by Aisling Ashbery

Created on: January 04, 2011

The wrath of God, environmental mayhem, and secret government testing are all explanations that have been offered for the bizarre happenings in Arkansas. Just days after residents of a small Arkansas town were shocked when up to 5,000 blackbirds fell from the sky, men and women were baffled again when as many as 100,000 dead drum fish were discovered along the Arkansas River.

A member of Arkansas Game and Fish told TodaysTHV that fish kills happen every year, but it’s the scale of this one that makes it remarkable.  The official offered disease as a possible explanation, but until tests are run it’s only a speculation. Despite the official’s explanation of disease, New York Daily News online quoted experts who say that a sudden drop in water temperature is the most likely cause of death for the fish.

Though changing temperatures and isolated disease may seem like reasonable explanations, the event has others raising eyebrows. The massive fish death is especially shocking considering how soon after the freak blackbird deaths it occurred. Though right now there is no environmental evidence to suggest it, the close proximity in both location and time of the two events has people looking at ways they may be connected.

In fact, these are not the only massive animal deaths reported recently. New York Daily News cited instances of massive fish deaths in Maryland and Brazil, as well as 500 blackbirds dropping from the sky in Louisiana. They are events that would seem more at home in an apocalyptic science fiction movie than in news headlines.

Because the occurrences are so bizarre, the explanations being offered are equally dramatic. One such explanation is the charge that the deaths may have been caused by experimental military testing conducted by the government. Though some might dismiss this as a baseless conspiracy theory, Paul Joseph Watson and Alex Jones of Prisonplanet.com claim that scalar weapons would be capable of producing such scenarios.

According to Watson and Jones, scalar weapons are those that have the power to reproduce environmental phenomena – in other words, they are weapons that can change the weather. They cite William Cohen, the 1997 Defense Secretary, who attested that eco-terrorism was becoming a real concern – in the quote, Cohen mentions such terrifying abilities as being able to “alter the climate, set off earthquakes [and] volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.”

But even if experimental government weapons were capable of causing freak animal deaths, is it really feasible to suggest that the government is testing them above residential Arkansas? Watson and Jones say yes. They cite long lists of instances where they claim government testing was the result of injury or death to unsuspecting animals as well as humans, though all their citations are of course controversial.

Whether the result of a government conspiracy, an injured environment, or the wrath of God, one thing is certain: there’s something odd going on in Arkansas.

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