Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Roswell’s big problem is it’s all word of mouth. There are these tremendous claims of what went on there, but why believe a low-brow farmer? The same goes for Kecksburg. Sure, we’ve heard the military hauled out a tarp-covered something-or-other that was shaped like a gigantic acorn, but show us the pictures.

That said, there’s finally a UFO-crash discovery that was caught on film – and we owe it all to commie-riddled Russia!

There are only two pieces of news that ever come out of Russia. The first is that Joseph Stalin’s nipples used to bleed every Easter. Some say it was a heavenly reminder of his parents’ religion that he so casually cast aside. This news re-breaks every two years or so. Wait for it – you’ll see.

The second news story that always breaks from the formerly red country is that their babies are born with temporary-but-reappearing Koranic tattoos. They’ve got some crazy stuff going on over there – we’re tellin’ ya.

Imagine our surprise then, when we discovered this third story came out of the country where we thought they only had a two-template newspaper. It happened in 1968.

No doubt you’d like us to cut to the chase. Here it is as All News Web puts it:

“The Soviet Defense Ministry wrote in March 1969, Order No. 481 addressed to the Commander of the Air Defense Forces in the Sverdlosvsk Military Region Lieutenant General A.G. Ponomarenko. He was ordered to assist in every way the local KGB authorities in the operation “Sverdlovsk Midget” (small aliens), signed by the Deputy Commander in Chief of the USSR Air Defense Forces, Colonel General S.D. Lebedey, Seal stated, General Staff of the USSR Defense Ministry.

“In a second letter from November 3, 1969 on the KGB letterhead addressed to Deputy Chief of the Scientific Research Department KGB USSR, Colonel Grigoriev. The letter stated that on March 5, 1969 information was received about discovery of the unidentified object wreckage, 3 meter high and 5 meter in diameter with remains of small unknown human like creature, Operation called “Sverdlovsk Midget”.”

 

We’re going to start doubling up on these Eurovision profiles again. Not because we made a fundamental calculation error, but because we love you.

What’s the big Eurovision news of the day? Only that bloody rehearsals have started in Moscow. And from these we can tell you that the woman from the Ukraine is a dirty girl, that the girl from Albania is energetic and sexy and the man from Lithuania is a git. You’re welcome, readers.

Anyway, here are the Eurovision 2009 rundowns for Elena Gheorghe from Romania and Anastasiya Prykhodko from Russia…

Romania · Elena Gheorghe, The Balkan Girls

Before we go any further, we’d just like to make it clear that Balkan girls are lovely. Almost embarrassingly lovely. And intelligent. Intelligent and lovely. But The Balkan Girls, the Romanian Eurovision entry this year, is the exact opposite of that. It’s stupid and whatever the opposite of lovely is. It’s less of a song and more something you’d hear a pimp chant outside a grotty Bucharest brothel – “The Balkan girls they like to party like nobody, like nobody/ For crowd delight, we’ll shine all night,” it goes, and it doesn’t stop until it’s broken you down and you agree to get a miserable cut-price handjob off one of them. Also, rhyming ‘kiss’ and ‘prince’ is beyond ridiculous. And no amount of writhing models in a pop video is ever going to change that.

Russia · Anastasiya Prykhodko, Mamo

About now, Russia is probably starting to realise that hosting the Eurovision Song Contest isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s the cost of the operation to deal with, not to mention the vast, life-draining pointlessness of it all. The old aversion of wanting to win Eurovision again is probably the reason why Russia has decided to enter Anastasiya Prykhodko this year – a funny-looking woman with a voice that, let’s not beat around the bush here, sounds like a man. And it’s also the reason why Mamo has no discernible melody to speak of. Still, Mamo does have one thing going for it -  two minutes in, Anastasiya hits one massive sustained note. So, if nothing else, at least we know what she’d sound like if she fell down a well. See? We’re all about the positive.

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Miss World doesn’t hate America. Or if it does, at least it’s clever about it. For instance, just look at who won Miss World 2008 this weekend – America’s arch enemy Russia.

Russia’s Kseniya Sukhinova has been crowned as the new Miss World, and she’s a worthy winner. Not just because she looks good in a bikini, though – Sukhinova also excelled in the ‘fashioning a small boat out of raw materials’ and ‘kicking footballs’ rounds. Honestly. Truly she is the pinnacle of humanity.

Hey Russia, we’re getting a little bit sick of you and your monomaniacal insistence on winning every single ridiculously outdated, culturally-irrelevant talent show this year. It was bad enough when you won the Eurovision Song Contest earlier this year, but now you’ve won Miss World 2008 too. Seriously Russia, if you even think of entering a team of ruthless professionals in the Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling Festival next year we won’t be held responsible for our actions.

