http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS_uYCIzi5E&feature=player_embedded

Is this truly the video that UFO skeptics have been dreading? Actually, a compilation of 17-month-old video clips from a Chilean military air show is stirring up predictable responses from both sides of the UFO debate, but no dread.

For those who are inclined to believe that some unidentified flying objects exhibit characteristics beyond what our technology seems capable of, the El Bosque case could represent the latest, greatest evidence for flying saucers.

“This is a very, very unusual case, and I’m hoping that this case will help move forward the recognition that there really is something here that’s worthy of further study. … It has the possibility of being a breakthrough case,” said investigative journalist Leslie Kean, the author of the book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record.”

But for those who think even the toughest cases can be explained away as video glitches, bugs or other tricks of the eye, the El Bosque case is just more of the same.

“They’re ‘unexplained cases’ only if you ignore the explanation,” self-described debunker Robert Sheaffer told me. “That’s what’s going to happen in this case.”

Genesis of an anomaly

The case goes back to an air show that was staged in November 2010, at Chile’s Air Force academy, which is headquartered at the El Bosque Air Force Base in Santiago. Nothing untoward was noticed by anybody during the show itself, but Kean said an engineer at the nearby aircraft factory noticed an anomalous spot as he was sifting through video taken from the show, looking for an image that could be used as a poster photo.

The spot appeared to move quickly from frame to frame, and the engineer thought it looked enough like some sort of craft to notify the Chilean government agency in charge of investigating anomalous aerial phenomena, known by the Spanish acronym CEFAA.

The way Kean tells it, CEFAA investigators looked around for other video clips of the event and pieced together six additional views of the spot-shaped phenomena. Ricardo Bermudez, a retired Chilean Air Force general who is now CEFAA’s director, told a UFO conference last month that his agency consulted with other officials, image-processing experts and “non-believer astronomers.” CEFAA’s conclusion was that the spots were caused by an object traveling through the scene at speeds in excess of 4,000 mph — so fast that it went unnoticed by air-show spectators.

“Humans inside this object could not survive,” Kean and a co-author, former New York Times investigative reporter Ralph Blumenthal, wrote in a Huffington Post report appearing on Tuesday. “And, somehow, it made no sonic boom…”

Kean told me that the El Bosque case was notable for several reasons: “I think what’s exceptional about this is that the investigation was thoroughly managed by a government agency.” Also, she said, “it’s something you can actually see with your own eyes.” The fact that the object shows up on seven videos from the same event, recorded from different vantage points, adds to the intrigue, she said.

The El Bosque case fits the pattern that Kean laid out in her book, in which she highlights UFO accounts from experienced pilots, military observers and government officials. Even measured by that standard, the Chilean case stands out, Kean said. “In some ways, I think it’s more explosive than many of the cases in the book,” she told me.

Skeptics unconvinced

In their article, Kean and Blumenthal wondered whether El Bosque would turn out to be “the case UFO skeptics have been dreading” — but experts on the other side of the UFO debate said their skepticism was unshaken.

“It’s a tiny thing in a low-res video,” astronomer Phil Plait, the myth-buster behind the Bad Astronomy blog, told me in an email. “If this is the best she can come up with, dread is not exactly what I feel.”

Sheaffer, a columnist for The Skeptical Inquirer magazine and author of the book “UFO Sightings,” joked about the reference to dread. “I’m shaking,” he told me during a telephone interview. “You just can’t see it on the phone.”

Sheaffer said there wasn’t yet enough data available to judge what really happened at El Bosque. “It’s going to be like the Phoenix Lights in 1997. We’re going to have to go and sit down and look at it,” he said. (Coincidentally, Kean and Blumenthal’s story came out on the 15th anniversary of the Phoenix Lights incident in Arizona.)

Some of the key missing points in the story have to do with the six other videos that are said to show the flying spot. Kean said that as far as she knew, those videos have not been seen by anyone outside CEFAA’s investigative group. Another must-have for outside investigators would be the identity of the shooters behind the seven videos. If they turned out to be seven random people, with no relationship to one another, that would at least argue against the incident being an intentional hoax, Sheaffer said.

The fact that no one reported hearing or seeing anything out of the ordinary during the air show itself would suggest that the anomalous object is a trick of the eye — or, more accurately, a trick of the video.

