Here’s something a bit unexpected you might appreciate, with a generous tip of the pasty-filled hat to the ever-mind-expanding Daily Grail.
Basically, the story goes like this: someone called ‘TramStopDan’ (actually Dan Wickham) recently posted up two galleries of scans (set #1 and set #2) of various papers inside a wooden box found abandoned on the side of the road in Asheville, N.C. in 2008.
The box is 29″ by 38″, and most of the drawings are large, heavily informed by a draughtsman’s eye for detail and line and with a few, errm, fairly spectacular pieces. In its brief online life, it has acquired the sort-of-catchy title “The Box of Crazy” (and also “The Ezekiel Box”), as if the person behind it was simply a nutter with a fixation on Ezekiel (which is explicitly referenced a number of times).
However, it turns out the truth is actually far more complicated and sad.
The author was Daniel S. Christiansen from St Petersburg, Florida: he also identifies himself as “Nesna-it-sirhc”, but (perhaps disappointingly) this is not some name given to him by our alien overlords but simply his name spelt backwards (so much for finding a Cipher Mysteries angle on the story *sigh*). He had a sister called Eva who lived back in Denmark: and it seems reasonably likely to me that he was the same Daniel S. Christiansen who was born on 27th November 1904 and died in St Petersburg, Florida on 26th September 1994… so perhaps the box was handed down to a relative who in turn died in 2008, but that’s just a guess.
From the handwritten notes, it seems that a turning point in his life came on 7th July 1977 with what he calls “The Tampa Bay Observation”: this seems to have focused all his previous thoughts about UFO visitations, Ezekiel, and unusual weather patterns into a single, tightly-draughted set of drawings, reaching towards a lucid yet hallucinatory quasi-religious UFO vision:-
And yet, Fox Mulder need not travel down from Washington just yet… it turns out that what Christiansen saw had a surprisingly down-to-earth explanation. On the same day that a tornado travelled across Pasco County, it seems very likely that Christiansen caught sight of something new and visually striking – a cutting-edge laser light art show being projected onto the cloudy skies above St Petersburg Port.
The show was done by avant-garde laser artist Rockne Krebs: the particular one that Christansen saw was probably Krebs’ “Starboard Home on the Range, Part VI”. The story behind the story is here, courtesy of the Tampa Tribune. But nobody has so far posted any images or videos of it online… perhaps there simply aren’t any. Maybe you just had to be there.
Oh, and finally: if you’re a completist as far as Internet coverage of odd phenomena goes, you should also head over to Reddit. But be warned that there’s far less there than the length of the page might initially lead you to believe – just tellin’ ya how it is, don’t shoot the messenger, etc. 😉