Former President Jimmy Carter told GQ magazine for a January article that he saw a UFO in 1969 in southwest Georgia as he was preparing to speak at a Lions Club meeting. He recalled that it was a bright light that got "closer and closer to us," but then "changed color to blue," then to red, then back to white, and then "receded into the distance." However, he said, "I've never believed it came from Mars." (In September, Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian minister of defense, asked Parliament to hold hearings on extraterrestrials. UFOs, he said, "are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head," and he fears the U.S. military might get Earth involved in an intergalactic war.)

(1) An October Agence France-Presse report noted the 2005 launching of the Paris gourmet bakery Mon Bon Chien ("my good dog"), featuring carob-flavored dog biscuits and foie gras dog cookies, and worldwide introduction of more than 400 new products for dogs, including stress-relief sprays, nail polish and hair coloring. (2) Gynecologists interviewed by The Wall Street Journal in December said business was booming for the $1,800 to $5,000 hymenoplasty (the re-creation of the hymen), for men who want to deflower their non-virgin women (surgery obviously good for one night only).

-- In December, according to police in Jersey City, N.J., Roselean Walker, 36, sat at one screen in a movie cineplex with her boyfriend while her 11-year-old son watched the longer Harry Potter film at another screen, but after her movie ended, she tired of waiting for the son and went home with the boyfriend to New York City. When police called her the next morning to come pick up the boy, she demanded that they drive him home. After officers ordered her immediately to the station, she showed up in a bad mood, threatening a lawsuit for the inconvenience, and wound up being charged with assaulting an officer (in addition to endangering a child's welfare).

-- According to the Nov. 10 Evening News of Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., a father was under investigation by police after War Memorial Hospital reported an assault on the man's 11-year-old son. Police said it appeared that the two were playing a video game, that the son had beaten his dad by using a secret upgrade that made his character more powerful, and that the dad, in anger, had spanked the kid, put soap in his mouth and slapped him several times in the head. (The father said only that he had punished the boy for lying.)

-- In June, a plaintiff's lawyer in the massive class-action litigation against asbestos manufacturers, under pressure from federal judge Janis Graham Jack of Houston, acknowledged that more than half of previous asbestos claims in one case appear to be fraudulent. The lawyer claims his clients contracted silicosis from asbestos exposure, but most of those same clients also claimed asbestosis from asbestos exposure, when experts say the two illnesses rarely exist simultaneously. Judge Jack found that one plaintiff's doctor, Ray Harron (who had given up his practice in order to interpret X-rays full-time, at $125 each), had detected asbestosis (but no silicosis) in all 1,807 X-rays he saw, and then, only a few years later, detected silicosis (but no asbestosis) in the same 1,807 X-rays.

-- Animals Gone Wild: A billy goat reportedly attacked Zimbabwe's strong-arm President Robert Mugabe during a gas-station stop en route to the mountain resort of Nyanga in December, injuring Mugabe's scrotum and large bowel. And Fremont, Calif., police officer Paul Rush, who was escorting a teenager home from a traffic stop in January, reported to a hospital emergency room afterward because five chihuahuas had attacked him at the front door of the teen's home, biting his ankles.

-- Stephanie Conley gave an agent for West Virginia National insurance company a $174 check on Aug. 15 (in 2001) for automobile coverage, received the "issued" policy on Aug. 30 ("effective" Aug. 15), and on Aug. 31 was involved in a collision resulting from her negligence. However, by then her $174 check had bounced, and the company considered the policy null and void. In December 2005, the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Conley was nonetheless covered on Aug. 31 because the company had not given her 10 days' cancellation notice.

-- In December, the Bush administration's Department of Justice filed a "friend of the court" brief at the U.S. Supreme Court, supporting Anna Nicole Smith in her battle with the son of her late husband, J. Howard Marshall II, over his estate. Smith and the administration believe that a federal bankruptcy court (which backed Smith) should control the case and not a Texas state court (which had sided with Marshall's son).

-- With an Oakland Tribune reporter and 20 people looking on in November in a parking lot in Fremont, Calif., Tu Jin-Sheng, 50, "grandmaster" in one of the Chinese arts of Qigong, pulled a rental truck several yards using only a piece of fabric tied to the base of his genitals. Jin-Sheng is supposedly a leader of the branch of Qigong known as "Iron Crotch," whose 60,000 adherents worldwide believe that strengthening the genitals increases energy. To warm up for the pull, Jin-Sheng had an assistant kick him hard between the legs.

-- BBC News reported in September that Sandra Luchian, 15, from Moldova, managed to hand-copy the 607-page "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," filling five notebooks, after borrowing it from a friend in the U.K. (since it was not available anywhere in Moldova and she couldn't afford to have it shipped to her). She said it took her about a month.

