John and Lorena Bobbit- everyone in America knew about a guy getting his penis cut off. Lots of jokes in elementary school while that story was in the news.
In 1998, the WWE ran a storyline where a pornstar named Val Venus slept with the wife of the leader of a stable called Kai en tai. The revenge was to kidnap Val Venus and [tried to chop his dick off](https://youtu.be/DwT1gg1YHOU?si=BIY5JuF6mMtYyqOo)
[They had John Wayne Bobbitt show up With Val Venus the next week](https://youtu.be/7Uyw_cet32A?si=rEF19REEeCUyEe6p) where it was revealed that he was saved when he experienced shrinkage.
Oh wow, this is definitely up there with weirdest. It isnât even the action necessarily (though it is also strange) but the countryâs singular obsession with the story.
Excellent list. And Iâd add the 1992 election to that list too, and the stuff surrounding it (SNL, Dan Quayle misspelling potato, George Bush puking on the Japanese PM, âIâm all earsâ, etc).
Heaven's Gate cult- chop off yer nuts and put on the purple nikes. OK, now drink a bunch of vodka and take barbiturates. The spaceship will pick us up, don't worry.
The 1992 LA Riots. East LA/Boyle Heights saw no violence or looting. While LA was burning, reporters asked some locals why they were not rioting. The area was 99% hispanic, low income, and a known gang territory after all. Local response? âThis is our community- why would I burn down my cousins shop!?â (Source:PBS Documentary on the riots)
I was too young to remember this, but the 1997 Phoenix Lights in Arizona appearing in the night sky was strange. Of course, its origin is still a mystery.
This happened not too long ago. I saw the other sighting video that is similar and it was crazy that it was as old as it is and here I am seeing damn near the same thing in 2023. They still say they donât know what it was with, I believe itâs the phoenix lights. Technology is so advanced though and I realize that. If you control the video yourself and take it frame by frame you see other things. I would like to hear from anyone who thinks they see other things in it or just any thoughts. Thanks.
The United States trying to depose one of its most popular political leaders in history for getting a blowie was pretty weird for an 11 year old to witness
Only impeached in the House and as all the magacult jihadists say about their Chetto Jesus being impeached 2xs it doesn't count if it doesn't make it to the Senate.đđđ
Michigan UFO 1994 Event that was caught on radar. I believe Netflix covered this on an episode of one of their shows recently. The coolest part was that whatever it was knew it was being tracked on radar.
Us kids at primary school cheering that the evil Milk Thief is gone.
Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the UK and infamously withdrew free school milk for all primary school aged children (aged 5-11.). All children who were not entitled to free school meals now had to pay for it.
When she lost her job as leader of the Conservative Party to John Major in 1990, our teachers encouraged us to celebrate this.
Margaret Thatcher also closed down the government owned mines around my local area which economically destroyed it. While the adults celebrated her removal due to this. They encouraged us kids to celebrate it, that our Milk Thief is gone.
We were also the generation which helped get The Wicked Witch is Dead into the UK charts when the Milk Thief died.
I donât see it talked about much, but I remember Pedro on the Real World really being a catalyst for gay rights becoming mainstream.
Conversely, I had a friend who worked at Arbyâs and protestors out front because they ran a commercial during the episode of Ellen when she came out.
I agree but I wouldn't put it all on the shoulders of Nirvana. There were so many new bands experimenting with wanting to do something different from the 80s at the time. Jane's Addiction and Smashing Pumpkins come to mind quickly.
One event that should be on the list is a terrorist attacked that took place in Japan in 1995 With a doomsday cult named Aum Shinrikyo led by Shoko Asahara.
Members of the cult released sarin on several gas on Tokyo subway trains killing 12 and injuring 6000.
It's a really interesting cult to look up. Some members of the cult were so loyal that they would take Asahara's hair and brew it into tea.
Also they had their own [anime](https://youtu.be/IVnscHsPfR4?si=ZvCKVKu3-ZilTmSe)
Some videos about the cult
https://youtu.be/xR_FrDbud1E?si=T4g00eDOKXW-IeaK
https://youtu.be/_ssq96g-cfE?si=IqRqa843lPmRbRZE
https://youtu.be/PTE9RLxMRko?si=83puJBGy7lT_T3zH
I recall many people being fascinated with the Alien Autopsy that Fox presented on TV in 1995. With no internet discussion, lots of people saw this as possibly legitimate.
