Nightfox Reports: Reach Out and Touch Someone’s Mind

With my typical wide view I have spotted some more strangeness in the news as reports have been appearing across the country for the last week or two of people getting into accidents after running out into the street and attempting to attack passing cars with their bare hands or whatever improvised weapons they could grab. Several of them have been killed, struck down by the car they attacked or another vehicle streaking by. In a couple of cases people were struck by trains while apparently attack the tracks or the train cars with axes and shovels. One elderly woman was struck by a plane at Heathrow Airport as it took off. Witnesses say she was swinging at the landing gear with a garden hoe.

Those who survived seem to have no memory of the event, saying the last thing they remember was picking a phone up when it rang or being on the phone with a friend. Interestingly, each victim of this delirium seems to have left a phone off the hook. Curiously, phone companies do not even report any records of calls to or from several of the victims so it is not known whom they were speaking with.

A friend of one victim of this bizarre phenomenon says she was one the phone with the friend who then began speaking gibberish, reciting something in an unknown language, then apparently dropped the phone and went off to attack a passing truck with a rolling pin. The driver stated he saw the woman run out of her house, leaving her door wide open, charging the side of his vehicle when he stopped at a light. The woman was struck by another car and killed. “She was crazy, yelling in some weird language while trying to kill my truck. She smashed my window, dented my door, and broke my side view mirror…” he told police when they arrived at the scene. Witnesses corroborated the truck driver’s statement and no charges were made against him or the driver who struck her.

One witness, a teacher from a nearby UC campus, said the woman seemed to be speaking in Egyptian Arabic. The unnamed woman, a suburban housewife visiting Westwood from Connecticut of Scotch-Irish background had reportedly never been outside of the US nor studied any foreign languages in college. Her husband said he never heard her utter a word of Arabic and had no idea where or when she could have learned any. The university professor did not want to be named in the news but said the woman was screaming “kill the machines” in Arabic.

In what may be a related case I have received a detailed e-mail about a factory worker in Detroit who had to be restrained by his co-workers when he started tearing apart a section of the assembly line that cars had just rolled off of. Friends say he was irate and seemed to want to kill the conveyor belt. He spat at it, kicked it, hit it with his wrench and cursed in a foreign language that they had never heard the Polish born autoworker speak in before. A Jewish foreman on the line confirmed it was Arabic, not Hebrew that the worker was speaking in after someone had speculated the man was Jewish. The foreman stated the deranged employee was Polish Catholic and had never been to the Middle East and had not been in the military or gone to college. The man was released to the custody of his family after arrest and booking. He did not remember anything about the incident other than he had been on the phone ordering parts for the factory. Makes me glad I am a skateboarder.

Right now while you are reading this blog a soldier is on the phone with his sweetheart. He is holding an assault rifle with a grenade launcher and armour piercing bullets and staring at a school bus full of kindergarteners passing by his base. He is starting to mutter in Arabic…

…Just kidding! But are you scared yet? I am! Luddites are on the prowl, apparently getting people to attack machines. Less publicised than the anti-vehicle attacks has been a rising number of attacks on television sets, phones, dishwashers, and other devices, including an unsuccessful torching of a Laundromat in Pasadena by a passing painter carrying a can of turpentine. As if I needed another reason to hate doing laundry! Well, what does this all mean, fellow creatures of the night? I don’t know, I just report the news, I don’t make it. Until this mess is straightened out though, you need to write or IM me, as I am turning my damned phones off!