This Week's Weird News 1/23/26

A mysterious triangular craft filmed at Area 51, tool use seen demonstrated by a cow for the first time ever, and a bizarre protest that saw an art student eat AI-generated pictures were among the weird and wondrous stories to cross our desk this past week.

A pair of videos featuring peculiar aerial anomalies popped up in the news this past week, beginning with footage from a webcam overlooking the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl. In the wondrous scene, an object resembling a glowing flying saucer zipped across the sky as a smaller rod-like UFO cut a similar path in the opposite direction. The odd video stirred renewed speculation that Popocatépetl is a clandestine alien base due to the sheer number of anomalies seen around the site. Later in the week, a skywatcher near Area 51 captured amazing thermal footage of a triangular craft flying near the infamously secretive military installation.

An Austrian cow named Veronika had an unexpected fifteen minutes of fame this past week when researchers revealed that the creature constituted the first-known case of bovine tool use. For the past decade, the animal had developed a penchant for scratching her back with a stick, much to the delight of her owner. Upon seeing a video of the cow's curious behavior, biologists from Vienna's University of Veterinary Medicine did something of a double-take and quickly descended upon the farm to see the 'act' for themselves. Following a series of tests, the researchers concluded that Veronika not only demonstrated tool use, but that it was multipurpose in nature, which has only been seen in humans and select chimpanzees.

By far the weirdest story of the week came by way of Alaska, where an art student declared his distaste for AI by eating another student's ChatGPT-produced pieces. The wild protest occurred at an exhibition of Nick Dwyer's work aimed at conveying psychosis induced by the seemingly omnipresent technology through 150 AI-generated pictures. While the effort was meant to raise awareness of the phenomenon, which has concerned mental health experts, performing arts student Graham Granger saw it as an opportunity to make his own statement about the technology by literally scarfing down dozens of the pictures until someone put a stop to the protest that resulted in him being charged with criminal mischief.

For more strange and unusual stories from the past week, check out the Coast to Coast AM website.