There’s ghosts, there’s UFOs, and then sometimes the two groups get together and have a real freaky lookin’ baby. They say the act itself is usually preluded with some smooth R&B after a night at the theatre and a nice dinner that costs more than $20 for the both of ‘em.

The end result is something called Phantom Planes – airbuses that both look and sound real, but then disappear into nothing. Some low-flying encounters with them have been so lifelike that pedestrians have jumped for cover.

As we already said – Phantom Planes are a phenomenon wherein the ghostly structure of a plane materializes, flies for a bit and then disappears. We haven’t heard if any long-dead crew have been seen piloting the ghost-ships, but there have been some reported very close encounters – like this one from the BBC:

“The most dramatic incident which came to the attention of ufologist Margaret Fry was reported by mothers in Llangernyw, Denbighshire, as they were picking up their children from school. Several claimed they were sent running for cover as the plane – which they described as rusty, with no paint work – roared over their heads.

“In the distance it followed the landscape and dipped down in the valley at such speed that the parents felt the plane was sure to crash, but they continued to watch as it pulled up and, with “great effort”, it managed to make it over some distant hills. Margaret said there was a shocked silence after the incident before locals began calling officials to try and find out what had happened to the plane.”They were told that no such aeroplane would even be allowed to fly in that condition,” said Margaret. “

Sounds unique, right? It’s not. Here’s another account – this one first hand. It’s from a man named Tony Ingle, who was out walking his dog:

“It was very eerie…I could see the propellers going round but there was no sound..It was getting lower and lower and I thought, this thing’s going to crash…..It was bizarre…I could see it was banking as if trying to turn, and then it seemed to go down just over a hedge. I ran up the lane to see if I could see anything. I expected a plane to be in the field but there was nothing…just lambs and sheep. Everything was silent, you could hear a pin drop…”

There was no sound with that particular sighting – it’s not always the case though. In this next one – taken from a 1976 edition of the Cincinnati Post (and found on Unexplained-Mysteries.com, there were a bunch of different types of witnesses – the last of which even heard people screaming as the phantom plane was about to crash:

“Butler County, Ohio, deputies discontinued a search yesterday afternoon for a plane which reportedly had crashed in Reily Township near Imhoff and Indian Creek Roads late Wednesday night. Deputies said an amateur radio operator heard what he thought was a distress call from a plane believed to be flying from Oxford to Cincinnati about 11 p.m. About 1:45 a.m. yesterday, George Mosley, 1203 Azel Avenue, Hamilton, his son and two other boys became separated in the same area while coon hunting. During the separation the boys said they saw a white flash in the sky at treetop level, then heard screaming and a crash. Airports in Hamilton and Butler County had no record of any small craft filing a flight plan during those hours. Deputies used a plane and walked the area in search of a downed plane Wednesday night until fog set in on the Reily area. The search was continued yesterday morning and discontinued after nothing was found.”

That’s a pretty creepy account – not only did the three boys see the thing individually,  but a radio operator heard a distress call completely separate from the other account.

Phantom Plane sightings don’t seem to happen too often – they’re rare enough to be pretty free from devoted debunkers, as far as our quick internet search can tell. Should any of these debunkers arise we’ve little doubt their chief arguments would have to do with tricks of light or the moon through the trees.  It doesn’t answer much, but when you have to publicly expose something you can’t actually study there’s not a lot of wiggle room.

All we know is if we saw a ghost plane accompanied by terrified screams, a light emitting explosion and distressed radio calls, we’d probably think at least twice about our brand of cough syrup.

Ad we’d rub our eyes.

Bruce Fromong became the headline attraction of the OJ Simpson trial on Monday, when it looked as if his heart was literally going to explode in his chest during his testimony. But yesterday Bruce Fromong got to do exactly what he came to do – testify against OJ Simpson by contradicting himself as many times as humanly possible.

According to Bruce Fromong, he wasn’t scared when OJ Simpson burst into his hotel room, but he did fear for his life. Also, although he wasn’t trying to profit from his OJ Simpson memorabilia, he did want to make big money from it. Keep this up and Bruce Fromong’s going to end up as the world’s favourite feeble-hearted flip-flopping uncle.

The pressure on everyone involved in the OJ Simpson armed robbery and kidnapping trial must be huge because, literally, the job they do will determine whether or not a man will spend the rest of his life in jail. And that pressure seems to be most evident in Bruce Fromong, one of the key witnesses to the alleged crime.

On Monday, things got to Bruce Fromong so badly that he had to interrupt his testimony to stagger around clutching his chest like Indiana Jones at the end of Temple Of Doom. But yesterday, with his internal organs tickety-boo again, Fromong managed to pull himself together for long enough to tell the court exactly what happened in that Las Vegas hotel room.

