Giant Freakin Robot

Found footage genre movies are a hit and miss proposition at best. It’s a stylistic approach that can be used well, certainly, but it’s overused to be sure. For every good offering, you get what feels like dozens of lackluster efforts. But that’s not going to stop people from adopting this approach, and we’ve got another one, The Rendlesham UFO Incident, on the way. Check out this new trailer and see for yourself if this is something you want to watch.

Google is trying to “bring the internet to everyone,” and per its Loon program, the revolutionary idea for doing so is to use solar-powered balloons that float in the stratosphere. They’re currently testing the balloons in New Zealand, but it seems that an early prototype of one of those balloons went rogue a while ago, and has since prompted UFO sightings across the U.S.

In October of 2012, folks in Pike County, Kentucky spotted a bright object zooming across the sky. Even an amateur astronomer was baffled by the sight.

Short of watching disaster flicks such as Deep Impact and Armageddon, how often do we get the chance to see asteroids fly by? Given all the talk about asteroid protection and the knowledge that such cosmic rocks have the capability to do serious damage to Earth and the human race, most people probably don’t see asteroid-viewing as being on the same level as star-gazing, but tonight it will be.

Asteroid 2000 EM26, which, at a diameter of 885 feet, is roughly the size of three football fields, will fly by Earth tonight at about 27,000 mph. Don’t worry — it won’t hit the planet, but it will come close enough (almost nine times as far away as the moon) to provide a pretty cool view. The best part is that the Slooh Space Camera will watch the asteroid for us, and Slooh will air a webcast starting at 9:00 pm EST tonight (you can also watch on Space.com). So hey, you can watch the Olympics on one screen and an asteroid flyby on the other. There’s something apropos about that, don’t you think? Especially since some of those skeleton racers and skiers are going almost as fast as the asteroid.

If you’ve never heard of flying snakes, well…I suppose something has to catch the flying squirrels, right? And I’d take flying snakes over flying spiders any day. Flying snakes have conventional movement skills — they undulate and slither and all that, but they can also climb up trees using the scales on their undersides and from there they can launch themselves from branch to branch, covering distances of 300 feet. Scientists have observed that they flatten their bodies to achieve maximum lift, somehow twisting and collapsing their ribs in a shape that looks from the side like a UFO. But the actual mechanics of the process has eluded scientists, and they’re using 3-D printing to help them figure it out.

Scientists don’t even fully understand why snakes fly in the first place. Escaping predators is a likely bet, as is evading land-bound predators, given that they can largely avoid traveling on the ground. They might even hunt via flight — if I were looking out for snakes, I probably wouldn’t think to look up. Whatever the reason(s), flying snakes exhibit an impressive mastery of aerodynamics, and biomechanists from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg finally turned to technology to help them understand nature.

Daylight savings time is here. It’s getting dark sooner, so there’s no point in going outside, right? All you want to do anyway is get inside to stream this particularly awesome assortment of sci-fi fare. And even if you’re too busy farming, you can just watch something on your mobile device.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (Netflix Instant)
A love-it-or-hate-it film that will probably see more adoration on this website than others, Buckaroo Banzai is a cult classic in the purest form. With a plot that involves Peter Weller’s surgeon/physicist/rock star bringing aliens into the world and having to destroy them, along with a high-grade bunch of ragtags, this is a mindbender of the highest order. There are maybe five minutes in this movie that aren’t driven by badass imagination and wackiness, but even those are damn awesome. We still somehow never got to see Banzai take on the World Crime League, nor did Yakov Smirnoff ever become the National Security Advisor. In present-day America, 8th dimension opens you.

Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano has been a hot bed of UFO activity for a long, long time. Over the years there have been hundreds of sightings, eyewitness accounts, and videos originating from the site, including the latest offering above. This version of the clip comes from a Mexican news broadcast.

The video was taken just a few weeks ago, and the images were captured on May 31. Is it just me, or does this look like something cut out of a Plan 9 From Outer Space knockoff? You can see a floating little silver ball zip around the night sky, then apparently take a dive into the smoldering volcanic opening. Or, you know, it flies past the mountain and lands somewhere else.