E.T. Abducts Veterinarian, Golf on the Moon, and WHAT Hit That Politician in the Face?!

Morning Weird Darkness — Thursday, February 5, 2026

A hilltop crucifixion of children, the biggest gold nugget ever yanked out of the ground, unexpected and deadly tornadoes in February, and a round of golf for space cases.

Listen to “E.T. Abducts Veterinarian, Golf on the Moon, and WHAT Hit That Politician in the Face?!” on Spreaker.

February 5th has given us everything from ancient executions to unexplained encounters on remote farms, from revolutionary leaps in technology to moments of pure cosmic absurdity. Some of what happened on this date changed the course of history. And at least one story involves a projectile no politician ever wants to see coming.

Welcome, Weirdos! I’m Darren Marlar and this is your Morning Weird Darkness — a darker way to start your day. It’s Thursday, February 5th, 2026. This morning we’ve got children crucified on a hilltop in Japan, the biggest gold nugget anyone’s ever pulled out of the ground, a couple of February tornado outbreaks that had no business happening, an alien abduction in rural Spain, and the only round of golf ever played on another world — plus a New Zealand politician gets smacked in the face with something I can barely say out loud.

The Strange Side of February 5th

February 5th has been a surprisingly busy day for firsts — the kind of milestones that quietly reshaped how people lived, what they watched, and how far they were willing to reach.

Georgia Abolishes Primogeniture and Entail (1777)

Back in 1777, just a year after declaring independence, the state of Georgia did something no other American state had done before — it formally abolished the inheritance practices of primogeniture and entail in its new constitution. If those terms sound like something out of a dusty law textbook, they basically are. Primogeniture meant the oldest son inherited everything. Entail meant the family couldn’t sell off the estate even if they wanted to. No more eldest son getting the whole pie while everyone else scrapped for crumbs — from now on, estates would split more evenly among the children, the widow included if she wanted her share. Georgia politicians — likely none of which were the eldest sons in their families — looked at both of those old English traditions and said, “No, we’re done with that.” It was a small legal change on paper, but the implications were enormous — the beginning of the end for inherited aristocratic power in the new nation, and a sharp, deliberate break from the British idea that massive landholdings should stay locked up under one heir forever.

America’s First Gas Company (1817)

Forty years later, on this date in 1817, the first gas company in the United States was officially incorporated in Baltimore, Maryland. Its purpose was providing coal gas for street lighting — the radical idea that you could illuminate an entire city block without candles or oil lamps. Before this, city streets after dark were essentially whatever the moon felt like providing. The Baltimore gas company changed urban life overnight — sometimes literally — and it held the distinction of being the biggest gas company in America for quite some time. Of course, the biggest gas company nowadays is Taco Bell — and it is still changing urban life overnight.

The Welcome Stranger Gold Nugget (1869)

Jump ahead to 1869 in the Australian bush, and a couple of Cornish prospectors named John Deason and Richard Oates were working a claim near the tiny settlement of Moliagul, Victoria, when they made a discovery so absurd it didn’t even look real. Just a couple of inches below the surface, tangled in the roots of a tree, they struck the Welcome Stranger — the largest alluvial gold nugget in recorded history. It weighed roughly 2,520 troy ounces, which works out to about 173 pounds of solid gold sitting right there under the dirt. The thing was so massive they had to haul it to a bank and break it apart on an anvil just to weigh it, which is a nice problem to have if you’re a miner and a very confusing one if you’re the scale. At today’s gold prices, it would be worth somewhere north of seven million dollars. And it was two inches underground. Two inches. Most people dig deeper than that planting tomatoes. Deason and Oates had struck gold in 1869. Gold was struck again in 1981, but that was Hall & Oates with “Private Eyes” and has nothing to do with this story, but I couldn’t get it out of my head after hearing the name Richard Oates.

The First Motion Picture (1870)

Barely a year later, on February 5th, 1870, a theater audience in Philadelphia witnessed something nobody had ever seen before. An inventor named Henry Renno Heyl demonstrated a device he called the Phasmatrope at the Academy of Music — and with it, he projected the first motion picture onto a screen. The images were simple, just a series of still photographs mounted on a spinning disc and thrown by a magic lantern, but the effect was something entirely new. People in a dark room watching moving pictures on a wall. The audience that night had no way of knowing they were watching the birth of an industry that would reshape global culture, but they were. It would take another twenty-five years before the Lumière brothers got the credit, calling their device a Cinematographe, but Heyl did it first, right here on this date, in front of a Philadelphia crowd that probably didn’t fully grasp what they’d just seen. He obviously should’ve gotten the credit — his name of Phasmatrope sounds so much cooler.

