Occasionally we venture to the “wild side,” looking at strange bits and pieces in the news.
When we elaborate on them at length, we do so in “Special Reports.”
But let’s do a quick spin into smaller curiosities.
Take the story of the “Little Sparrow” of Pittsburgh.
Real name: Patricia Kopta.
This was an attractive, married, and professional woman who in youth certainly seemed to have her act together.
A former straight-A student, model, and dance instructor, she later worked in finance and then at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. She was married to a truck driver named Bob Kopta for twenty years.
One day at work, Patricia claimed to have encountered an angel in the building’s elevator. The door opened and there he was.
She said the angel revealed the future of the world to her, and immediately afterward, Kopta quit her job and began preaching on the streets and especially at Pittsburgh Steeler football games, obsessively warning everyone she could pull aside that the end of the world was nigh.
She did this from morning till late in the evening, walking so much in parking lots and along busy roads in Ross Township north of Pittsburgh that she wore out shoes and often bled from the feet. Patricia was locally famous as “the Sparrow” because of her slight build and the way she seemed to flit from one corner to the next.
For a while she was institutionalized for what were diagnosed as “delusions of grandeur” and “schizophrenia.” Then, in 1992, the now-bedraggled woman simply vanished, breaking the heart of her dedicated husband. After years of fruitless search, he signed a death certificate for her.
But Patricia was alive and somehow in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, where she was located in a nursing home more than thirty years after her disappearance. No one knows how she got there.
Her husband is now dead (he never got her to come back, dying with a broken heart), and as far as we can tell, she is still alive in a nursing home at age 86.
What was it Patricia saw in that elevator?
If we adhere to what the Bible says (“by their fruits you will know them,” Matthew 7:16), it doesn’t seem like such a good “angel.”
Let’s leave it at this: Pray for her.
Do you believe in curses?
It seems more and more today do. [scroll for more:]
And a famous football star, Peyton Manning, even wondered, on live television, if one was operating on the Buffalo Bills football team, which, speaking of heartbreak, has been frustrated for decades in its attempts at a championship, despite teams with stellar talent (such as its current quarterback, Josh Allen, who was the league’s “most valuable player” last year and will go down as a historically great player).
Despite Allen, Buffalo has lost six playoffs with him at the helm (just last week losing to the Denver Broncos in overtime), and in the 1990s, went to the Super Bowl for four straight years and lost every game (including, in its first Super Bowl, another nail-biting overtime game that became infamous when a last-second field goal attempt went wide right).
We decided to look into this idea of a “curse” (Manning sent a barrel over Niagara Falls with past Super Bowl memorabilia to “break” it), and when we did, we learned that the Bills’ Highmark Stadium is built near and on land believed to be ancient Native American burial grounds, specifically of the Wenrohronon (Erie) people, with artifacts disturbed during parking lot construction and a historic pioneer cemetery (Sheldon Cemetery) remaining nearby, leading to local legends and discussions about spiritual significance and respect for the land, especially as the new stadium construction begins.
Indian burial grounds are notoriously “haunted” (for those who believe in such things, which we are prone to do). By the by: President William McKinley was assassinated nearby in 1901 (after arriving on a train that passed a spot on the Niagara Gorge called “Devil’s Hole” (on his deathbed he asked forgiveness for his attacker and said his death was God’s Will. His last words, spoken as he succumbed to assassination wounds, reflected his piety and gentle nature: “‘Good-bye, good-bye to all.’ ‘It is God’s way. His Will be done — not ours,” often followed by murmuring parts of the hymn \”Nearer, My God, to Thee\.” He also whispered comforting words to his wife and told aides to “Go easy on him, boys,” referring to his assassin, demonstrating forgiveness even in death.).
The presence of these burial grounds contributed to local folklore, with some fans holding Indigenous ceremonies to address these beliefs. Unfortunately, pagan and occult “ceremonies” make a bad situation worse. (Pray for the team, which has so many excellent, good people, and that area, and the freedom of any wandering souls.)
Nearly matching all the above in strangeness was the life of a California conman named Jeff Lash. He was an eccentric gun collector who stashed away literally tons of ammunition and preparation supplies (again, for an apocalypse) and convinced a string of women to give him hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Lash had spent years telling people an elaborate story that he was a government agent (or working for high-level intelligence) and, in some versions of his claims, that he was not fully human—an “alien” or other extraordinary being.
After his body was found (following a welfare check in 2015), the case drew major media attention because the items recovered looked like the cache of someone preparing for violence, even though authorities did not link him to a specific terrorist plot. The public “alien conman” angle largely came from the bizarre personal mythology he built around himself and the way he allegedly exploited those beliefs to gain money, loyalty, or obedience from people he drew into his orbit.
There’s no doubt he was a conman. And certainly no evidence that he was either a secret government agent or, of course, an alien. And yet according to the Hollywood Reporter, there was strangeness indeed.
You know that conspiracy theory about black helicopters?
That seemed to be operative here.
“Laura VadBunker doesn’t believe Lash’s alien-spy hype,” says the Reporter about one woman who knew Lash. “But one thing has always bothered her. ‘To tell you the truth, no matter where we traveled, there was always a blacked-out helicopter hovering overhead; that’s one thing I can’t explain,’ she says. ‘All the way to Santa Monica, all the way home. I said, ‘Guys, what’s with the helicopter?’ They said nothing. I said, ‘No, really.’ That bothered me. I mean, what are the odds? No matter where I traveled with … would be that damn black helicopter. I cannot explain that away.'”
We report; you try and figure it out.
[resources:Special Reports] and Lying Wonders, Strangest Things]
