes.

2002: An Aberdeen-based trawler nets a female giant squid, 10 feet long with its tentacles missing, off the Scottish coast.

2002: A locomotive and two railroad cars suffer damage after striking some unknown hovering object. Engineers report that the locomotive's electrical system "went haywire" before the collision,