United Artists Corporation Founded (1919)

And speaking of movies — on February 5th, 1919, four of the biggest names in Hollywood decided they were tired of studios calling all the shots. At a time when movie studios owned actors, controlled contracts, and dictated every creative decision, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and director D.W. Griffith pooled their fame and their money to create United Artists Corporation. The idea was simple and, at the time, pretty radical — let the artists control their own work. Four of the biggest names in silent film basically said, “We’re doing this ourselves,” and it was a power move that rattled the industry — not with explosions or scandals, but by quietly changing who actually held the keys. When word got out, one studio executive reportedly said, “The inmates are running the asylum.” Turned out the inmates were pretty good at it. United Artists would go on to distribute some of the most important films in cinema history, and the model Chaplin and his partners built — creators owning their own distribution — is essentially the template every independent filmmaker still chases today.

Sputnik 7 and the Race to Venus (1961)

Fast-forward to the space race. On this date in 1961, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 7, which at 7.1 tons was the heaviest satellite anyone had ever put into orbit. Its mission was ambitious — send a probe to Venus. It failed. The spacecraft never made it out of Earth orbit, which is a bit like packing for a road trip and then never leaving the driveway. But the ambition was real. Venus. In 1961. While the Americans were still a few months away from getting Alan Shepard off the launch pad, the Soviets were already aiming at another planet. They just couldn’t quite get there. And now you’ve probably got a certain 1969 Shocking Blue song stuck in your head. You’re welcome.

Apollo 14 Lands on the Moon (1971)

Ten years later, on February 5th, 1971, Apollo 14 touched down near Fra Mauro crater, making it the third successful crewed lunar landing. And by the third one… America had kind of already moved on. The TV ratings had dropped off a cliff compared to Apollo 11. Millions of people had watched Neil Armstrong take that first step in 1969, transfixed by the sheer impossibility of it. By the time Apollo 14 rolled around less than two years later, the nation collectively sighed, “Seen it already,” and changed the channel. Watching human beings walk on the surface of another world was apparently only interesting the first couple of times. But there’s a detail about this particular mission I’m saving for later — because what one of those astronauts did on the Moon while nobody was paying attention deserves its own moment.

The Dark Side of February 5th

Now, for the darker side of February 5th. And this one starts about as dark as it gets.

The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan (1597)

On this date in 1597, twenty-six Christians were executed on a hill overlooking the harbor in Nagasaki, Japan. The group included six Franciscan missionaries from Spain and Mexico, three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese laymen — among them three boys, the youngest just twelve years old. But the execution itself was only the end of a much longer ordeal. Before they reached that hilltop, Japanese authorities had the left ears of all twenty-six cut off in Kyoto as a public warning. Then they were paraded through the streets of several towns and forced to march roughly six hundred miles in the dead of winter to Nagasaki. Six hundred miles. On foot. In winter. With open wounds where their ears had been. When they finally arrived, they were bound to crosses with iron bands and ropes, and the crosses were raised in a row to face the harbor — positioned so that arriving ships would see them first. Each was killed with two spear thrusts to the torso. The order had come from Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the ruler who had unified Japan, and who viewed the growing Christian influence as a direct threat to his political control. The twenty-six are now known as the Martyrs of Japan, and they were canonized as saints by the Catholic Church in 1862 — two hundred and sixty-five years after their deaths.

Belle Starr: The Bandit Queen (Born 1848, Murdered 1889)

Shifting forward a couple of centuries — if Belle Starr‘s name rings a bell, we did talk about her yesterday. But today’s actually her birthday, so she gets the full spotlight. Born Myra Maybelle Shirley on February 5th, 1848, near Carthage, Missouri, she grew up in a reasonably well-off family, received a classical education, and learned to play piano — none of which stopped her from becoming one of the most notorious figures in the Wild West. Known as the Bandit Queen, Starr was linked to horse theft, robbery, and a colorful roster of outlaw associates that included members of both the James-Younger gang and the Starr clan of the Cherokee Nation, which is where she got her surname through marriage. She was convicted of horse theft by the famous “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker and served time at a federal penitentiary in Detroit. But it’s her death that really earns her a place here. On February 3rd, 1889 — just two days before what would have been her forty-first birthday — someone ambushed her on a muddy road near her home in the Canadian District of Indian Territory, which is now Oklahoma, and shot her in the back with a shotgun. She was thrown from her horse, and as she tried to get up, her attacker fired again. She never saw who it was. Despite multiple suspects — including her own son, Ed Reed, who’d had a volatile relationship with her — the murder was never solved. It remains officially open to this day, a cold case more than a hundred and thirty-six years old.