Not Cut Out for a Life of Crime: (1) The robber of a Fastrip store in Joplin, Mo., ignoring a "Use Other Door" sign pointing to an unlocked front door, spent valuable getaway time trying unsuccessfully to bash in the companion (but locked) front door with a chair, then finally bashed in a small window along a side wall and crawled out to escape (December). (2) Landon McQuilkin, 21, arrested in November in Jacksonville, Fla., after he allegedly abducted a man and said he would kill him, relented to his victim's "last request" to visit his girlfriend before he died; with McQuilkin waiting in the car outside her house, the victim went in, locked the door and called police.

On the surface, it appeared that Michael Sargent, an unhappy, 29-year veteran postal worker in Anchorage, Alaska, had managed to work out his anger fairly passively by, according to prosecutors, merely accepting bulk mailings into the postal system without bothering to charge the mailers (cheating the Postal Service out of at least $106,000 in revenue and perhaps as much as $436,000). However, a search of Sargent's home turned up a federal gun-dealer permit in his name, along with 66 firearms, including silencers and a machine gun. Said the prosecutor, "He is a disgruntled public employee. Access to weapons is of concern."

Two men, aged 50 and 36, who had taken a taxicab home so they wouldn't be driving drunk, were killed when the cab was hit by a 21-year-old drunken driver (Albuquerque, November). And a 21-year-old Mormon man, riding in a truck at about 35 mph with his brothers, who were offending him by cussing, demanded that they stop or he would jump out; one of the brothers, perhaps jokingly, said, Go ahead, and the man did and was killed when his head hit the pavement (South Jordan, Utah, November).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

Bangkok economics student Panupol Sujjayakorn interrupted his studies in November to defend his World Scrabble Championship in London, one of many non-English-speaking competitors who achieved top-of-the-line ranking by memorizing up to 100,000 words in English without ever knowing their meanings. Like the others, reported the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mr. Panupol learned first those premium words that overuse the prominent Scrabble letter tiles (such as "aureolae"). (Alas, this time around, a native English speaker, Dr. Adam Logan, a number theory researcher, won the title, building actual words like "qanat" and "euripi.")

-- Scientists at Syracuse University, recently describing for a British journal their study of body measurements of bats, found an inverse size relationship between a male bat's brain and testicles. The researchers hypothesized that both sperm and brains are metabolically costly to produce, and in species with relatively stable monogamous relationships, brains are allowed to grow, but where females are promiscuous, males that do not overdevelop testicles get left out of the race to procreate.

-- (1) In November in Murfreesboro, Tenn., U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs bureaucrats Joseph Haymond and Natalie Coker were charged with taking kickbacks from suppliers on government purchases of 100,000 rolls of red tape. (The tape is distinctive, red "security" tape used on packages of VA pharmaceuticals.) (2) According to a November Washington Post profile of federal examiner Russell Stormer, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has, since 1790, granted about 30,000 patents to people who have imagined unique ways to reinvent the wheel (or at least improve upon it).

-- Most Convenient Ambulance Chase: In November, according to an Indianapolis Star report of a local accident, an SUV driver collided with another car, causing the SUV to crash into an office building, partially smashing through a wall. Among the building's tenants: the personal-injury law firm Mitchell Hurst Jacobs & Dick, which specializes in automobile accidents.

-- Mr. Rayfran das Neves Sales was convicted in Belem, Brazil, in December of the widely reported murder of an American rain forest-activist nun, who was gunned down as she argued with Sales over who owned the land he was working. Sales claimed self-defense, in that, according to him, the nun reached into her bag as she was proclaiming that "the weapon I have (for fighting for preservation of the rain forest) is this," and Sales, sensing that she was about to pull a gun, shot her. The nun's "weapon," was, of course, her copy of what countless preachers refer to as a primary "weapon" against sin: the Bible.

-- After trying for 22 years to get Hattie Siegel, now 83, to mow her lawn and clear the other critter-infested vegetation from her yard according to regulations of the village of Tequesta, Fla., officials finally cracked down on the accumulated $1.8 million in fines they had levied, and in December, a bankruptcy court ruled that she must liquidate her estate to pay the tab. Two other properties of hers were sold, and she stands to lose more (everything except the Tequesta house itself, which is protected by state law). However, Siegel has finally sought help in the matter and plans to challenge the constitutionality of the village's fines.

-- A bold weight-loss program of the Life of Life Healing Spa in Hong Kong involves actually setting fire briefly to the parts of the body holding the most fat, according to a December dispatch in London's Daily Telegraph. According to owner Karen Chu, the fire follows an energy flow "reading," full-body exfoliation, high-pressure hose spray, and herb-and-potion and alcohol rub-downs (but wet towels and a fire extinguisher are at the ready in case of problems). Chu said about 100 clients have undergone the treatment, with no complications, and the ones interviewed by the Daily Telegraph reporter praised the service. Chu said the treatment is based on traditional Chinese medicine, but a Hong Kong doctor interviewed by Agence France-Presse said, "I have never heard of such a thing."