But in a way it’s completely fitting that the new Miss World should be Russian. After all, Miss World is a hopelessly anachronistic throwback to a more casually sexist patriarchal age, where women were happy to objectify themselves in front of a panel of sneering men who were only there because they knew they’d probably get a Vaseliney blowjob out of it.

Or, in short, a throwback to the last time that Russia made a decent bid at being a global superpower. We’re not joking – chuck in a round where the contestants have to swallow a microfiche capsule and make off on a jetpack and Miss World would be a perfect replica of the James Bond novels.

However, that’s not to dismiss the efforts of the new Russian Miss World, Kseniya Sukhinova, who managed to win the judges over with her sparkling personality, dedication to charity, obvious intellect and the way that her tits looked in a bikini. And, obviously, her boat-building skills, as the Press Association reports:

“I am so happy to be here,” she said of South Africa, which was hosting a record-breaking sixth Miss World final. “I am so excited. It’s amazing.” In addition to the swimsuit and modelling segments, the 109 contestants competed in a “pentathlon” that included building a small boat and taking football penalty kicks; a talent show; and an event showcasing their charity work.

So congratulations to Kseniya Sukhinova, not only for being crowned Miss World 2008, but also because she chose to enter that contest and not Miss Universe – a beauty pageant so full of pratfalls and booing and drug-fuelled sex orgies that it’s basically Jackass with boobies.

But, of course, the real winner of Miss World is host nation South Africa because, by putting on Miss World without a hitch, it has shot down doubts that it’s ill-equipped to host the 2010 World Cup. Although we’re not so sure.

After all, Miss World is a competition full of drearily monosyllabic jumped-up preening idiots who can’t go more than ten paces without stopping to check their hair or bursting into tears for no reason, and the World Cup is…

No, we take it all back. South Africa will be brilliant at hosting the World Cup.

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The Tunguska Blast may not have been a big deal had Bruce Willis been alive to save the world from it. Well, we say the world, but really we mean over 80 million trees, a bunch of wildlife, and definitely anyone who was out jogging in 1908 Russia miles away from the closest anything at all.

You see, on June 30, 1908 in Russia there was a huge explosion way out in the middle of nowhere. It leveled 2,150 square kilometres (830 square miles) of trees – and for the longest time nobody knew what happened. Even after all this time nobody’s absolutely sure – but science has a pretty good idea. And they don’t think it was a temporary miniature black hole, an exploding alien space ship or Paul Bunyan with something to prove.

The Tunguska Blast was a major catastrophe in Russian history, one that can only be solved with educated scientific guesses and endless hypotheses.

And eyewitness reports like this one from a person named Chuchan of Shanyagir tribe:

“We had a hut by the river with my brother Chekaren. We were sleeping. Suddenly we both woke up at the same time. Somebody shoved us. We heard whistling and felt strong wind. Chekaren said, ‘Can you hear all those birds flying overhead?’ We were both in the hut, couldn’t see what was going on outside. Suddenly, I got shoved again, this time so hard I fell into the fire. I got scared. Chekaren got scared too. We started crying out for father, mother, brother, but no one answered. There was noise beyond the hut, we could hear trees falling down.

“Chekaren and I got out of our sleeping bags and wanted to run out, but then the thunder struck. This was the first thunder. The Earth began to move and rock, wind hit our hut and knocked it over. My body was pushed down by sticks, but my head was in the clear. Then I saw a wonder: trees were falling, the branches were on fire, it became mighty bright, how can I say this, as if there was a second sun, my eyes were hurting, I even closed them. It was like what the Russians call lightning. And immediately there was a loud thunderclap.

“This was the second thunder. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one! “Chekaren and I had some difficulty getting out from under the remains of our hut. Then we saw that above, but in a different place, there was another flash, and loud thunder came. This was the third thunder strike. Wind came again, knocked us off our feet, struck against the fallen trees. “We looked at the fallen trees, watched the tree tops get snapped off, watched the fires.

“Suddenly Chekaren yelled ‘Look up’ and pointed with his hand. I looked there and saw another flash, and it made another thunder. But the noise was less than before. This was the fourth strike, like normal thunder. “Now I remember well there was also one more thunder strike, but it was small, and somewhere far away, where the Sun goes to sleep.”