For some of the denizens of the Above Top Secret online forum, the nature of the spot, or spots, was obvious: It’s a bug, or bugs. An insect flying at regular speed through the foreground of the video could have been misinterpreted as an aircraft flying at super-fast speed through the background. One forum member posted several animated GIF images showing a similar effect. Different bugs could conceivably have flown through the viewing fields of different cameras, leading to the impression that the same super-fast craft was shown in each video — particularly if the six videos identified during CEFAA’s follow-up were pulled out of a larger set.

“Maybe we’ll find out it’s a bug, but I seriously doubt it,” Kean told me. She said she took Bermudez and his fellow investigators at their word. “All I know is that people who know way more about photo analysis than I have ruled that out,” Kean said.

Even though Kean has made a name for herself as a UFO writer, she insisted that she’s not wedded to a woo-woo explanation. “I just wanted to get this story out there,” she said. “I’m hoping that some American scientists will now take on the analysis of this.”

Update for 8:30 p.m. ET: I’m getting additional information from both sides of the debate. Leslie Kean sent me a follow-up email on the bug hypothesis:

“I went back to the CEFAA official re the bugs, and he said that’s what they all thought at first when they got the first film (the one I posted). But when they went and got additional footage from very different vantage points which showed the same thing, they knew that was impossible. I don’t think they’re that stupid to claim this is a UFO if it was a bug, given that so many experts looked at it.”

And there’s this from UFO skeptic Tim Printy:

“I am very skeptical of this story the more I read it. There are no high-quality videos available, and the frame grabs/brief clips I have seen appear to be vague and indistinct. The idea they may be birds, insects or possibly a small Mylar balloon has crossed my mind but I can’t tell much from the data at hand.

“There are some big red flags for me:

“1) This happened over a year ago and people are still working on analyzing this? If the evidence was truly that good, it would take a few months at best to come up with a reasonable analysis to demonstrate it was something not of this earth.

“2) It is being leaked out to various UFO blogs instead of publishing in a scientific journal. If it were good evidence, that is where it would appear, and not the Huffington Post.

“3) The videos are unavailable to be analyzed from outside sources. Perhaps they learned from the Mexican Air Force video debacle. Once the videos were revealed in sufficient length, many people identified the source of the images as being from oil wells in the gulf. A lot of people had egg on their face from that one. NARCAP was initially involved with that one, but then later stated they could not properly analyze the video because of the provenance being questionable or some excuse similar to that.

“4) The videos have no provenance. We don’t know what has been done to them since the day of the event.

“Just my thoughts on this one. I can probably come up with a few more red flags, but I would rather wait for the report to appear or the raw videos to surface. Meanwhile, I will hit my snooze button while the UFOlogists proclaim it the latest ‘smoking gun.’ So far all of these ‘smoking guns’ have turned out to be empty water pistols that have never fired a squirt.”

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/15/10704801-video-from-chile-stirs-up-ufo-buzz

By Meghan Keneally

Last updated at 4:47 PM on 1st January 2012

Ancient Mayan legend says that 2012 will bring the end of the world.

A small Arkansas town might have shown the first example of that as approximately 5,000
blackbirds dropped dead from the sky last night in the early hours of the new year.

As if the incident was not strange enough, it is the second time in two years that the
birds have fallen as the calendar year changes.

‘I thought the Mayor was messing with me when he called me,’ said Milton McCullar, the street department supervisor in Beebe, Arkansas.

‘He got me up at 4:00 in the morning and told me we had birds falling out of he sky.’ Mr
McCullar told ABC News.

Given the amount of birds and the condensed time and location of their deaths, there has to be some commonality behind the bizarre event, but scientists remain baffled.

The fact that the birds were even flying in the middle of the night makes no sense because that is not something that they are trained to do.

‘Most of these birds don’t see any better at night than you or I do. They
aren’t adapted to see at night like owls so if they went off from their perches
at night they’re blind at night just like you would be’ said Dr Kevin McGowan,
an ornithologist from Cornell University.

Initially, last year’s deaths were blamed on celebratory fireworks, with people thinking that the birds were startled to death. A flash hail storm or massive lightning strikes were all discussed as possibilities as well.All three theories have been debunked, however, as the weather was calm in Arkansas last night and police even imposed an impromptu firework ban in an effort to prevent it from happening again.

‘I called the police department and told them “I’m not drunk, I’m not on drugs” and
she immediately said “Oh you’re calling about the birds?” and I was like “Uh yeah!”‘ resident Jeff Drennan told ABC.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2080859/Blackbird-deaths-Sign-apocalypse-thousands-die-2nd-New-Years-Eve-row.html#ixzz1iF6Xycnp

Here’s a new geological conundrum courtesy of the Mysterious East: A group of people studying online maps stumbled across a series of strange patterns in the Chinese desert large enough to be seen from space. The unusual white designs appear to have been etched into the ground and their creators clearly don’t lack for ambition: They are over one mile long and 3,000 feet wide. The researchers have yet to identify the silver or white material used to fabricate these outsize desert grids.