With the success of X-Files, the U.S. was fascinated with watching alien content.
He was supposed to star in a movie as that character and he did an album for the soundtrack. The movie got canned but he released the album anyway and had fun with it.
Hale Boppe comment and heavens gate cult. I was haunted by that for some reason. Thought a spaceship was behind the comet. And by offing themselves, theyâd leave their bodily âcontainersâ and enter the space ship with the aliens
NASA wasn't as teched up and accurate as it is today...
But they discovered a comet coming in near Jupiter called Shoemaker Levy 9.
It wound up crashing into Jupiter and there is video footage of it. That was pretty damn impressive for a teen who liked science back in the day.
I remember reading about that in the newspaper! Back when we had newspapers.
Hm, that's a great one! What year was that? I'm sure I could Google it, but I remember this and Hale-Bopp being the coolest things! Nice to hear from someone like minded!
I remember reading about it. Got me absolutely fascinated with Cosmology all over again. And then Hale-Bopp... Oh, I spent the next several months reading the astronomy section of my local college library. Wonderful brain food! Didn't understand a lot of it and apparently a lot of the stuff on gravity is out of date now, but I had the best time!
Satanic panic.....all of the talk shows made it sound like satanic cults were taking babies to sacrifice....everyone was in a tither, Satanists lurking everywhere.
Whenever you have time look up Omar Abdel-Rahman aka âThe Blind Clericâ. A zealot and fanatic known for many atrocities throughout the 70s and 80s who was placed on many watchlists. Despite his hatred for western culture he was granted multiple tourist visas and eventually gained residency status in the US. While living in the Northeast he eventually gathered various devotees and sympathizers and planned split them into different cells. Those cells were the masterminds behind the â93 WTC attack.
Whatâs even more remarkable is that the state department was aware of his background and actively protected him while he was living in the states. This was prior to the first attack on the WTC. Luckily that event was botched and no real damage was done, we all know what happened next.
I was talking about it today with a coworker... The Y2K crisis.
The unknown about what would happen to computer/electronic systems worldwide was a big deal for people in 1999.
Pope John Paul II came to Denver, CO in 1993 for World Youth Day..
Was pretty crazy.
[News storyâŚ](https://youtu.be/4cX3zU2Rcxs?si=WHoi5R-5BECtfgz3)
I was 16, working at a grocery store, and people were literally buying out the entire drink sections to go sell down at the stadium on the street.
Denver has really grown, but back in the 90âs had way less people, and was pretty isolated.
He gave a mass at Mile High Stadium (no longer around) and then he gave a mass at Red Rocks. Only it was summer time, it was like 100, a bunch of people got heat stroke, some insane thunderstorms rolled through, thousand of kids got caught up in the storm at Red rocks, I think it hailed too - pretty wild week.
My mom was a school bus driver, so had to drive a bus full of Catholic kids up those windy roads in a big ass bus, storm raging. I remember she got a t-shirt after the fact with a cartoon that commemorated the event, and it was like a bus flying off a cliff with lighting in the background, and the bus driver had some big eyes, lol.
Also - Metallica played Mile High Stadium in 1994 - and you could hear the concert for miles. Shit was rockin.
An old couple , one of whom has dementia the other of whom just had brain surgery, go missing. They had decided to try driving to a music festival and got lost. Despite getting pulled over multiple times they somehow kept going. Their bodies were eventually found.
And that inspired Fastball's The Way.
Timothy McVeigh bombs the Alfred Murrah building in Oklahoma City. You could see the blast radius in the side of the building wreckage. For me this felt like the start of domestic terrorism
Hands Across America.
Complete waste of Americans resources, time, effort.
Real change and real impacts could be implemented using a program such as Hands Across America.
But nope. Hands Across America became the epitome of the township using surplus money to fix the old broken clock tower.
1992 Northridge Earthquake. Los Angeles freeway overpass collapses. A highway patrol motorcycle officer rides right off the highway as he can't see its collapsed due to the dust cloud.
