Alright, it’s Halloween, so let’s get to the weird shit.
So… what on earth happened at the Bayside Mall in Miami at the start of the year?
A considerable spectacle/mystery unfolded in Miami in January to help inaugurate the new year: and it is still entirely unclear what exactly transpired at the busy mall that night. Here’s how Forbes covered it.
I’m late covering it, but I was taking notes at the time, before world events drew our attention away.
If you were to go with the more excitable content producers online, you’d be asking whether 10 ft tall aliens or interdimensional ‘shadow beings’ materialised in a crowded mall, terrifying scores of people.
Some of the descriptions from the time made it sound like it would make a pretty good horror/sci-fi film.
If you’re not inclined to go with the more excitable crowd, then we need to look for less extraordinary explanations.
At the very least, what appears to be the case is that a significant incident occurred in the Miami mall, causing people to flee in a panic.
What was striking from footage was the scale of police response: there was a massive convoy of police cars that showed up to this incident.
According to police statements that were changing from hour to hour, a crowd of teenagers were either fighting with sticks or setting off fireworks. There was also an early initial claim of an active shooter being at the location.
An active shooter would explain the excessive police response. However, the active shooter story appeared to fizzle out quite quickly.
Furthermore, the cops apparently only arrested four teenagers.
The real weirdness came with all the claims and stories that quickly spread on social media, TikTok and YouTube.
Even news channels and websites in the US apparently reported on the incident.
There were overwrought claims, for example, that 10 ft entities were witnessed in the mall: and that this is what people were fleeing from.
According to some accounts, these terrifying beings were ‘glitching’ or materialising and disappearing. Some claimed that people were shooting at the entities – and this was what was mistaken for either fireworks or an active shooter event.
It is virtually impossible to know whether all these claims or accounts are true or not.
Are people just playing games? Trying to create a viral story? Is it mass hysteria? And were a bunch of people simply jumping on the bandwagon once a few initial claims had been made? Did it essentially become a game of Chinese whispers?
Well, that is generally how viral untruths proliferate on the Internet. Someone or something gets things started and then there’s a snowball effect via social media, and within hours there are channels and sites trying to capitalise via clickbait content.
Before you know what’s what, an urban legend has already been created: and it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction.
The fact that some initial ‘witnesses’ subsequently retracted their claims or deleted their accounts suggests some degree of fabrication was going on. In fact, almost all the January YouTube videos allegedly featuring first person accounts aren’t there anymore.
@ainesoddities This is the clearest Footage I have found of the incident that happened inside the Miami Mall. Looks like 8-10ft tall something… some people say that the co-ordinates were put in wrong for the Portal and they ended up in the Mall (reverse the co-ordinates and the portal would take you to Antarctica). Also could be Project Blue Beam #since the Epstein Case names have come out… You decide. #miami #portal #miamimallaliens #miamimallcreatures #miamimall #reversecoordinates #miamiclearvideo #tallbeings
But why would anyone in the first instance make up such a specific account of 10 ft tall beings?
There were also claims that police were confiscating phones or deleting people’s video recordings. It’s impossible to ascertain whether that’s true or not – I haven’t found any proof of it.
It is odd how large the police convoy was that responded to whatever the initial calls were about.
We should also mention that video footage does exist, allegedly showing glimpses of whatever happened that night. Footage varies in quality (and the reliability of the footage is entirely open to question), but some claim to show the anomalous entities in the mall.
Some are interesting: but none are decisive. And it isn’t difficult to doctor video footage or create fake images. It seems mostly fakes.
@guynamedfitz #miami #baysidemall #aliens #creatures #miamimall #miamialiens #mall #miamialien #ufo #paranormal #witness #baysidemiami #bayside #alien #aliens #aliensighting #extraterrestrial #extraterrestres #et #uap #ovni #ovnis #ufos #ufosighting #ufosky #fyp #viral
@justmeloge
It could be considered odd, however, that neither the police nor the mall itself has released any footage of what went on. The mall presumably has its own security cameras, and individual stores might also have their own cameras.
Instead, all there appears to be is low quality (alleged) footage supposedly taken by witnesses on camera phones.
It’s also curious that the mall remained closed for weeks after the incident. If all that happened was that some kids caused some unrest and the cops came and made some arrests, then it’s curious that the mall would stay shut for weeks.
There were some reports of looting or vandalism, however: maybe that’s an explanation.
So, what the hell did happen here?