The Medinaceli Alien Abduction (1978)

On this date in 1978, a veterinarian named Julio Albafuera in the small town of Medinaceli, in the Soria province of Spain, reported that he had been abducted by alien beings — and he wasn’t alone. According to Albafuera, they also took his dog.

He described the beings as tall and Nordic-looking, and claimed they subjected him to a series of medical procedures, taking samples of his blood, gastric juices, and semen. He said he was taken aboard their ship but couldn’t see clearly and could only recall fragments of the experience. What he did remember, though, was a conversation. He said he asked them why they were doing this to people, and one of the beings told him that their own world was becoming “a dark, spoiled place” — that they wanted to study Earth before humans made the same mistakes they had. They told him that as time went on, mankind would become sterile because of pollution to the land, the water, the air, and the bacteria — and that they were collecting biological specimens now in order to preserve samples they could grow things from in the future.

Now, whether you believe any of that is entirely up to you. But what makes this case hard to just wave away is who was telling the story. Albafuera was a working veterinarian in a small, close-knit rural community — not someone operating on the fringes or chasing media attention. He had a professional reputation to lose by making this kind of claim, and he made it anyway. His account fits a pattern that shows up again and again in alleged abduction cases from this era — the medical examinations, the environmental warnings, the sense of fragmented memory. Whether that pattern points to something real or something deeply human, the Medinaceli case remains one more entry in the long, strange, and deeply frustrating catalog of alleged contact events.

February Tornadoes: Houston (1986) and Super Tuesday (2008)

And then there are the tornadoes. February isn’t exactly prime tornado season — most people associate twisters with April, May, June. The warm, unstable air colliding with cold fronts, the supercell thunderstorms that spin up across Tornado Alley in the spring. But February actually averages about thirty tornadoes a year across the United States. That’s a fraction of what spring and early summer produce, but it’s not nothing. And every once in a while, February decides to remind everyone what it’s capable of.

On this date in 1986, a supercell thunderstorm rolled through the Houston, Texas, area and spawned four tornadoes along with devastating hail. The worst of them was rated F3 on the Fujita scale — winds between 158 and 206 miles per hour — and it killed two people, injured eighty, and flattened a mobile home park and the Houston-Gulf Airport. An F3 in February in Texas. Most people never saw it coming because nobody expects that kind of weather in the dead of winter. You hear “February in Houston” and you think chilly rain, maybe some fog off the Gulf. You don’t think “tornado strong enough to destroy an airport.”

Twenty-two years later, on this same date in 2008, February showed off again — and this time it was catastrophic. The so-called Super Tuesday tornado outbreak — named because it fell on the same day as the presidential primary elections — produced at least sixty-four confirmed tornadoes across the central and southern United States over a span of about fifteen hours. Fifty-nine people were killed across Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Alabama. Entire communities were leveled. It was one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks in the country since 1985, and it happened in the first week of February. While millions of Americans were casting primary ballots that evening, dozens of twisters were tearing through towns that never expected it. So, how often do tornadoes happen in February? Often enough to kill you if you’re not paying attention.

The Josh Powell Case (2012)

And then there’s February 5th, 2012 — and this one is just devastating. There’s nothing paranormal about it. It’s just human evil, plain and documented.

Josh Powell had been the primary suspect in the 2009 disappearance of his wife, Susan Cox Powell, in West Valley City, Utah. Susan vanished on December 6th, 2009, and Josh claimed he’d taken their two young sons camping in the middle of a freezing December night — a story almost nobody believed. Despite the ongoing investigation and mounting evidence pointing at Josh, he was never formally charged, and he’d been granted supervised visits with his two boys, Charlie, age seven, and Braden, age five. On this date, a court-appointed social worker brought the boys to Powell’s rented home in Graham, Washington, for a routine custody visit. When they reached the front door, the boys ran ahead toward their father. Powell pulled them inside and slammed the door shut, locking the social worker out. She could smell gasoline immediately. She called 911. Dispatchers initially treated it as a prior code and delayed sending help. Within minutes, the house was engulfed in flames so intense that firefighters couldn’t get near it. Investigators later determined that Powell had attacked both boys with a hatchet before igniting a fire he’d prepared with five gallons of gasoline spread throughout the home. All three died inside. Susan Powell’s body has never been found. The case remains one of the most harrowing failures of the custody system in modern American history — a man suspected of murdering his wife was given access to his children, and he used that access to kill them.

