CFZ-USA

On This Day in Weird, January 15...

1535: Desperate for a divorce, Henry VIII founds the Church in England with himself in charge.

1919: Two million gallons of molasses flood Boston Mass., drowning 21 persons.

1947: An early-morning shopper finds the bisected corpse of "Black Dahlia" Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles. Her murder remains officially unsolved.

1953: Birth of Kent "Dr. Dino" Hovind, "young Earth" creationist, crypto-author, and convicted tax evader.

1965: Motorist Charles Knee Jr. observes a UFO after his car dies on Route 4-A, between Enfield and Wilmot, N.H. As the craft departs, his engine starts again.

1967: Witnesses watch UFOs circling over Boxford and Granville, Mass., and over North Granby, Conn., six miles southeast of Granville. That evening, two couples sight another near Roosevelt, Utah.

1972: Roger Patterson, producer of the world's most famous purported Bigfoot film footage, dies from cancer.

1977: The Coneheads debut in a skit on Saturday Night Live.

1978: A pilot en route from Evansville, Indiana to Cincinnati, Ohio, meets a "blob" UFO flying a collision course with his plane over Washington County, Ind., 22 miles north of Louisville, Ky.

1979: Motorist Kay Price and two passengers see "Knobby," a locally famous Bigfoot, standing at roadside near Casar, N.C.

1980: Railroad engineer Cyrii O'Brien sees an unidentified creature beside the tracks, eating an animal carcass. Searchers report finding six-toed footprints at the site.

1988: Witnesses report a UFO as long as 2½ semi trucks hovering over a factory in Fort Wayne, Ind.

2002: An injured, four-meter-long giant squid surfaces offshore from Goshiki Beach Park, in Kyotango, Japan. Witnesses tie it to a quay with rope, where it subsequently dies.

2005: Sunspot "NOAA 720" explodes, producing the first of four powerful solar flares over a five-day period, climaxed with the sun's worst proton storm in 20 years on January 20.

2009: Paul Thomas hears a crash outside his home in England, emerging to find that a chunk of ice has fallen from the sky, shattering in the street. Authorities assume it fell from an aircraft at high altitude.