You can see a detailed satellite view of the desert pattern here.

So why would the Chinese government–or anyone, for that matter–go to such trouble to paint such gigantic stripes on such remote territory? People analyzing the photos suggest the Chinese military may have constructed them as space-targeting grids.

According to Gizmodo, the various patterned sites are located in Dunhuang, Jiuquan, Gansu, north of the Shule River. The Shule crosses the Tibetan Plateau to the west into the Kumtag Desert—meaning that the painted sites would serve as an ideal, isolated location for training in military targeting.

Slash Gear notes that in one of the grid photos, you can see three structures that are destroyed or partially standing, “as if they were for target practice.” Another image of the grid clearly shows aircraft resting in the pattern’s inner circle.

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Also available on iTunes and Amazon

To calculate the likelihood that they’ll make radio contact with extraterrestrials, SETI scientists use what’s known as the Drake Equation. Formulated in the 1960s by Frank Drake of the SETI Institute in California, it approximates the number of radio-transmitting civilizations in our galaxy at any one time by multiplying a string of factors: the number of stars, the fraction that have planets, the fraction of those that are habitable, the probability of life arising on such planets, its likelihood of becoming intelligent and so on. [10 Alien Encounters Debunked]

The values of almost all these factors are highly speculative. Nonetheless, Drake and others have plugged in their best guesses, and estimate that there are about 10,000 tech-savvy civilizations in the galaxy currently sending signals our way — a number that has led some scientists to predict that we’ll detect alien signals within two decades.

Their optimism relies on one factor in particular: In the equation, the probability of life arising on suitably habitable planets (ones with water, rocky surfaces and atmospheres) is almost always taken to be 100 percent. As the reasoning goes, the same fundamental laws apply to the entire universe, and because those laws engendered the genesis of life on Earth — and relatively early in its history at that — they must readily spawn life elsewhere, too. As the Russian astrobiologist Andrei Finkelstein put it at a recent SETI press conference, “the genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms.”

But in a new paper published on arXiv.org, astrophysicist David Spiegel at Princeton University and physicist Edwin Turner at the University of Tokyo argue that this thinking is dead wrong. Using a statistical method called Bayesian reasoning, they argue that the life here on Earth could be common, or it could be extremely rare — there’s no reason to prefer one conclusion over the other. With their new analysis, Spiegel and Turner say they have erased the one Drake factor scientists felt confident about and replaced it with a question mark.

While it’s true that life arose quickly on Earth (within the planet’s first few hundred million years), the researchers point out that if it hadn’t done so, there wouldn’t have been enough time for intelligent life — humans — to have evolved. So, in effect, we’re biased. It took at least 3.5 billion years for intelligent life to evolve on Earth, and the only reason we’re able to contemplate the likelihood of life today is that its evolution happened to get started early. This requisite good luck is entirely independent of the actual probability of life emerging on a habitable planet.

“Although life began on this planet fairly soon after the Earth became habitable, this fact is consistent with … life being arbitrarily rare in the Universe,” the authors state. In the paper, they prove this statement mathematically.

Their result doesn’t mean we’re alone — only that there’s no reason to think otherwise. “[A] Bayesian enthusiast of extraterrestrial life should be significantly encouraged by the rapid appearance of life on the early Earth but cannot be highly confident on that basis,” the authors conclude. Our own existence implies very little about how many other times life has arisen.

Two data points rather than just one would make all the difference, the researchers say. If life is found to have arisen independently on Mars, then scientists would be in a much better position to assert that, under the right conditions, the genesis of life is inevitable.

This article was provided by Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com. Follow us on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover.

www.malinche.info

Blue stain believed to be sign of poisoning or hypoxia – lack of oxygen that is precursor to altitude sickness

Cold weather and overbreeding blamed for deaths of two 2million fish in Chesapeake Bay

Disease behind deaths of 100,000 fish in Arkansas River

At least nine incidents of mass animal deaths across the globe

Hundreds of confused birds plummeted to their deaths in multiple locations in the U.S.

Rapid movement of Magnetic North Pole towards Russia may have caused bird deaths

Thousands of dead turtle doves that rained down on roofs and cars in an Italian town were victims of their on greed, an expert claimed today.

