Dan Liebke's Astonishing Tales

In the late 1970s, the brains trust of The Village People voted 5-4 in favour of the final costume of the group being that of a Red Indian. The decision caused much despair and protest among postal workers who had been the bookmakers’ overwhelming favourites for the role. ‘Have you ever seen a Red Indian [...]

It is thought by many that cloning and genetic manipulation are relatively new scientific breakthroughs. Not so. Documents have been recently discovered that suggests that near-humanoid creatures were being grown in laboratories as early as 1981. The research was originally commissioned in the early 1970s by Dr Peter ‘Columbo’ Falk who had witnessed first hand [...]

We have managed to get our hands on NASA’s top secret report on what really went wrong with the Mars lander last year. Thousands of tiny frogs, apparently. Clogging up the wires, throwing the rotation out of balance with their random hopping about. NASA officials confirm that everybody feels ‘awful’ about what has happened and [...]

In 1974, 12 years after Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned by the South African government, a team of elite troops concocted a plan that would ultimately lead to the overthrow of the apartheid regime.

Using advanced espionage strategies garnered from watching old episodes of Hogan’s Heroes, the elite troops led by Carl Douglas (the tortured poet [...]

The most eerie thing about Ray Parker Jr’s 1985 hit Ghostbusters is that the song was written five years earlier and completely independently of the hit movie with which it eventually became associated (Tango and Cash).

In 1980, Ray had decided to invent some street slang, a sample of which follows:

‘Ghost’ = ‘Angel Dust’
‘Buster’ = ‘Supplier’
‘Strange’ [...]

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is over. It’s been over since 1995 when the cast of Mad About You discovered a radio message emanating from one of the stars in the Orion constellation. Paul Reiser immediately rushed into production a sophisticated supercomputer, powered by neural networks and genetic algorithms and spread across a series of [...]