The land developer Bigg Homes, creator of the Eagle Mountain community near Salt Lake City, touted in its online promotional materials the fact that the development's "(b)lack race population percentage (is) significantly below state average." After hearing complaints, Bigg co-owner David Adams removed the phrase in November, blaming the agency that designed Bigg's materials. (Whoever wrote the phrase must have thought that Utah's "state average" of 1.3 blacks per 100 was somehow suffocating.)

In September, based on the complaint of only one letter-writer (and that man later said he was more being provocative than complaining), the band director of C.D. Hylton High School in Prince William County, Va., dropped from his playlist the popular Charlie Daniels Band song, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," because it centers on Satan. Daniels, interviewed by The Washington Post, was appalled: "I am a Christian, and I don't write pro-devil songs."

Sidney Hale, 31, was arrested in Bluefield, Va., in November after enlisting a female friend to help him to, as he put it, sharpen his reflexes in case an intruder broke into his trailer home. The woman was to knock at the front door, and Hale was then to quickly grab his handgun. (A third person was to gauge Hale's reaction time.) According to a sheriff's detective, she knocked, and Hale grabbed the gun. However, it accidentally fired a slug through the door into the woman's back (but she is fine following surgery). And in December in Lake Worth, Fla., a 16-year-old boy found a .45-caliber bullet, began eagerly pounding it with a hammer and screwdriver, and shot himself in the stomach. (He was treated and released at a hospital.)

(1) Francisco Torres, 52, wanted for murder in New York City, was arrested at Lincoln Hospital in November, after he checked in at the emergency room. According to police, he had suffered a severe asthma attack apparently triggered by the gunpowder residue from the bullet he fired at his victim. (2) Former Miami police officer Jesus Gutierrez, 35, charged with having sex with an underage girl, was initially offered a plea bargain that would have meant probation and no jail time, but he decided to go to trial. In September, he was convicted, and in December, a judge sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

Guilty Despite Deformity: In November, engineering student Mischa Beutling, 22, became the most recent rape defendant to profess innocence by impossibility, arguing that his penis is simply too large to have committed the crime. Beutling, who stands 6-7 and weighs 240 pounds, called a urologist to the stand in Newmarket, Ontario, to testify that Beutling's is 8 1/2 inches long "semi-relaxed" and 6 1/2 inches in circumference and that a woman who has not given birth could not accommodate it without serious injury. (In December, a judge named Margaret Eberhard found Beutling guilty.)

Same Gun? Same Bullet!: In November, in Brooklyn, N.Y., Jon Shuler, 20, aiming to settle an argument with Kenny Berry, 27, over a small amount of money, got a gun and shot Berry. Seriously wounded, Berry struggled for the gun, wrested it from Shuler, and shot him dead, just before Berry himself collapsed and died. Also in November, in Sun City, Calif., an 84-year-old man put a gun to his head after a quarrel with his wife and killed himself. However, according to sheriff's deputies, the woman, 71, standing about 8 feet away, was also killed when the bullet passed through him and into her forehead.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

(G)Ass Backwards: To support its December rate-increase request, the Connecticut utility Yankee Gas Services said it needs more money because too many of its customers have lowered their bills by heeding calls to conserve energy. And a November report commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce included the proposal that Congress replenish the federal Highway Trust Fund by imposing a special tax on gas-saving hybrid cars (in that those cars consume less fuel than regular cars and therefore pay less in gasoline tax).

-- In South Korea, which has the highest rate of high-speed Internet use in the world, more than one-third of the population plays video games, with the result an alarming number of obsessive gamers requiring counseling (and, so far, two deaths after, respectively, 50 and 86 straight hours of playing). According to an October Associated Press dispatch from Seoul, at the many Internet cafes, gamers "typically live on instant (noodles) and cigarettes, barely sleeping and seldom washing." Video games are also a spectator sport: Three cable channels show matches, and the government is building an electronic-sports "stadium," where competitions will be shown on big screens.

-- Update: In 2001, News of the Weird reported on the Mosuo people's (in southern Tibet) tradition in which females nightly choose the men who will be their bed partners, but a September BBC News dispatch emphasized females' dominance in other aspects of the society, e.g., only women have the right to inherit property or raise children, with the "father" barely an occasional presence. BBC reported that the picturesque Mosuo region around Lugu Lake is now so popular with visitors that commerce is superseding Mosuo traditions.