Residents in Faenza described the birds falling to the ground like ‘little Christmas balls’ with strange blue stains on their beaks.

Last night it emerged that 40 turtle doves had also been found dead at San Cesario near Modena, 60 miles from Faenza, and tests were also being carried out on their bodies.

Shock: Residents described seeing individual doves fall from the sky, before groups of 10 or 20 began hitting roofs and cars

The birds have been found by residents in the village for the last three days and they alerted authorities after hearing reports of the incident at Faenza.

Gianni Sereni, who found 12 birds in his garden, said: ‘At first I didn’t think anything of it but then I saw the reports on the news about what had happened elsewhere so I called the local veterinary service.’

Initial tests on up to 1,000 of the doves from Faezna indicated that the blue stain could have been caused by poisoning or hypoxia.

Hypoxia, a lack of oxygen, is known to cause confusion and illness in animals. It is also a common precursor to altitude sickness.

Gianni Sereni, who found 12 birds in his garden, said: ‘At first I didn’t think anything of it but then I saw the reports on the news about what had happened elsewhere so I called the local veterinary service.’

Official results on the Italian birds are due tomorrow, but Rodolfo Ridolfi, a director at the regional zoological institute, said:’We are fairly confident the birds died as a result of massive indigestion brought on by over-eating.

Mystery: Experts said they believed the blue colouration around the doves’ beaks may indicate poisoning or lack of oxygen

‘The most likely cause are discarded sunflower seeds that were found on an industrial estate close to where the bodies of the turtle doves were found.

‘In essence the birds were greedy, ate too many of the seeds – which we have found inside them during autopsies – and this brought on the indigestion that led to their death.’

Mr Ridolfi said that cold weather last week could have caused the turtle doves to die as the flock was swept into a high-altitude wind storm before falling to the earth.

It comes after two million dead fish were found to have washed up on shores in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland.

The alarming find is being blamed by authorities in Maryland on the stress caused by unusually cold water and overbreeding among spot fish.

Littering the beach: The bodies of two million spot fish have washed up on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, after unusually cold weather

Carnage: Thousands of dead fish have washed up on the shores of Spruce Creek, Florida

That investigation comes just days after the deaths of an estimated 100,000 fish in northwest Arkansas, which is being blamed on disease.

A statement by the Maryland Department of the Environment said: ‘Natural causes appear to be the reason.

‘Cold water stress exacerbated by a large population of the affected species (juvenile spot fish) appears to be the cause of the kill.’

Preliminary tests of the water in Chesapeake Bay have showed the quality was acceptable, officials said.

The statement added: ‘The affected fish are almost exclusively juvenile spot fish, three to six inches in length.

‘A recent survey showed a very strong population of spot in the bay this year. An increased juvenile population and limited deep water habitat would likely compound the effects of cold water stress.’

Gruesome: New Year revelers watched in horror as the birds rained down on houses and cars in Beebe

Mystery: Officials initially blamed high-altitude hail or lightning hitting the birds. Then preliminary lab tests concluded they had died from multiple blunt force trauma

Mystery: A starling lies along the Morganza Highway in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Experts said hundreds of birds may have died after hitting power lines

Mass winter deaths among spot fish have occurred twice before in the Maryland area – in 1976 and 1980.

The incident is the latest mass animal death to hit the headlines in the last two weeks.

These include:

450 red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, grackles and starlings found littering a highway in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

3,000 blackbirds on roofs and roads in the small town of Beebe, Arkansas

Thousands of ‘devil crabs’ washed up along the Kent coast near Thanet

Thousands of drum fish washed along a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River

Two million small fish in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland

Thousands of dead fish found floating in warm Florida creek

Hundreds of snapper fish found dead in New Zealand

Scores of American Coots found dead on Texas highway bridge

Experts have speculated that New Year fireworks, thunderstorms, cold weather, parasites and even poisoning may be behind the deaths.

But conspiracy theorists have also speculated on the internet that secret government experiments could be behind them, with some even claiming it was a sign of a looming Armageddon at the end of the Mayan calendar next year.

Another theory is that the rapid movement of the Magnetic North Pole towards Russia may have affected the birds’ innate navigation systems.

The plot thickens: Rescue chief Christer Olofsson holds a dead bird in Falkoping, Sweden. Dozens of jackdaws were found dead on the street

Creepy: Thousands of dead drum fish were also discovered just miles away lining the shores of the Arkansas River

Inbuilt navigation systems in birds and fish is believed to be affected by magnetism.

