CFZ-USA

This Day in Weird, January 9....

1893: Notorious ivory and slave trader Mohara dies in battle and is eaten by the victors.

1917: Herbert Lom, known for performances in Dorian Gray, The Phantom of the Opera, and the Pink Panther film series, born in Czechoslovakia.

1948: An Eastern Airlines pilot sees a "blue circular flame" pass his DC-3 aircraft near Cartersville, Georgia.

1952: Residents of Kerrville, Texas, report "roaring" interference on their radios as a UFO circles overhead.

1953: Flight crews report UFO sightings over Santa Ana, California, and Misawa, Japan.

1958: Radar tracks multiple UFOs over Biggs Air Force Base in El Paso, Texas, while three witnesses report seven "red lighted objects" soaring over Marion, Illinois.

1966: Witnesses report a UFO with a "blue light beam" flying over Chascomus, Argentina.

1967: Brothers Dan and Grant Jaroslaw fake Polaroid photos of a UFO at Lake St. Clair, in Detroit (confessing the hoax in 1976). On the same date, a farm family at Malta, Montana, report seeing a large rectangular UFO.

1974: Bigfoot has a rough day in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Motorist Richard Lee Smith claims the creature "ran into his car" and departed limping from the crash scene. In a separate incident, Patrolman Robert Hollemeyal allegedly shoots the hairy biped, then watches it flee at an estimated speed of 20 miles per hour.

1981: Witnesses report the first of many UFO sightings blanketing Northern California through March 7.

1984: A female giant squid, 14 feet long and weighing 370 pounds, washes ashore at Cove Bay, near Aberdeen, Scotland.

1984: Witnesses report UFO sightings from Capron, Indiana; Mojave and Pearsonville, California; Torrington, Connecticut; and Hawthorne, New Jersey.

1986: Multiple driver stop along Interstate 84 in Hartford, Connecticut, to watch a boomerang-shaped object the size of a Boeing 747 flying overhead. Other witnesses sight the same craft, or its twin, over New Britain and Torrington.

1987: A highway maintenance worker sees two heavyset humanoid creatures standing beside a disk-shaped craft near Jozsa, Hungary.

1993: Cattle flee from a glowing "blue oval ring" on a ranch near Slagle, Missouri. On the same night, witnesses report a UFO with a "tiny smoky humanoid" occupant at Popudinske Mocadliny, Slovakia.

1998: Unidentified vandals return the severed head of the Little Mermaid statue to its place at Langelinie, in Denmark's Copenhagen harbor.

1999: Witnesses report a 10-meter-wide UFO circling twice over Cava Dei Tirreni, Italy.