The Feathersdorp UFO Encounter, Zimbabwe (1996)

Shifting to something altogether different. On this date in 1996, a thirty-one-year-old farmer named Johan Reitman, who worked a property near the small settlement of Feathersdorp — about 150 kilometers from Harare, Zimbabwe — woke from a bad dream just after midnight. What pulled him out of sleep was the sound of a car passing on the road near his farm, which was unusual enough on its own. This was rural Zimbabwe — a stretch of road where a single passing vehicle at night was noteworthy, let alone two. But when Reitman got up and looked out his bedroom window, he saw exactly that — two cars passing each other in the dark.

Then one of them turned into his gate.

His first thought was entirely practical — someone was coming to steal his new borehole engine. He rubbed his eyes and face to make sure he wasn’t still asleep, then looked again. What he saw wasn’t a car. The object was long and wide, and it produced a low humming sound. He could see a row of red lights along the back and a front light powerful enough to illuminate the tops of the trees on his property. The thing stopped at his gate for a good thirty seconds — just sitting there, humming — and then moved forward as if the gate had simply opened for it.

Reitman’s farm workers were convinced it was a ghost. Reitman himself, a self-described Christian, said he believed it was a phantom or some kind of spiritual phenomenon. He specifically stated that he does not believe in UFOs. Which makes him an unusual addition to this kind of catalog — a witness who saw something he couldn’t explain and then rejected the most common explanation other people would apply to it. He didn’t want it to be extraterrestrial. He just knew it wasn’t a car.

It’s also worth noting that Reitman’s encounter happened barely a year and a half after one of the most famous UFO incidents in African history — the Ariel School sighting in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, where sixty-two schoolchildren between the ages of six and twelve reported seeing a silver disc land near their playground and beings emerge from it. That case was investigated by Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who found the children’s testimony credible. Reitman’s sighting was a quieter event — one man, one farm, one object in the dark — but it happened in the same country, in the same stretch of time, and it has never been explained.

What We’re Celebrating Today

Alright. Let’s come up for air with some of today’s observances, because February 5th has a few worth mentioning — and the scheduling, frankly, raises some questions.

World Nutella Day

February 5th is World Nutella Day, created back in 2007 by an American Nutella superfan named Sara Rosso who was living in Italy at the time and apparently decided that the world’s most spreadable chocolate-hazelnut product needed its own international holiday. She started a campaign, the internet rallied behind it — because of course it did — and now it’s a global thing where people post recipes, photos, and probably consume way too many spoonfuls straight from the jar before noon. She was right, by the way. It absolutely deserved its own day. Although — wait. Do they sell heart-shaped boxes of Nutella? They don’t, do they? Valentine’s Day is nine days away and nobody at Nutella thought of this? Somebody call their marketing department.

National Chocolate Fondue Day

It’s also National Chocolate Fondue Day, which means today is essentially a double-chocolate holiday. Nobody’s complaining, but you’d think the chocolate lobby could spread these out a little. Two chocolate-centric holidays on the same date feels less like coincidence and more like someone in the confectionery industry figured out that February is when people’s New Year’s resolutions finally break — especially right after Valentine’s Day when it’s all half-price.

Disaster Day vs. Optimist Day

February 5th is also Disaster Day. That’s it. Just… Disaster Day. No specific disaster being commemorated. No awareness campaign. No fundraising initiative. Just a day to apparently acknowledge that disasters exist. Like the disaster of forgetting to buy chocolates for your Valentine… or the disaster of eating them all yourself before you’ve gifted them and you have to go out and buy more.

And right next to it on the calendar — Optimist Day. The same day as Disaster Day. Whoever scheduled those two back to back either had a very specific sense of humor or wasn’t paying attention at all. “Everything’s terrible! But look on the bright side!” February 5th can’t even agree with itself on whether things are going well. It’s essentially the ending of the movie “The Life of Brian” while everybody dies by crucifixion while singing, “Always Look On The Bright Side of Life.”

The Weird, the Absurd, and the Deeply Questionable

And now, the weird, the absurd, and the deeply questionable decisions made on February 5th throughout history.

The 1962 Planetary Conjunction That Ended Nothing

If you caught yesterday’s episode, you already heard about this one, but it technically belongs to today’s date so it gets its proper home here. On February 5th, 1962, the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all lined up in a rare planetary conjunction visible from Earth. Astrologers and doomsday enthusiasts around the world predicted catastrophe — earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, the end of civilization as we knew it. Books were written about it. Millions of people genuinely panicked. Some built shelters. Others made arrangements for the end of the world. And then… absolutely nothing happened. The planets lined up, the Earth kept spinning, the tides behaved themselves, and everyone quietly went back to work the next morning pretending they hadn’t spent the previous week stockpiling canned goods. The universe, it turns out, has a real gift for anticlimax.