-- (1) Police in Hampton, Va., knew who the suspect was for the robbery of a Wachovia Bank in October (a man named David Wescott, 44), but he got away. They learned his identity because, said witnesses, after he fled the bank with the money, he ran to a nearby cellular phone store to pay his bill before leaving the area. (2) Quebec's La Fromagerie Boivin announced in October that, even with divers and high-tech equipment, it had given up on finding the nearly 1 ton of cheese that it had sunk underwater in 2004 north of Quebec City in a plan to improve its taste.

-- Andrew Uitvlugt, candidate for mayor of Kelowna, British Columbia, proposed in November to coax drug addicts into public jobs, such as trash collection, by rewarding them with crack cocaine, on the theory that the work would be so fulfilling that they would ultimately decline the drugs. (He finished fourth out of five candidates.)

-- Hair Mania: (1) Pontypool, Wales, bus driver Mark Davis had his hair colored red, with an actual (small) fir Christmas tree woven in, along with a string of lights (according to a December BBC News report, with photo). "It gives everyone a laugh," he said, but "(i)t's very difficult to sleep with it." (2) An October profile in the Jamaica Star reported on barber Darain Housen, 40, who is well-known in St. Thomas parish as the guy who has shaped his bristly hair in the form of a baseball cap, with the bill extending out a couple of inches over his forehead.

-- In September, scientists from the Institute of Marine Research in Vigo, Spain, described, for likely the first time, the probable mating ritual of giant squid (which are typically 50 feet long, with eight legs and two tentacles, living in the blackness of the ocean a mile down). Based on examining five squid stranded on a beach in Spain, they posited that the larger female could rather easily resist the male, whose 8-foot-long, hypodermic needle-like penis is wielded so clumsily that he could mistakenly inseminate another passing male, or his own tentacle.

-- Even though bonobos (small chimpanzees found in the Democratic Republic of Congo) are among the most copulating animals on Earth, poaching has dropped their population by 90 percent in the last 25 years, according to a September dispatch in London's Daily Telegraph. Explained the director of a primate orphanage in Kinshasa, mellow bonobos enlist for sex immediately upon sensing any danger, stress or friction: "They also have sex for pleasure, but most of the time, it's a way of making peace."

-- In New Braunfels, Texas, in November, Robert Villarreal, 34, was sentenced to 50 years in prison after he sold drugs to the same undercover officer for the third time in a 14-year period. He had actually argued "entrapment," claiming that for the first sale, in 1988, he was so young that he shouldn't be expected to remember later what the officer looked like.

-- In September, Washington, D.C., police charged George Haynes with three robberies and suspect he is the man who committed two dozen more in the area since being paroled in 2004. Haynes was fingered for the latest robberies after he violated parole in July and was fitted with a global positioning satellite tracking device, linked to his ankle monitor. He apparently was not aware that police then knew his whereabouts 24 hours a day, to within a few feet, and found that Haynes was in the exact area of the three robberies at the exact, odd hours in which they occurred.

People who accidentally shot themselves recently: A 22-year-old driver, in the abdomen (gun in waistband) while reaching down to pick up money (Colorado Springs, Colo., October). A 34-year-old hunter, in the foot, where his rifle was pointed while he was loading it (Barrington, N.H., November). A 15-year-old boy, in the hand with a shotgun he was building based on instructions he had downloaded from the Internet (Round Rock, Texas, November). A 59-year-old man, in the hand, while removing his gun from a hook in the men's room at a gun show (Faribault, Minn., November). A 22-year-old man, in the leg, when his propped-up rifle fell over while he was posing for photographs with a deer he had just killed (Lawrenceburg, Tenn., December).

More Pain-Resistant People Scamming Insurance Companies: A 50-year-old dentist in Amsterdam, Netherlands, received only a suspended sentence in November for a scheme in which he had chopped off a finger but then staged a car accident to claim the equivalent of about $2.2 million for the finger-maiming under his auto policy. Also in November, a 35-year-old man in St. Johann, Austria, was arrested for trying to claim the equivalent of about $1.17 million in insurance based on his severed finger, from a bicycle injury, when, according to police, he had actually placed his finger on a rail and let a train run over it.

(1) A 23-year-old man was found dead of smoke inhalation in a burning house in Billings, Mont., in November, and police said, to the best of their knowledge, it was the man who started the fire in two rooms to cover up the burglary he had just committed but that he wasn't able to get out of the house in time. (2) And in Reseda, Calif., in September, one man was killed and his pal wounded in a shootout as they attempted a random carjacking but didn't realize that men in the targeted car were FBI agents on surveillance.

CORRECTION: In News of the Weird's previous installment of Weird Animal Mating Habits (in November), concerning a great white shark tracked 12,400 miles over nine months ostensibly in search of sex, I reported that the shark was a male. It was female.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)