Occasionally we ventures to the “wild side,” looking at strange bits and pieces in the news.
When we elaborate on them, we do so in “Special Reports.”
But let’s do a quick spin into some smaller curiosities.
Take the story of the “Little Sparrow” of Pittsburgh. Real name: Patricia Kopta.
This was a married, attractive, and professional woman who 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 Bob Kopta, a retired truck driver, for twenty years.
One day at work, she claimed to have encountered an angel, presumably in the elevator. She said the angel had revealed the future to her, and immediately afterward, she quit her job and began preaching on the streets of Pittsburgh, and especially at Pittsburgh Steeler football games, obsessively warning that the end of the world was nigh.
She did this from morning till late in the evening, wearing her shoes out and walking so much in parking lots and busy roads in Ross Township, north of Pittsburgh, that she often bled from the feet. She was locally famous as “the Sparrow” because os her slight build and the way she seemed to flit around. For a while she was institutionalized (for “delusions of grandeur” and “schizophrenia”), and then, in 1992, simply vanished, breaking the heart of her dedicated husband.
She ultimately ended up in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, where she was located after being missing for over thirty years.
Her husband is now dead (he never got her to come back, dying with a broken heart), and as far as we can tell, is still alive in a nursing home at age 86. What was it she saw in that elevator?
If we by what the Bible says (“by their fruits you will know them,” Proverbs) it doesn’t seem like such a good “angel.”
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 television, if one was operating on the Buffalo Bill football team, which has for decades been frustrated 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 quarterback).
Despite Allen, Buffalo has lost six playoffs with him at the realm (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 nailbiting overtime game that became famnous when a last-second field goal attempt went wide left).
We decided to look into this idea of a “curse,” and did learn 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 are prone to do).
The presence of these burial grounds contributed to local folklore, with some fans holding ceremonies to address these beliefs. Hopefully the “ceremonies” were not occult ones; that is guaranteed to make any bad situation worse.
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 Dawn would be that damn black helicopter. I cannot explain that away.'”
[resources: Special Reports]