THIS DAY IN WEIRD

On This Day in Weird, January 26...

66: Fifth recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet.

1920: Paranormal researcher and author Hans Holzer, best known for his "Amityville Horror" investigation, born in Vienna, Austria.

1973: Three members of the McGregor family watch a white-haired Sasquatch 8.5 feet tall cross a yard and pass through an unfinished house at Island Lake, Minn.

1974: Several witnesses claim a Bigfoot sighting at Aurora, Ill.

1975: Two truckers report Bigfoot walking along Illinois Highway 149 in Jackson County.

1976: Japanese whalers retrieve a single giant squid tentacle from the stomach of a sperm whale harpooned in the Northwest Pacific, at 36°39′N 141°51′E.

1996: Sarah Spiers, 18, vanishes after leaving a nightclub in downtown Claremont, Western Australia, the presumed first victim of a still-unidentified serial killer.

2004: A beached sperm whale explodes in the harbor at Tainan, Taiwan.

2009: A merchant ship sights the sailboat Lunatic, apparently abandoned, 20 days after its owner—72-year-old Slovenian sailor Jure Šterk—broke radio contact on his latest trip around the world. A research vessel finds the Lunatic adrift on April 30.

2013: French cryptozoologist and Bernard Heuvelmans biographer Jean-Jacques Barloy dies in his sleep at age 74.