Scientists have said the Magnetic North Pole is shifting at an average of around 25 miles a year.

With birds and fish relying on it to travel to breeding grounds and warmed climes, there are fears that the shifting pole could be confusing the animals which means they do not migrate in time to avoid cold weather.

Tests are being carried out on the dead birds and fish, but results are not expected for several weeks.

Scientists have been baffled by the sudden deaths of hundreds of birds which have plummeted to the ground seemingly simultaneously in several locations.

Two hundred American Coots were found dead on a highway bridge crossing Lake O’ the Pines in Big Cypress Creek, Texas.

They are believed to have been hit by passing vehicles while walking or apparently trying to roost on the bridge.

Swedish experts blamed the shock of New Year fireworks for the unexplained deaths of 50 jackdaws found on a street in Falkoping, Sweden.

Many of the birds are believed to have died from stress or as a result of being run over while disoriented.

The largest incident took place in Beebe, Arkansas, were horrified revellers witnessed around 3,000 blackbirds crashing to their deaths into homes, cars and each other as they celebrated New Year.

Another 450 birds were found strewn along a highway in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after apparently hitting overhead power lines.

In both cases, the birds are believed to have become confused and were flying at a lower height than usual.

The deaths of tons of fish across the globe is being attributed to unusually cold water.

Thousands of Brazilian fishermen have been left struggling to make ends meet after the sale of seafood was temporarily suspended when masses of fish were discovered in Paranaguá, Antonina and Guaraqueçaba Pontal do Paraná.

Fish were also discovered rotting and floating in Spruce Creek, Florida, after another period of cold weather.

100,000 drum fish were found strewn along the shore of the Arkansas River.

And the cold snap has been blamed for the deaths of 40,000 Velvet swimming crabs – known as ‘devil crabs – found littering beaches in Thanet, Kent.

Thousands of them: Crabs washed up at Palm Bay, Margate, are thought to have died of hypothermia
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1344913/Animal-death-mystery-8k-turtle-doves-fall-dead-Italy-blue-stain-beaks.html#ixzz1AdnBoYGB

Their stomachs were empty, which rules out poison, Dr. George Badley said, and they died in midair, not on impact with the ground.

That evidence, and the fact that the red-winged blackbirds fly in close flocks, suggests they suffered some massive midair collision, he added. That lends weight to theories that they were startled by something.

Earlier Monday, the estimated number of dead birds was raised to between 4,000 and 5,000, up sharply from the initial estimate of 1,000.

Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, provided the new numbers.

Residents of the small town of Beebe awoke Saturday to find thousands of dead blackbirds littering a 1.5-square-mile area. The birds inexplicably dropped dead, landing on homes, cars and lawns.

Violent weather rumbled over much of the state Friday, including a tornado that killed three people in Cincinnati, Ark. Lightning could have killed the birds directly or startled them to the point that they became confused. Hail also has been known to knock birds from the sky.

The director of Cornell University’s ornithology lab in Ithaca, N.Y., said the most likely suspect is violent weather. It’s probable that thousands of birds were asleep, roosting in a single tree, when a “washing machine-type thunderstorm” sucked them up into the air, disoriented them, and even fatally soaked and chilled them.

“Bad weather can occasionally catch flocks off guard, blow them off a roost, and they get hurled up suddenly into this thundercloud,” lab director John Fitzpatrick said.

Rough weather had hit the state earlier Friday, but the worst of it was already well east of Beebe by the time the birds started falling, said Chris Buonanno, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in North Little Rock.

If weather was the cause, the birds could have died in several ways, Fitzpatrick said. They could easily become disoriented — with no lights to tell them up and down — and smack into the ground. Or they could have died from exposure.

The birds’ feathers keep them at a toasty 103 degrees, but “once that coat gets unnaturally wet, it’s only a matter of minutes before they’re done for,” Fitzpatrick said.

Lightning or hail are also possibilities.

Karen Rowe, an ornithologist for the state commission, noted that in 2001 lightning killed about 20 mallards at Hot Springs, and a flock of dead pelicans was found in the woods about 10 years ago. Lab tests showed that they, too, had been hit by lightning.

Moreover, in 1973 hail knocked birds from the sky at Stuttgart, Ark. Some of the birds were caught in a violent storm’s updrafts and became encased in ice before falling from the sky.

Rowe noted that birds of prey and other animals, including dogs and cats, ate several of the dead blackbirds and suffered no ill effects.

“Every dog and cat in the neighborhood that night was able to get a fresh snack that night,” Rowe said.

