Strange news

One of the finest things about working in the news business is the stunning unpredictability of it. I can be working on another story about the latest drug dealer, the latest car wreck or the latest knifing when something truly strange will come to my ear. From the mindless hum of routine to the thrill of the unexpected with eyeblink speed.

One night not long ago, I was glumly pounding out a follow up story on a recent fire. A call came in to my desk and an excited voice chattered from the other side. It was a stranger standing in the middle of a field with a group of friends and watching strange lights in the night sky. Would I come out? Hell yeah. I was there in minutes. For the rest of the night and into morning, I stood with this wide-eyed group out in the middle of nowhere, watching blue lights move in strange, but organized paths across the sky. We tossed around theories about the origin of these lights and got nowhere. When the lights began to fade, we drifted apart and wandered from the field. The lights were not newsworthy by themselves. I didn't race back to the newsroom and file a story on deadline. Not one word was printed about that night at all.

I work the crime beat, for the most part, and there is plenty of strangeness in that world. There are the unsolved murders that still haunt me. There are the heinous crimes that leave all but the killer perplexed. But then there are stories from outside the limits of my beat -- stories of weird creatures prowling the woods; about ghosts in a welfare apartment filled with religious icons; about inexplicable objects that blaze across the sky leaving only a contrail of mystery.

It will take me some time to fish out many of these stories from the archives of my memory. I will post them here as they come to me. In the meantime, here's hoping for new weirdness. Here's hoping that truth remains stranger than fiction.