The strangest thing about the blast is there was no resulting crater. There was no impact, there was no ground zero and there was no smoking volcano. Nothing. Nobody – and we do mean nobody, knew what it was. The blast was 100 times more powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima, yet it had no obvious cause. Confusing, right?

Here’s what a CNN article said of the matter in an article 100 years later:

“Despite countless investigations, the so-called Tunguska Event remains one of the 20th century’s greatest enigmas — seized upon by mystics, UFO enthusiasts and scientists as evidence of angry gods, extraterrestrial life or the impending threat of a cosmic collision.

“But says Stanislav Krivyakov, who has spent the past 35 years investigating the Siberian blast, despite intense interest in the event — which has featured in several episodes of “The X-Files” — no conclusive evidence has been found to support any theory.”

Like it says there – paranormalists have seized on the blast claiming it to be evidence of aliens, teleportation or something worse. Some, however, believe the whole thing was caused far more locally – by Thomas Edison’s rival Nikola Tesla. According to ArmageddonOnline.org:

“It has also been suggested that the Tunguska explosion was the result of an experiment by Nikola Tesla at his Wardenclyffe Tower, performed during Robert Peary’s second North Pole expedition. Tesla had claimed that the tower could be used to transmit electromagnetic energy across large distances. The Wardenclyffe Tower was designed to utilize the largest version of Tesla’s patented magnifying transmitter, popularly known as the Tesla Coil, to transmit electrical power into the earth as well as the upper atmosphere.

“In 1908, Tesla allegedly sent a cryptic communication to the American explorer, Robert E. Peary, advising him to be on the alert and make notes of any unusual auroral phenomena encountered as he attempted to reach the North Pole. Allegedly Tesla fired up his transmitter for a trial run and attempted to generate and direct his ethereal oscillations toward the North Pole in the hope of stimulating the polar aurora and perhaps attracting world attention to his invention. It is alleged that Tesla’s trial run coincided with the Tunguska event in Siberia.”

This theory is quickly discounted by the scientific community, but it seems as good as any other explanation, if you ask us. The point is nobody knows exactly what happened, and no inquiring scientific minds bothered to check it out until years after the explosion occurred.

In a side note – did you know the Tunguska Blast was mentioned in Ghost Busters? Dan Aykroyd refers to the demise of Gozer and all that accompanied it as something like the greatest paranormal event since the Tunguska Blast of 1909.

His quote was a year late. That’s all we remember.

That’s because it’s true. The Eurovision Song Contest has got so political these days. The proof? The UK hasn’t won Eurovision for over a decade, regardless of whether we’ve entered a rubbish holiday camp cabaret act or a hamfisted reality TV show runner-up. It’s a flipping disgrace.

But Eurovision won’t be political for much longer, because Eurovision bigwigs are bringing back national juries in a bid to end the tactical voting that’s destroyed the contest’s credibility in recent years. At last! Now when the UK comes last at next year’s Eurovision we’ll know for certain that it was because our entry was genuinely awful and not because everyone’s quite scared of Vladimir Putin.

Another fact: the UK was robbed at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. No, we were. Andy Abraham’s song Even If came joint last out of 43 countries, when everyone knows that turgid rehashes of I Believe In Miracles sung by binmen with all the charisma of wet toilet paper deserve to come at least 39th.

Instead of watching Andy Abraham lift the Eurovision trophy we had to watch in disgust as Russia won – not because they entered a globally-renowned heartthrob who’s sold tens of millions of records and whose song was produced by Timbaland and featured a dance routine by a world champion figure skater, but because of tactical voting.

Oh you know. Tactical voting. It’s where all the Scandinavian countries vote for each other, all the former members of the USSR vote for Russia and nobody votes for the UK because we’ve spent the last decade humping America’s leg like a randy dog instead of concentrating more on countries like Andorra.

Tactical voting has destroyed Eurovision to the extent that Terry Wogan even threatened to quit earlier this year unless it was nipped in the bud.

And, terrified that a red-faced Baileys-stinking old Irish bloke would quit his commentary job, Eurovision has decided to do exactly that, by reintroducing national juries – the process of electing a panel of experts to judge each country’s Eurovision entry rather than letting it become a public phone-vote free-for-all. Ruurd Bierman, chairman of the Eurovision reference group, said:

“We strongly believe in televoting as a way of measuring the opinion of our millions of viewers across Europe. After the public debate about neighbour and diaspora voting, we decided to give the national juries a say in the outcome of the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest.”

That’s perfect in principle – it means that next year the continent’s finest scholars, taste-makers and musicologists will be able to detail exactly why the UK is so staggeringly bad at Eurovision – but let’s think about this seriously.