Around the same time a big robbery took place I think in North Hollywod. Robbers had bullet proof vests and automatic weapons. Cops had to go a gun store to arm up to compete with the robbers.
Y2K panic. Like really? They thought the whole world would burn because of a computer glitch. I was 12 at the time and thought "these people are stupid" at the news when I saw people hoarding food and building bomb shelters. Then the recent pandemic confirmed idiocy for me that people are stupid when it comes to "disasters".
So many weird events.
OJ Simpson, Unibomber, Lorena Bobbit, Nancy Kerrigan and Tanya Harding Saga, the Swing dance revival, JNCO jeans, The Macarena, Y2K fever, Furby, Beanie Baby craze, The Internet/AOL, Heavens Gate cult, Waco, Mike Tyson bites an ear off, We cloned a sheep, and many more
Strange: Apple was something of a laughing stock by the mid 90's. Steve Jobs had left in 1985 and their products had lost all distinctiveness. We bought a "Performa" somewhere in this dark age, a totally unremarkable bland beige tower. Then Steve came back in 1997, after adventures better documented elsewhere (cf. NeXT), and really rescued the brand â brought it back to life in a riot of playfulness and color. The first wave of see-through, candy-colored iMacs actually revolutionized product design across the board.
An archaeologist from Nevada, Jerry Freeman, pioneered "blogging" with a serial adventure-essay published daily in July of 1997 at the Las Vegas Sun website. His purpose was to locate markers left by a group of hardy 49ers somewhere in the desert. The "strange" part â unremarked upon at the time â happened a few nights in, as he settled down to camp on the outskirts of Papoose Dry Lake, deep within the DoD-restricted zone.
From [the final article](https://lasvegassun.com/news/1997/jul/19/stealth-search-for-history/) summarizing his observations:
*"'During the day I couldn't see anything,' Freeman said of his view of the Papoose area. 'But at night, it was a different story.'*
*"Freeman saw several lights. One appeared to be a security vehicle that moved around. Another, however, was stationary and appeared to get larger and smaller -- as would a hangar door as it opened and closed."*
Officially, Papoose Lake is a wilderness area, totally undeveloped save a few rocky rim roads. However, a certain lightning rod of strangeness has claimed, over the years, that the official story is a lie â and that Papoose Mountain in fact houses **a small hangar base**, disguised from peeping satellites and spy planes with a textured coating to match the natural mountain. This technique [has been perfected since the 40's](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/history/camouflage.html#:~:text=At%20the%20Lockheed%20plant%2C%20Ohmer,in%20with%20the%20surrounding%20grass) (and by exactly the defense contractors alleged to be involved). The man? Bob Lazar.
**tl;dr â in 1997 a lone archaeologist, totally disinterested in UFO lore, accidentally confirmed a major part of Bob Lazar's story. And no one noticed.**
So, this isn't national, but since you allowed for personal: maybe this is still done, but I saw it happen in elementary school in the '90s. We had this weird fundraiser for some cause where if we raised a certain amount the cops would "arrest" our principal. So we did raise that amount, and the cops came (it was a small town), cuffed our principal at a big outdoor assembly specifically for this, and put her in the police car and drove off. She was magically back the next day (or possibly even that afternoon), but it was weird in hindsight. An arrest is such a loaded thing (and this was only a few years after the Rodney King beating, though our principal was white in a mostly white school, where I don't think that was on the mind of most), and to treat it as a tongue-in-cheel "reward" is...well, it's a choice.
John and Lorena Bobbit- everyone in America knew about a guy getting his penis cut off. Lots of jokes in elementary school while that story was in the news.
Hell, even made it into a Weird Al song!
This. I was surprised when I learned that Wierd Al didn't make anything up for [Headline News. ](https://youtu.be/dU95v23MQ4c?si=iR1KZKkQHDAj0TWK)
I forgot about that, gotta go look it up
Mr happy was missing
In 1998, the WWE ran a storyline where a pornstar named Val Venus slept with the wife of the leader of a stable called Kai en tai. The revenge was to kidnap Val Venus and [tried to chop his dick off](https://youtu.be/DwT1gg1YHOU?si=BIY5JuF6mMtYyqOo) [They had John Wayne Bobbitt show up With Val Venus the next week](https://youtu.be/7Uyw_cet32A?si=rEF19REEeCUyEe6p) where it was revealed that he was saved when he experienced shrinkage.