Mike Robertson, the mayor in Beebe, said the last dead bird was removed about 11 a.m. Sunday in the town about 40 miles northeast of Little Rock. A dozen workers hired by the city to do the cleanup wore environmental-protection suits for the task.

Robertson said the workers wore the suits as a matter of routine and not out of fear that the birds might be contaminated.

“It started at 7 a.m., picking up birds on the street, in the yards, been run over. It’s just a mess,” Beebe Street Department supervisor Milton McCullar told WISC-TV.

Several hundred thousand red-winged blackbirds have used a wooded area in the town as a roost for the past several years.

Robertson and other officials went to the roost area over the weekend and found no dead birds on the ground.

“That pretty much rules out an illness” or poisoning, the mayor said.

But some residents voiced concerns.

“I’ve been to Iraq and back and not seen nothing like this,” Beebe resident Jeff Drennan told local Fox16 News on Sunday.

UPDATE

First, New Year’s Eve fireworks were blamed in central Arkansas for making thousands of blackbirds confused, crashing into homes, cars and each other. Then 300 miles to the south in Louisiana, power lines likely killed about 450 birds, littering a highway near Baton Rouge.

It’s almost certainly a coincidence the events happened within days of each other, Louisiana’s state wildlife veterinarian Jim LaCour said Tuesday. “I haven’t found anything to link the two at this point.”

Up to 100,000 dead fish on Ark. River

To add to the mystery, 50-100 jackdaws, a bird species in the crow family, fell dead in central Sweden late Tuesday night, English-language Swedish news website The Local reported Wednesday. 

“We do not know what the cause is,” Skovde police commander Tomas Ahlgren said. The birds fell in the city of Falkoping, which is southeast of Skovde. 

Mass bird deaths aren’t uncommon. The U.S. Geological Service’s website listed about 90 mass deaths of birds and other wildlife from June through Dec. 12.

There were five deaths of at least 1,000 birds, with the largest near Houston, Minnesota, where parasite infestations killed about 4,000 water birds between Sept. 6 and Nov. 26.

In Louisiana, the birds died sometime late Sunday or early Monday in the rural Pointe Coupee Parish community of Labarre, about 30 miles northwest of Baton Rouge.

The birds — a mixed flock of red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, grackles and starlings — may have hit a power line or vehicles in the dark, LaCour said. Two dozen of them had head, neck, beak or back injuries. 

About 50 dead birds were near a power line 30 or 40 feet from Louisiana Highway 1. About a quarter-mile away, a second group of 400 or more stretched from the power line and across the highway, he said.

Dan Cristol, a biology professor and co-founder of the Institute for Integrative Bird Behavior Studies at the College of William & Mary, said the Louisiana birds may have been ill or startled from their roost, then hit the power line.

“They don’t hit a power line for no reason,” he said.

In Beebe, New Year’s revelers spent the holiday weekend cleaning up dead red-winged blackbirds.

Some speculated that bad weather was to blame. Others said one confused bird could have led the group in a fatal plunge. A few spooked schoolkids guessed the birds committed mass suicide.

Officials acknowledged, though, they may never know exactly what caused the large number of deaths.

Cristol was skeptical of the fireworks theory, unless “somebody blew something into the roost, literally blowing the birds into the sky.”

Wildlife officials in both Arkansas and Louisiana sent carcasses to researchers at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. and the University of Georgia.

LaCour said he didn’t expect results for at least two or three weeks.

In 1999, several thousand grackles fell from the sky and staggered about before dying in north Louisiana. It took five months to get the diagnosis: an E. coli infection of the air sacs in their skulls.

“I hope things go faster than that,” said Paul Slota, branch chief for the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. He said necropsies of the Arkansas birds began Tuesday afternoon.

“If it isn’t strictly trauma, it may take more time to get results back,” he said. “When nothing shows up, you run the tests longer and let it incubate longer.”

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission is also trying to determine what caused the deaths of up to 100,000 fish over a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River near a dam in Ozark, 125 miles west of Beebe. The fish were discovered on Dec. 30.

The commission expects results on the fish tests in probably a month. Disease may be the culprit, since almost all the fish were one species — bottom-feeding drum, the commission said.

Keith Stephens, a commission spokesman, said the events do not appear to be related. Both that section of the river and the air at the site of the bird deaths were tested for toxins, Stephens said. 

As for the dead birds in Sweden, a county veterinarian would not speculate on the cause of their death, The Local reported. He was traveling to the site Wednesday to investigate.

“We will work quietly and methodically,” he said.

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