If we’re being even-handed, we have to assume that it was a mixture of things. First, if there were kids letting off fireworks, it could explain why someone would mistake the noise and commotion for an active shooter situation.
Which would in turn explain why so many police showed up: they might’ve initially thought they were responding to an unfolding mass shooting event.
If it was teenagers with fireworks, this would also explain what people were fleeing from. And it would also explain why only a handful of kids were reportedly arrested: it would only have been a handful of troublemakers setting off fireworks.
That would all make sense: there’s just the problem of the supposed 10 ft tall entities.
Which means that either everyone telling that story was lying… or something happened that somehow fits that description of events.
One possibility is of course that there simply were 10 ft tall beings in the mall. But let’s call that our last resort.
The two other possibilities are either a mass hallucination/delusion… or a deliberately manufactured event involving hoaxers.
I don’t know what evidence there is for a mass hallucination. But as leaked documents show, induction of mass hallucination isn’t as farfetched a possibility as it necessarily sounds.
As for the second option, it seems entirely possible that an illusion could be created using holographic technology or some other means.
That kind of tech exists.
In fact, holograms could explain the alleged ‘glitching’ in the anomalous beings appearance.
Who would conduct such an illusion and why?
Well, for one thing it would be an interesting social and psychological experiment: create the scary event in a very busy public place, see how people react, track how the accounts and stories develop, see how far and how quickly the stories travel, monitor the public response and the theories, the media coverage, etc.
Could this whole thing have been a psy-op?
Such things have been known to have been discussed before: by the CIA in Cuba, for example.
Could they be testing the water? Gaging how ready people are for an event of this type? Or at least using it to simply see what would happen?
Some talk, I’m sure, will also turn to things like the alleged Project Bluebeam: and the theorised plan to stage a fake otherworldly invasion using mass illusions.
In which case, this incident in Miami (and other, lesser reported incidents around the world) might be small test runs of the capabilities.
All of this being said, I’m still inclined to believe that the police were simply responding to what they mistakenly thought to be an active shooter situation, which was actually just a bunch of teenagers setting off fireworks.
The rest of it, presumably, was a game of Chinese whispers that got out of hand and went viral.
If it was actually a psy-op, one would expect there to have even more media coverage to maximise the effects.
That being said, it’s also curious that the news outlets that did report the incident didn’t – as far as I can ascertain – bother speaking to eyewitnesses about what they saw. Yet, from what news clips I was able to look at online, no interviews were attempted. The only accounts therefore were from social media, primarily TikTok.
But I won’t pretend to know what the answer is or what really went down that night in Miami.
It is odd that anyone – let alone multiple people – would claim to have seen 10 ft tall beings during all of this.
What would be funny is if there was an actual reality glitch in Miami that evening and interdimensional entities did accidentally materialise in the middle of a shopping mall.
As I’ve been mostly sceptical here, I’ll provide balance by linking to this Reddit post claiming to be an eyewitness account of what happened. I don’t find it particularly convincing: but it’s an interesting tale. Here’s a taste of it: ‘A 10-foot-tall metallic gray humanoid figure climbed out the burning pile of metal seemingly unfazed by the intense heat from the fire. I needed to get a picture of it. The lights then went out and the only source of light in the mall was the bonfire I which the creature was standing. It finally climbed out the fire, limbs popping, as it spoke a mysterious language. In shock I dropped my phone…’
‘The gray figure’s head snapped to look at me. Its whole body was thin and bones protruded from random points in its body. It had at least a dozen eyes, no nose, and a thin slit mouth with teeth visible behind its thin metallic skin. It began to crawl towards me, knocking displays over, limbs cracked and deformed so it could walk on all four…’
You get the idea.
As if this wasn’t already strange enough, it appears to have been the case that a very similar, almost identical, incident occurred at the exact same location and at the same time in January the previous year too.
The only thing missing from last year’s incident was the 10 ft aliens story: otherwise it seems to have been the same story, with a heavy police presence, alleged fireworks being set off by teenagers, and people fleeing, etc.
Presumably the only reason last year’s incident didn’t blow up like this year’s did is because of the alleged mass witnessing of a supernatural incident that was claimed this time.
A strange story, to say the least.
But I’m going to suggest not the mind-blowing or paradigm-shattering event a lot of people seem to think it was.
One does wonder, however, how the media or the authorities would present the facts if 10 ft tall entities really did show up in a busy shopping centre some day.
One wonders if some kind of contingency protocol is already in place for such an occurrence.
