Tombstone Filled With Marijuana

Customs agents at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport were recently baffled by a tombstone that someone tried to ship via air from overseas. Apparently, it's just something that is never done - the costs to ship a giant heavy slab of stone via air are immense, and why would anyone do that when gravestones are almost always made to order in the vicinity of the cemetery in which it's to be used?

Upon further inspection, the agents started noticing other oddities - there was no last name on the headstone, assuming the senior in "Delroy Senior" is a suffix and not a surname. Being "late of England and Jamaica" was also puzzling to them, although I'll grant slack that someone could have genuinely considered themselves to have been of both places.

But once they inspected it closely, they found the stone was actually ordinary cheap poured concrete painted with a faux-finish to look like granite. The drug-sniffing dogs were called in and they immediately went off like a geiger counter at the BP disaster site. As it turns out, the fake tombstone was hollow inside and filled with 50 pounds of marijuana.

According to cincinnati.com:

Bell said efforts to find the stone’s sender – or the intended recipient – have failed because everyone involved used fake names and addresses.

“Everything came up as a dead end,” Bell said.

Dragon Accident at Bowman Field

A BAC 167 Strikemaster plane that had been scheduled to perform in tomorrow's Thunder Over Louisville air show had a close call with disaster today.

The vintage fighter plane reportedly slid off the runway at Bowman Field after somehow suffering damage its landing gear while attempting to land. It wasn't immediately evident what caused the incident, but according to the Courier-Journal, their current theory is that "a gust of wind caused it to lose lift on its wings".

The plane, nicknamed "The Dragon", is part of an air-show company called Red Star & The Dragon. The show must go on, so the Red Star will fly solo without its partner, I hear.

Although there's probably no connection with the Bowman Field incident, problems with aircraft seem to be on an uptrend lately. A small plane filled with firearms and ammo intended for a gun show went down in Louisville Fairgrounds a week and a half ago.

Elsewhere in the world, Qantas Airlines has had five engine malfunction incidents in the last 16 days. Just last week, an Australian jet ended up grounded when it was realized it had somehow sustained a cracked cockpit during its previous flight. That, in turn, makes the mind wander to the recent rise in near-Earth meteoric material, and/or space junk, which may or may not have caused the fireball in the sky seen over the Midwest. (And then there's the oft-invoked alleged duck collision excuse, which sounds a lot like a Glomar Response cover story to me.)

Cylindrical UFO at Louisville Airport

Roger Marsh of Examiner.com is covering recent MUFON reports in his latest column:

Reports of UFOs over Louisville International Airport on June 24 may include multiple sightings from various employees, according to witness testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) database.

A package handler at the airport first heard a report over his radio about 10:30 a.m. that there was a UFO over the North South runway. The man did not see anything at that time, but at 1:55 p.m., he saw a reflection in the sky from the south end of the runway.

“As this object came closer," the witness stated, "I could make out it was rotating and was a cylinder, then was a diamond shape.”

He said the object moved in a straight line over the runway at a slow and steady speed at a point just under the cloud cover, approximately 1,500 feet. The object stopped at the end of the ramp and hovered for 30 to 45 seconds, then moved up into the clouds and disappeared.

The Airports of Madison County

Okay, so we here at Unusual Kentucky are admittedly given to paranoid and conspiratorial conjecture at the drop of a hat. But the Madison County Airport really does give us the Creeps. It's tucked back in the woods far, far, far from civilization and there are almost no signs pointing how to get there from the main road. There is a real feeling of uneasiness out here, and everyone here seems very paranoid and wary of outsiders. (It's been this way for years, incidentally - long before the Sept.11th incident made all airports a little more tense) Though airnav.com lists the military as accounting for only 3 percent of their traffic, we've seen an awful lot of military planes in and out of here at times. The airport, it should be noted, is not far from Blue Grass Army Depot, who of course have extensive airport and helipad facilities of their own.
On Menelaus Road, on the way to the Madison Airport, there is yet another airport, apparently called "The Berea/Richmond Airport" according to one map. Never seen planes come or go here but the planes parked in the weed-filled field change from time to time so evidently they do get some traffic. It's a tiny field next to a barn and farmhouse, with a small half-hangar towards the back.
And while you're out in this neck of the woods, also check out the Hanging Bridge.

Hanging Bridge in Berea

A user recently posted this entry on the Unusual Kentucky message board:

I have known about the Unusual Kentucky site for quite some time now and I would like to suggest a place of interest.

Hanging Bridge in Berea, Kentucky, a few miles away from Airport Road, is a genuinely creepy place, especially at around dusk and night.

I've been there myself, on multiple occasions, during the night and day. In the daytime, you don't usually encounter much. The only thing I have experienced during daylight hours are rather odd noises, like footsteps, on the bridge itself, when the air is mostly still, and traffic is nil. The two things that will make your skin crawl during the day, however, are not near Hanging Bridge, but a few miles before it in the forms of two old, abandoned houses.

However, this place tends to get a little more active when daylight expires.

The first time I ever went to Hanging Bridge, I remember seeing a strange, blue light in the woods behind my friend's truck. I did a double take to make sure that there wasn't some far-off man-made light source causing this, and there was not.

I returned again the next night with another friend and had a more intense experience....

Click here to continue and read the full post.