For nearly 170 years, schools across the United States and the world have been visited by UFOs. These are not brief fly-overs. In many cases, the objects hover for extended periods and at extremely low altitude, often landing next to the school grounds. UFO researcher Preston Dennett joined guest host Richard Syrett (Twitter) to discuss some of these schoolyard UFO encounters, starting with the earliest case he uncovered from 1853 at Burritt College in Spencer, Tennessee, where the UFO display was seen by students and Burritt faculty members as well.
The phenomena really took off in 1950 and there have been an average of about two cases per year since then, Dennett continued. Roughly half of the cases take place at elementary schools, and many incidents have been covered up by the military, he reported. Dennett shared details from the Westall UFO encounter from 1966 in Melbourne, Australia, where more than 200 students and teachers allegedly witnessed metallic flying saucers hovering over a field near their school. One of the objects landed and at least a dozen students ran over to see it before it took back off into the sky, he added.
Dennett detailed a case from 1994 at the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, where a couple of hundred students watched multiple objects in the sky over their playground. The larger craft landed next to the school and 60 students watched as humanoid entities exited the object and approached them, he revealed. The entities communicated messages about the environment to the students, Dennett noted. "Schools are clearly being targeted, it's not random," he said.
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Show business has inspired artists to test their limits and create death-defying performances, but not everyone lives to tell the tale. For centuries, audiences have witnessed surprising deaths of entertainers from all walks of the business. Pop culture expert and publicist Jeff Abraham and award-winning television and film producer Burt Kearns talked about their new book on shocking, bizarre, and historic deaths of performers who died onstage. According to the authors, they researched about 600 cases of entertainers who's end came while performing for an audience. "These were people who either died of natural causes, there were suicides, there were accidents," Kearns said.
Perhaps one of the most famous cases is of British comedian and magician Tommy Cooper, who died of a heart attack live on television on April 15, 1984. The onstage death has been preserved by YouTube and shows Cooper collapse on stage while the audience laughs at what they think is still his performance. "There's close to a minute of a close-up of a beloved performer having his last moments on Earth on stage," Abraham noted.
The two men also spoke about actor and comedian Dick Shawn, who suffered a fatal heart attack while performing at San Diego's Mandeville Hall on April 17, 1987, as well as actor Albert Brooks' father, Harry Einstein, known professionally as Parkyakarkus. During a roast in honor of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in 1958, Einstein suffered a fatal heart attack and slumped into Milton Berle's lap, they explained.