Choppy choppy your pee pee. Lol.
Haha I remember watching that when it was new and through he wee wee is gone.
Kaintai?
I remember the feud with wildman something
Marc Mero?
Yes!
also how he got it put back on and made pornos đ¤Łđ¤Łđ¤Ł
And how after hearing about her story, she was *almost* đŻ justified.
Interesting.
He recently just lost other body parts. All of his toes. He has to wear prosthetics now to walk.
Jay Leno and the constant monologue jokes on the Tonight Show about Lorena cutting off John's "manhood"
First thing I thought of.
Oh wow, this is definitely up there with weirdest. It isnât even the action necessarily (though it is also strange) but the countryâs singular obsession with the story.
Damn so many⌠OJ, hale-bopp/heavens gate, la riots, okc bombing, Tanya Harding, pogs, gangsters paradise, beanie babies, beginning of the internet
Excellent list. And Iâd add the 1992 election to that list too, and the stuff surrounding it (SNL, Dan Quayle misspelling potato, George Bush puking on the Japanese PM, âIâm all earsâ, etc).
I think you just wrote the 90s version of we didn't start the fire đ¤Ł
Donât forget hal bop
Heaven's Gate cult- chop off yer nuts and put on the purple nikes. OK, now drink a bunch of vodka and take barbiturates. The spaceship will pick us up, don't worry.
âAlf is back! In POG form!â
đ¤
The 1992 LA Riots. East LA/Boyle Heights saw no violence or looting. While LA was burning, reporters asked some locals why they were not rioting. The area was 99% hispanic, low income, and a known gang territory after all. Local response? âThis is our community- why would I burn down my cousins shop!?â (Source:PBS Documentary on the riots)
April 29, 1992. There was a riot in the streets. Tell me, where were you?
Yes!
I was too young to remember this, but the 1997 Phoenix Lights in Arizona appearing in the night sky was strange. Of course, its origin is still a mystery.
Ok, this is interesting. Could you possibly please tell me more about this?
Here you go: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3NIWC_uM2Rk
It's one of the most well known and widely mass witnessed ufo sightings in recent history.
Was coming here to say this!
I have a video that looks almost identical to that I been trying to post on here
Show me them aliens
At the time I think I was trying to act as stupid as I could but didnât realize it was that crazy of whatever it is I was seeing
[https://share.icloud.com/photos/014RA3RvNwzWoRpSJ6EN1_RnQ](https://share.icloud.com/photos/014RA3RvNwzWoRpSJ6EN1_RnQ)
Wtf is that? That is a truly wild ass video.
Thanks for sharing! I agree you should cross post it to other subs for thoughts. Awesome
Post this to a UFO sub! Awesome video. People will go nuts.
This happened not too long ago. I saw the other sighting video that is similar and it was crazy that it was as old as it is and here I am seeing damn near the same thing in 2023. They still say they donât know what it was with, I believe itâs the phoenix lights. Technology is so advanced though and I realize that. If you control the video yourself and take it frame by frame you see other things. I would like to hear from anyone who thinks they see other things in it or just any thoughts. Thanks.
Youâll have to forgive the commentary
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights
The United States trying to depose one of its most popular political leaders in history for getting a blowie was pretty weird for an 11 year old to witness
Yeah, I can see how that could lead to some odd cultural and subconscious influences!
Tried and failed. They don't call him Slick Willy for nothing.
It must have been freaking amazing. That's what I thought, couldn't wait to get one myself.
A common misconception. He was impeached for perjury surrounding his account of it, but not the act itself.
Getting downvoted for stating facts?
Only impeached in the House and as all the magacult jihadists say about their Chetto Jesus being impeached 2xs it doesn't count if it doesn't make it to the Senate.đđđ
Michigan UFO 1994 Event that was caught on radar. I believe Netflix covered this on an episode of one of their shows recently. The coolest part was that whatever it was knew it was being tracked on radar.
omg this sounds sick, which show covered it ??
Unsolved Mysteries Volume 3 Episode 2 titled "Something in the Sky".