Not that we needed telling, of course – ever since OJ Simpson was arrested last year we’ve known that he burst into Fromong’s hotel room with a group of men during a sports memorabilia deal and shouted “You think you can steal my shit?” about a billion times. The important questions are whether any of OJ Simpson’s goons had guns and whether that shit was OJ Simpson’s shit or something he’d already pooped out and legitimately handed to someone else.

Did Bruch Fromong clear those points up? Not really. AP reports:

He acknowledged that he said previously, “I felt my life was being threatened.” But moments later, under inquiry by Stewart’s lawyer Robert Lucherini, Fromong said, “I was not scared.” He insisted the memorabilia Simpson sought was not stolen but said he didn’t know where some of it came from.

Well thanks a bundle Bruce. Really helpful. Almost as helpful as when you said you didn’t want to profit from the merchandise despite saying that you did before putting the merchandise on eBay with the description ‘The same ones stolen by O.J. in Las Vegas’.

So, where has Bruce Fromong’s testimony put the OJ Simpson trial? Exactly where it was before. Let’s hope that some of the witnesses called have at least some clue about what’s going on, otherwise we’re not going to get anywhere at all.

Unless they all have crazy old health scares like Bruce Fromong did. Boy, that was fun. We miss that.

What’s that? They have? In fact, one of the first witnesses in the entire OJ Simpson armed robbery and kidnapping trial clutched his chest in the middle of his testimony thinking he was going to have a heart attack because that’s how scary even the thought of OJ Simpson is to him? Oh, right, sorry.

However, this seems like a massive misstep on the part of the prosecutors. Deploying the witness with the weakest heart at the start of the OJ Simpson trial? The jury’s bound to forget about that when it comes to deliberation time. Either the prosecutors have blown their big chance to convict OJ Simpson or there’s another star witness who’ll come on at the end, spontaneously combust, pop his eyeballs out and poo fire. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Yesterday was the day so many of us had been waiting for. No, not because Britney Spears announced her new poptastic album, but because the long-awaited OJ Simpson armed robbery and kidnapping trial finally got underway in Las Vegas.

It’s been a long hard road to get here – OJ Simpson’s alleged henchmen had to be persuaded to testify against him and the court had to assemble the most mean-spirited Caucasian jury in history before anything exciting could happen – but yesterday things got going with a bang.

OK, not really a bang. To be honest it was more of a minuscule cardiovascular rupture, and it wasn’t even that. But whatever it was, it was all thanks to witness Bruce Fromong.

Bruce Fromong is, of course, the sports memorabilia collector who OJ Simpson allegedly raided with a gang of gun-toting heavies while wailing “You think you can steal my shit?” like the overzealous curator of the world’s biggest Crap Museum.

His testimony would have been one of the most compelling of the trial, since he was the man who OJ Simpson apparently robbed and who owns an audio recording of the raid that seems to back his story up. But no, Bruce Fromong had to go and make it all even more dramatic by almost having a heart attack in front of everyone during his testimony. The New York Daily News reports:

Fromong called for medical help while under a barrage of
questions from Simpson’s attorney. His testimony was suddenly
halted as emergency medical technicians rushed to the courtroom to
bring Fromong’s blood pressure under control. “He has 50% heart capacity,” said Fromong’s lawyer Louis Schneider. “While he was on the stand, he started to feel heated.”

Now, there are three ways to look at this. Firstly, it could all be true. Bruce Fromong could have an especially weak heart and the intensity of a court environment coupled with the fact that he could effectively jail OJ Simpson for life got to him. We don’t believe a word of this.

Secondly, Bruce Fromong could have faked a heart attack to either prevent him from answering some tricky questions from the defence or exaggerate the level of fear that he feels in the presence of OJ Simpson. Again, we don’t believe this either, despite the tactic’s obvious success rate.

And that leaves option three – that OJ Simpson is a Magneto-like supervillian who can destroy the bodies of his enemies with the vindictive power of his mind alone. This, we’d argue, is absolutely the cause of Fromong’s heart attack scare and OJ Simpson should instantly go to a specially-built electro-magnetic detention centre four miles under the North Pole where he’ll never be able to harm anyone ever again.

The trial continues today. Unless OJ Simpson manages to implode everyones’ ribcages with his brain-rays and make his escape on the back of a jet rocket, of course. Could happen.

Because yesterday at the R Kelly child pornography trial… not much happened. Not much happened because the judge halted the trial for a day. And the judge halted the trial because a brand new ultra-mysterious secret witness for the defence has just descended onto the scene.

According to R Kelly’s defence, nobody knew this witness even existed until 9am yesterday morning when it received a phone call. It’s exciting, dramatic stuff and not even the judge knows what’s going on. We can’t wait! We want to be profoundly disappointed by the inevitable anticlimax now!

Although we’re aware that R Kelly’s defence hasn’t had a proper go yet, the R Kelly child pornography trial hasn’t especially been going great shakes for the singer so far.

