Birds of a Feather

Undoubtedly my readers have been following the happenings (har har) in Arkansas. To recap briefly -a rather considerable amount of birds dropped dead New Year's eve in the town of Beebe, Arkansas:

"Residents of the small town of Beebe awoke Saturday to find thousands of dead blackbirds littering a 1.5-square-mile area. The birds inexplicably dropped dead, landing on homes, cars and lawns.

"Preliminary autopsies on 17 of the up to 5,000 blackbirds that fell on this town indicate they died of blunt trauma to their organs, the state's top veterinarian told NBC News on Monday."

Around the same time tens of thousands of fish bought the farm around Ozark:

"Arkansas Game & Fish is trying to figure out why 100,000 fish in Northwest Arkansas turned up dead. They were found along a 20-mile stretch between the Ozark Dam and Highway 109 Bridge in Franklin County.

"The 20-mile stretch along the Arkansas River where an estimated 100,000 drum fish were found washed ashore and floating looks much different now."

A few things immediately stand out to me. One would be that both of these bizarre events happened along the 35th north latitude. Many early civilizations in the Mediterranean and Middle East built holy sites between the north 31st and 39th latitudes. This tradition seems to have been followed in North America, by both natives and later Europeans. I tackled this topic briefly here.

The location of the dead fish, in Ozark, is especially interesting. Ozark is about 50 miles southeast of Fayetteville, which has been a hot spot for Fortean phenomenon over the years. Cryptids are especially popular here. Some kind of river monster is most common, but a tall figure prowling the woods has also been described.

To the south of Ozark is Yell County, home of the Aikman Mounds. A considerable amount of prehistoric human skulls have been found in this area:

"The Aikman Mounds, in a remote area near Bluffton in the southwest corner of the county, midway between Ft. Smith and Hot Springs, have been found to contain huge numbers of human skulls... They found that many of the skulls had been crushed, and this has led to speculation that their owners might have been clubbed to death in a great prehistoric battle. There were also large quantities of bracelets, rings, and animal bones unearthed."
(Weird America, Jim Brandon. pg. 20)

Ozark itself has experienced its own weirdness. In November 1880 it not only experienced raining pebbles, but large rocks described as coming up through the ground.

This western area of Arkansas has also been home to ample black opts over the past few decades. It is here that we find the infamous 'Mena connection':

"Of the many stories emerging from the Arkansas of the 1980s that was crucible to the Clinton presidency, none has been more elusive than the charges surrounding Mena. Nestled in the dense pine and hardwood forests of the Oachita Mountains, some 160 miles west of Little Rock, once thought a refuge for nineteenth-century border outlaws and even a hotbed of Depression-era anarchists, the tiny town has been the locale for persistent reports of drug smuggling, gunrunning, and money laundering tracing to the early eighties, when Seal based his aircraft at Mena's Intermountain Regional Airport."

Naturally one of the main storage facilities for chemical wepaons in the entire United States is located nearby at Pine Bluff Arsenal, but I'm sure that couldn't have had anything to do with the dead fishes and birds.

By now, of course, bizarre incidences of animals dropping dead across the world have amplified. Even my little burg has experienced its own little die off of fish:

"VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. -- Thousands of dead fish were floating in Volusia County Tuesday. They were all in Spruce Creek in Port Orange. The fish kill is unusual because it is warm, according to people who live along the creek."

Reports like the one above have been receiving ample coverage over the past few days since public interest in the Arkansas events have intensified. It's interesting to note that one of the real life events, dying birds, was a plot point in the series Flashforward, which I have never seen. A clip can be seen here. I don't want to make claims of predictive programming having never seen the show, but it is interesting.

So, the question becomes, are these mass animal killings intentional? I'm leaning toward the negative. Sometimes synchronicity can just pile on... The right event can be a trigger point for dozens of others. But its important to learn as much as we can about these events in the mean time.