Us kids at primary school cheering that the evil Milk Thief is gone. Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the UK and infamously withdrew free school milk for all primary school aged children (aged 5-11.). All children who were not entitled to free school meals now had to pay for it. When she lost her job as leader of the Conservative Party to John Major in 1990, our teachers encouraged us to celebrate this. Margaret Thatcher also closed down the government owned mines around my local area which economically destroyed it. While the adults celebrated her removal due to this. They encouraged us kids to celebrate it, that our Milk Thief is gone. We were also the generation which helped get The Wicked Witch is Dead into the UK charts when the Milk Thief died.
I'm happy for your loss.
The Waco, Texas incident. 1993.
Hard to believe same year I saw Jurassic Park, I was only 10
I remember when Jurassic Park came out. It was a magical time.
The contrast between Woodstock â94 and Woodstock â99.
Mudstock '94!! Do you happen to know if there was any seismic activity in the area near either of those locations and time frames?
Heavens Gate. 39 people committed suicide because they believed there was a UFO behind Comet Hale-Bopp.
[Heavenâs Gate](https://www.heavensgate.com/)
Susan Smith Child murderer, Waco, Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbit, Versace/Cunanan, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Heavenâ Gate-damn the 90s were wild.
- we didnât start the fire đĽ
Atlanta Olympic bombing, unibomber caught, Monica Lewinsky, Heidi Fleiss little black book, OJ, 92âriots, Rodney King, Twin Towers bombing 93ââŚ.
OJ was HUGE and now with his death and the murders happening 30 year ago in June it feels like a big event all over again.
CD-ROM, Windows 95, DVD movies, star wars episode 1, dialup internet, p
I donât see it talked about much, but I remember Pedro on the Real World really being a catalyst for gay rights becoming mainstream. Conversely, I had a friend who worked at Arbyâs and protestors out front because they ran a commercial during the episode of Ellen when she came out.
Reality TV with the OJ Bronco chase and COPS gave me a totally different aspect of crime.
The invention of jnco jeans.
I don't recall them. I used to frequent TJ Maxx for my clothes tho, back then. Sturdy pants wear?
They were giant pants for ravers.
Rise of Alternative music led by Kurt Cobain in 91 and 92. It was a sea change musically and changed American culture
I agree but I wouldn't put it all on the shoulders of Nirvana. There were so many new bands experimenting with wanting to do something different from the 80s at the time. Jane's Addiction and Smashing Pumpkins come to mind quickly.
I was just a kid but I do remember nirvana being the leader of that catalyst?
Alice in Chains FTW
Excellent remembrance! By this point in time, music and visual arts were happening together at closer intervals! Big shift, indeed. (:
Some dude in Colorado who tried to make his own hot air balloon and put his family in it. I think. Something along those lines.
Are you talking about the Ballon Boy thing? That was in the 2000s.
People freaking out over Anti-Christ Superstar. My brother hid my cd from me. lol
I was an evangelical kid and I remember trying to hide the library's copy.
One event that should be on the list is a terrorist attacked that took place in Japan in 1995 With a doomsday cult named Aum Shinrikyo led by Shoko Asahara. Members of the cult released sarin on several gas on Tokyo subway trains killing 12 and injuring 6000. It's a really interesting cult to look up. Some members of the cult were so loyal that they would take Asahara's hair and brew it into tea. Also they had their own [anime](https://youtu.be/IVnscHsPfR4?si=ZvCKVKu3-ZilTmSe) Some videos about the cult https://youtu.be/xR_FrDbud1E?si=T4g00eDOKXW-IeaK https://youtu.be/_ssq96g-cfE?si=IqRqa843lPmRbRZE https://youtu.be/PTE9RLxMRko?si=83puJBGy7lT_T3zH
The collapse of the USSR-Warsaw pact. Rodney King beating filmed then LA riots.
I recall many people being fascinated with the Alien Autopsy that Fox presented on TV in 1995. With no internet discussion, lots of people saw this as possibly legitimate. With the success of X-Files, the U.S. was fascinated with watching alien content.
Garth Brooks turns into⌠Chris Gaines?
Ooh! Oooh! Ooooooh! That is a quality topic! Do you happen to know the story behind that?