The trial revolves around a video of a girl, possibly as young as 13, having all sorts of illegal piss sex with a man to the sound of the Backstreet Boys. Since R Kelly denies it’s him on the tape and the girl suspected to be the victim also denies that she’s on the tape, the onus is on the prosecution to find people who’ll identify both R Kelly and the girl.

Apparently, that’s not as hard as it seems, because everyone from friends of the girl to family members of the girl to R Kelly’s old employees have been lining up to claim that R Kelly is the man in the sex tape.

However, that could all be about to change dramatically with the sudden appearance of a previously-unknown witness for the defence, who’s apparently going to swoop in and save the day. BBC News reports:

Dramatic claims of a potential new defence witness have interrupted the trial of US R&B singer R Kelly on child sex charges. A lawyer for Mr Kelly informed the court in Chicago that the defence had not known about the new witness until he called them on Wednesday morning. The judge halted the trial for a day to allow time for the man to fly in from another state and make a deposition. “I have no idea what’s going on,” Judge Vincent Gaughan told the court.

Dramatic, huh? It’s just like an exciting courtroom drama, only it’s far slower and it’d never get shown on TV because a grown man shags a child and then pisses on her head in it.

We’re not too sure about what happens now. Will this surprise defence witness get wheeled out in court immediately, drop a giant bombshell and bring the R Kelly child pornography trial to a premature end? Or will the prosecution finish up its business before the witness is allowed to make a grand game-changing entrance?

Most importantly, do we still get to hear the witness’ testimony even if he turns out to be a funny-looking R Kelly superfan whose argument just consists of singing “I don’t see nothing wrong with a little bump and grind” several times in a row while doing a creepy little shuffle dance in the witness box?

Because we get the feeling that’s what’s going to happen, and we’d quite like to see the pastel courtroom sketch of that, please.

And by serious, we mean dull. To convict R Kelly, the prosecution needs to prove that it’s him in the aforementioned sex tape – something that’s hard to do because R Kelly says it isn’t him and the girl accused of co-starring in the tape says she’s got nothing to do with any of it either.

But yesterday a witness stepped forward to say that R Kelly is definitely the guy in the video doing a wee on a child, and that the child is who everyone thinks it is as well. So it looks like everyone can go home soon. Cocktails all round!

The R Kelly child pornography trial has only been going on for a couple of days, but it’s already taught us some valuable lessons. Lessons like:

1) Forget paper rounds – doing a wee to the Backstreet Boys for the illegal sexual pleasure of creepy men is by far the most lucrative way for 13-year-old girls to augment their pocket money,

2) Although accused of being a fan of urine, R Kelly doesn’t like it when poo vapour goes up his nose, and

Actually we haven’t got a clue whether the man in the sex tape is R Kelly or not – R Kelly certainly doesn’t seem to think it’s him – but yesterday at the R Kelly child pornography trial a witness came forward to say that it was.

Twenty-four-year-old Simha Jamison was called as a witness by the prosecution because she apparently recognises both participants in the sex tape. The girl, Jamison claims, is her friend Roshona Landfair, and the man is – wait for it – R Kelly.

Rishona Landfair is the girl widely suspected to be the female lead in the sex tape, and she’d make a valuable witness for the prosecution, except she denies that it’s her and doesn’t want anything to do with the trial.

So, with the prosecution’s Plan A – to get Landfair in court and play Everybody by the Backstreet Boys at her to see if she instinctively starts writhing around and weeing in her knickers – torpedoed, much of the prosecution’s case rests on people like Simha Jamison to go to court and tell creepy stories about R Kelly that make everyone feel a bit weirded out. Job well done, then, as BBC News reports:

Simha Jamison, 24, told the Chicago court that she recognised her friend Roshona Landfair, 23, from her face. She said the two of them often met Mr Kelly when they were around age 12… Ms Jamison said Ms Landfair had first introduced Mr Kelly as her godfather and that they often visited him at his recording studio and a Chicago basketball court. She said Mr Kelly would give Ms Landfair money – “no less than $100 (£50) and no more than $500″. Ms Landfair often stayed on with the singer after Ms Jamison went home, she said.

However, let’s not get too excited. The R Kelly child pornography trial must still be treated fairly, even if it does revolve around a man who once wrote a song entitled Come To Daddy. And, as such, we have to remember that this is just one side of the story, and that the rest will come out when the defence makes its case.

We’re particularly looking forward to that, in fact, since during cross-examination yesterday the defence suggested that the tape may have been digitally altered. Fingers crossed that its entire argument revolves around the tape being a cleverly edited fake pieced together from bits of the music video to Feelin’ On Yo Booty and segments from the underground porno classic Upset-Looking Children Urinating To The Backstreet Boys For Cash.

Hunker down kids, we might be here for a while.

Read more:

Witness friend ‘in R Kelly video’ – BBC