Turn-On: The Fastest Cancellation in TV History (1969)

On this date in 1969, the ABC television network debuted a brand-new show called Turn-On. If you’ve never heard of it, there’s a very good reason — it aired exactly one episode before it was pulled off the air, making it one of the fastest cancellations in television history. The show was supposed to be a rapid-fire, counterculture comedy in the vein of Laugh-In, full of quick cuts and edgy humor. It lasted less than thirty minutes. Affiliates across the country deemed it so vulgar that several stations refused to air it at all. Some pulled it mid-broadcast — literally cut away while the show was still running. The Cleveland affiliate reportedly called ABC during the first commercial break to say they were done. One episode. That was it. Turn-On was turned off. It remains a footnote in broadcast history — proof that there is, in fact, a line, and that 1969 found it. Doggone it… now I really want to watch that show! Wait… here it is!

Alan Shepard Plays Golf on the Moon (1971)

Remember Apollo 14 from earlier? Third Moon landing, nobody was watching, America had moved on? Here’s what they missed. During that mission, astronaut Alan Shepard — the same man who in 1961 had become the first American in space — smuggled a makeshift six-iron club head onto the spacecraft. He’d had it custom-made to fit the handle of a lunar sample collection tool, essentially turning a piece of scientific equipment into a golf club. Once on the surface, he dropped two golf balls onto the lunar dirt, took his stance in a bulky pressurized space suit that barely allowed him to bend at the waist, and swung. The first shot shanked — barely moved. Hard to get a good follow-through when you’re wearing what amounts to a balloon with gloves. But the second one connected. Shepard watched it arc away in the Moon’s low gravity — one-sixth of Earth’s — and later claimed it went “miles and miles and miles.” It didn’t. Best estimates put it at about forty yards. But it didn’t matter. Alan Shepard played golf on the Moon. It remains the only round of golf ever played on another world. And most of America had already changed the channel.

A Rubber Projectile and a New Zealand Politician (2016)

On February 5th, 2016, New Zealand politician Steven Joyce — the Economic Development Minister at the time — was attending a pre-Waitangi Day event in Waitangi and chatting with reporters when a protester named Josie Butler stepped forward and hurled an object at him from close range. It struck him directly in the face. On camera. On live television. The object in question was a rubber… well, let’s just say it was a novelty item shaped like a part of the human anatomy that doesn’t typically make appearances at political functions. Steven, to his remarkable credit, barely flinched. He brushed it off his shoulder and casually said, “Oh yes yes, good-o,” before continuing his conversation as if nothing had happened. The video went viral worldwide within hours. Butler, for her part, said she threw it as a statement against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, adding that she felt it was “the most appropriate political statement.” Steven later joked about it in interviews. The incident became one of the more surreal protest moments in modern political history — one of those rare situations where everyone involved, on both sides, seemed to handle it with more composure than anyone had a right to expect.

Shower with a Friend Day and National Fart Day

And finally — February 5th is Shower with a Friend Day. Which apparently originated as a PR stunt by a shower filter company trying to promote water conservation, and… really? That’s the angle they went with? Shouldn’t this also be Embarrassment at Your Body Day? Or at the very least, Awkwardness with Friends Day? Who thought this was a good idea? The name alone makes it perfect for uncomfortable breakfast conversations or that one friend who always takes the joke exactly one step too far. And while we’re on the subject, February 5th is also National Fart Day, which — again — is really just Embarrassment at Your Body Day by another name. These two holidays being on the same date feels less like a coincidence and more like a warning. Like the calendar looked at February 5th and said, “You know what this day needs? Maximum discomfort.”

Closing

That’s your Morning Weird Darkness for this Thursday, February 5th. I hope your coffee is strong and your commute is uneventful — especially if you’re driving through February tornado country. If you are, maybe keep one eye on the sky, the other on the road.

I might also have a story or two for Weird DarkNEWS, so keep an eye out for those as the day progresses!

And of course, I’ll be back tonight with a full-length episode of Weird Darkness, and you’re welcome to join the weirdo family for our nightly Live Chat Video Premiere on YouTube as we post tonight’s podcast episode and hang out together — that starts at 10pm Eastern, 9 Central, 8 Mountain, 7 Pacific. Head to WeirdDarkness.com/YouTube and I’ll see you there.

Today we covered crucifixions, unsolved murders, alien abductions, tornado outbreaks, a 173-pound gold nugget two inches underground, and the only golf game ever played on the Moon… and somehow, Shower with a Friend Day is only the third most uncomfortable thing we talked about. Have a great day, Weirdos.

References

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.