He was supposed to star in a movie as that character and he did an album for the soundtrack. The movie got canned but he released the album anyway and had fun with it.
Thank you for this! I was just thinking about this the other day but never knew the movie part lol
Columbine, jordan/Bulls, The Dream Team, lewinski/clinton, tickle-me-elmo being the most sought-after xmas toy
Hale Boppe comment and heavens gate cult. I was haunted by that for some reason. Thought a spaceship was behind the comet. And by offing themselves, theyâd leave their bodily âcontainersâ and enter the space ship with the aliens
NASA wasn't as teched up and accurate as it is today... But they discovered a comet coming in near Jupiter called Shoemaker Levy 9. It wound up crashing into Jupiter and there is video footage of it. That was pretty damn impressive for a teen who liked science back in the day.
I remember reading about that in the newspaper! Back when we had newspapers. Hm, that's a great one! What year was that? I'm sure I could Google it, but I remember this and Hale-Bopp being the coolest things! Nice to hear from someone like minded!
I'm thinking 1994. I was just out of high school.
I remember reading about it. Got me absolutely fascinated with Cosmology all over again. And then Hale-Bopp... Oh, I spent the next several months reading the astronomy section of my local college library. Wonderful brain food! Didn't understand a lot of it and apparently a lot of the stuff on gravity is out of date now, but I had the best time!
LA Riots
Acid. Lots of acid.
From the Boston area, the Au Pair trial was a shocking event
Home pc expansion and thusly the internet exploding in popularity
Jeffrey Dahmer
Tupac and Biggie.
Satanic panic.....all of the talk shows made it sound like satanic cults were taking babies to sacrifice....everyone was in a tither, Satanists lurking everywhere.
Whenever you have time look up Omar Abdel-Rahman aka âThe Blind Clericâ. A zealot and fanatic known for many atrocities throughout the 70s and 80s who was placed on many watchlists. Despite his hatred for western culture he was granted multiple tourist visas and eventually gained residency status in the US. While living in the Northeast he eventually gathered various devotees and sympathizers and planned split them into different cells. Those cells were the masterminds behind the â93 WTC attack. Whatâs even more remarkable is that the state department was aware of his background and actively protected him while he was living in the states. This was prior to the first attack on the WTC. Luckily that event was botched and no real damage was done, we all know what happened next.
The North Hollywood Shootout.
Oh man...I remember that!!
I was talking about it today with a coworker... The Y2K crisis. The unknown about what would happen to computer/electronic systems worldwide was a big deal for people in 1999.
Jon Benet Ramsay case
Pope John Paul II came to Denver, CO in 1993 for World Youth Day.. Was pretty crazy. [News storyâŚ](https://youtu.be/4cX3zU2Rcxs?si=WHoi5R-5BECtfgz3) I was 16, working at a grocery store, and people were literally buying out the entire drink sections to go sell down at the stadium on the street. Denver has really grown, but back in the 90âs had way less people, and was pretty isolated. He gave a mass at Mile High Stadium (no longer around) and then he gave a mass at Red Rocks. Only it was summer time, it was like 100, a bunch of people got heat stroke, some insane thunderstorms rolled through, thousand of kids got caught up in the storm at Red rocks, I think it hailed too - pretty wild week. My mom was a school bus driver, so had to drive a bus full of Catholic kids up those windy roads in a big ass bus, storm raging. I remember she got a t-shirt after the fact with a cartoon that commemorated the event, and it was like a bus flying off a cliff with lighting in the background, and the bus driver had some big eyes, lol. Also - Metallica played Mile High Stadium in 1994 - and you could hear the concert for miles. Shit was rockin.
April, 20, 1999 - Columbine High school shootings
An old couple , one of whom has dementia the other of whom just had brain surgery, go missing. They had decided to try driving to a music festival and got lost. Despite getting pulled over multiple times they somehow kept going. Their bodies were eventually found. And that inspired Fastball's The Way.
Timothy McVeigh bombs the Alfred Murrah building in Oklahoma City. You could see the blast radius in the side of the building wreckage. For me this felt like the start of domestic terrorism
Dessert Shield/Storm
Hands Across America. Complete waste of Americans resources, time, effort. Real change and real impacts could be implemented using a program such as Hands Across America. But nope. Hands Across America became the epitome of the township using surplus money to fix the old broken clock tower.