If, say, Russia wanted to win Eurovision again, wouldn’t it be far easier and more cost-effective to go and personally intimidate the national juries of its neighbouring countries, rather than maintaining a vaguely menacing military threat over the entire east European/central Asian region?

But now’s not the time to be cynical. Perhaps by bringing back national juries, Eurovision can restore itself to its former glory. True, not winning Eurovision might cause Russia to lose its temper and nuke the entire continent into the boiling sea, but compared to the thrill of seeing the UK come sixth or seventh at a singing contest that nobody really cares about anyway, it’s definitely worth the risk.

Instead, mummy still plops you in the shopping trolley at Asda, gives you a bib at feeding time and still tucks you in at night to make sure the monsters don’t attack you.

However, when you reach the age of thirteen/fourteen something magically happens! Young girls and boys develop a mini sense of direction. Granted, they’re only copying what they see on the TV and need their parents to buy all the essential clobber for them, but they are independent, cool and part of a movement. Over the years the most popular fad has been Emo.

Dressing in black and looking like a box of pins has exploded in their faces, they’ve worried councillors, coffin-dodgers and corner shop owners. It’s not just the UK that has this problem, it’s Russia too and, in a strange move, the country wants to ban Emo culture.

Whilst hecklerspray isn’t the most clued-up on historical knowledge, we get the feeling that wanting to wipe out a certain culture sounds similar to something that happened in the 1940s. You know when that bloke Hitler wanted only blond-haired blue-eyed people to rule supreme and for all Jews to perish in dodgy ways?

We’re not suggesting that a mass gassing is on the cards for anyone wearing a My Chemical Romance shirt, but they should at least try to wear a bright pink My Little Pony coat to disguise themselves with.

As the NME reports:

“The legislation was presented last month at a hearing held by the State Durma, where critics claimed that the “negative” emo culture encourages anti-social behaviour and glorifies suicide.”

We’ve listened to a few emo-sounding records and, to be honest, we didn’t feel like jumping off a bridge or licking a plug directly afterwards.

Instead, we just struggled to understand the constant shouting and laughed at some moron gushing out his heart. Aww, he misses his girlfriend, how cute. Always refreshing to see that he went and painted a new tattoo over his arm saying “H8er 4ever fook everyting.”

But if you live in Russia this is soon to be banned, well if Alexander Grishunnin has his way. This is because Emo:

“Is driven by fears that these “dangerous teen trends” encourage depression and suicide.”

Ouch, annoying stuff you must agree. Well, if you’re one of these people who steal others’ souls deep at night. Whilst Russia may be drafting plans to stop people apparently wanting to kill themselves, we all have to remember that the UK may get an import of Russians.

Russian people are pretty much an all right bunch – they bring us vodka to get drunk with. But do we really want depressed youths hanging on our street corners? Of course not, that position has already been filled by Polish people apparently.

Looks like those Russians may have to leave The Black Parade if the law gets passed.

And with Eurovision now less than a fortnight away, it’s time to kick off some official Eurovision festivities, like today’s Serbian Royal Eurovision welcome party held in Belgrade’s White Palace, where one Eurovision contestant will be chosen at random and fed to the dogs as an example of the family’s all-consuming power. Fingers crossed it’s the Estonians.

Here are the Eurovision betting odds for Russia, with help from Paddy Power…

Russia (pop. 144,526,378: the largest country in the world) Dima Bilan, Believe

Although the common image of Russia is all furry hats and espionage and terminal grimness, we’re starting to get the impression that it’s actually more like a Backstreet Boys video. Every single year the Russian Eurovision entry sounds exactly like the Backstreet Boys and that’s still the case this year. But maybe the Russian Eurovision songs always sound identical because Russia always enters the same bloke. Dima Bilan represented Russia at the Eurovision Song Contest back in 2006, and here he is again with Believe, a mid-tempo ballad that’s only made interesting because Dima makes intermittent guinea pig noises throughout it. Buoyed up by the arrogance that comes from being in Eurovision twice in three years, at one point Dima starts yelling “Stop me! Stop me!” like it’s a dare to his competitors. Well, it’s either the arrogance of being in Eurovision twice in three years or the arrogance of knowing his government can get handy with the old Polonium-210 if anyone does actually try to stop him. Current Eurovision betting odds – 6/1

Tomorrow: San Marino! But if that’s too long to wait – or you feel like making more money than you know what to do with – head right over to the Paddy Power Eurovision betting odds page to see the latest, and best, betting odds.