The appetites of Pravda readers appear to have much in common with those here in North America who pick up the National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout line. (Me? Never!) The illustrious Russian daily is reporting that weather balloons retrieved after being sent up into an area of spinning gray fog over the South Pole consistently have their clocks set backward thirty years. Supposedly, the CIA and FBI are fighting for control of research into the anomaly; experiments are underway to send a human subject into the past.

A year ago, I reported on a Pravda story that Saddam was reverse-engineering a UFO that had crashed in a remote Iraqi region, and that the invasion of Iraq may have been about stopping him from gaining control over this presumptively invincible technological advantage. The paper is also describing reports of an alien visitor to a Russian province in the Urals. January, 2004’s unconvincing story of a Russian girl with ‘x-ray vision’, for which I credited Ananova, was also picked up from Pravda.