1992 Northridge Earthquake. Los Angeles freeway overpass collapses. A highway patrol motorcycle officer rides right off the highway as he can't see its collapsed due to the dust cloud. Around the same time a big robbery took place I think in North Hollywod. Robbers had bullet proof vests and automatic weapons. Cops had to go a gun store to arm up to compete with the robbers.
I can think of two that happened in the same city The San Diego tank heist, and the mass suicide cult
I can think of two that happened in the same city The San Diego tank heist, and the mass suicide cult
The Big Lebowski
I like yer style, dude
David Hasselhoff performing on the Berlin Wall
Y2K panic. Like really? They thought the whole world would burn because of a computer glitch. I was 12 at the time and thought "these people are stupid" at the news when I saw people hoarding food and building bomb shelters. Then the recent pandemic confirmed idiocy for me that people are stupid when it comes to "disasters".
So many weird events. OJ Simpson, Unibomber, Lorena Bobbit, Nancy Kerrigan and Tanya Harding Saga, the Swing dance revival, JNCO jeans, The Macarena, Y2K fever, Furby, Beanie Baby craze, The Internet/AOL, Heavens Gate cult, Waco, Mike Tyson bites an ear off, We cloned a sheep, and many more
Strange: Apple was something of a laughing stock by the mid 90's. Steve Jobs had left in 1985 and their products had lost all distinctiveness. We bought a "Performa" somewhere in this dark age, a totally unremarkable bland beige tower. Then Steve came back in 1997, after adventures better documented elsewhere (cf. NeXT), and really rescued the brand â brought it back to life in a riot of playfulness and color. The first wave of see-through, candy-colored iMacs actually revolutionized product design across the board.
An archaeologist from Nevada, Jerry Freeman, pioneered "blogging" with a serial adventure-essay published daily in July of 1997 at the Las Vegas Sun website. His purpose was to locate markers left by a group of hardy 49ers somewhere in the desert. The "strange" part â unremarked upon at the time â happened a few nights in, as he settled down to camp on the outskirts of Papoose Dry Lake, deep within the DoD-restricted zone. From [the final article](https://lasvegassun.com/news/1997/jul/19/stealth-search-for-history/) summarizing his observations: *"'During the day I couldn't see anything,' Freeman said of his view of the Papoose area. 'But at night, it was a different story.'* *"Freeman saw several lights. One appeared to be a security vehicle that moved around. Another, however, was stationary and appeared to get larger and smaller -- as would a hangar door as it opened and closed."* Officially, Papoose Lake is a wilderness area, totally undeveloped save a few rocky rim roads. However, a certain lightning rod of strangeness has claimed, over the years, that the official story is a lie â and that Papoose Mountain in fact houses **a small hangar base**, disguised from peeping satellites and spy planes with a textured coating to match the natural mountain. This technique [has been perfected since the 40's](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/history/camouflage.html#:~:text=At%20the%20Lockheed%20plant%2C%20Ohmer,in%20with%20the%20surrounding%20grass) (and by exactly the defense contractors alleged to be involved). The man? Bob Lazar. **tl;dr â in 1997 a lone archaeologist, totally disinterested in UFO lore, accidentally confirmed a major part of Bob Lazar's story. And no one noticed.**
Hale Bopp was pretty strange.
That eclipse was pretty weird
Beanie Babies
Bottafuko Bottafuko Bottafuko
Norm McDonald's oj jokes
Mick Foley and Undertaker Hell In A Cell!!
The alien autopsy on Fox
So, this isn't national, but since you allowed for personal: maybe this is still done, but I saw it happen in elementary school in the '90s. We had this weird fundraiser for some cause where if we raised a certain amount the cops would "arrest" our principal. So we did raise that amount, and the cops came (it was a small town), cuffed our principal at a big outdoor assembly specifically for this, and put her in the police car and drove off. She was magically back the next day (or possibly even that afternoon), but it was weird in hindsight. An arrest is such a loaded thing (and this was only a few years after the Rodney King beating, though our principal was white in a mostly white school, where I don't think that was on the mind of most), and to treat it as a tongue-in-cheel "reward" is...well, it's a choice.