Drue Wagner

Strangest State: A UFO in Austin and a Rare Cloned Horse

Weird news from far-flung Texas.

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A version of this story ran in the May / June 2021 issue.

From the May/June 2021 issue

AMARILLO //  A rare cloned horse raised in Amarillo is heading to its forever home at the San Diego Zoo, KAMR reports. The endangered Przewalski horse named Kurt was born after his father’s DNA was frozen for 40 years. The veterinarian who raised Kurt hopes that the horse will be able to boost his species’ numbers in California.  

 

WACO // Ted Nugent, the draft-dodging, Trump-loving rock musician, is auctioning off some of his prized belongings in Central Texas. Among the items the 73-year-old Nugent is selling are vintage guitars, vehicles, and bow hunting gear, KWTX reports. He calls the items “the coolest stuff available to mankind,” adding, “My outrageous, adventurous lifetime has accumulated way too much stuff than anybody could reasonably put to use.”

 

BRAZOS COUNTY // A dog and cat tested positive for the UK variant of COVID-19, marking the first known positive cases of the variant in pets, Texas A&M Today reports. The black Labrador mix and the shorthair cat live in the same home as a human who had been infected with COVID-19. Their owner said the pets were sneezing more than usual but otherwise seemed OK. 

 

AUSTIN //  In a visit to Texas’ capital city, Cleveland Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield reportedly saw an unidentified flying object. Mayfield wrote on Twitter that he and his wife saw a “very bright ball of light going straight down out of the sky” near Lake Travis. As his Twitter mentions mounted, Mayfield’s wife, Emily Wilkinson, backed him up, writing, “I’m typically not someone who buys into UFO talk. But all I know is I saw something tonight that I have never seen.”

 

SAN ANTONIO // A wax museum that featured a figure of Donald Trump removed the installation after people kept attacking it, NBC News reports. Visitors did the most damage to the Trump figure’s face by punching and scratching it, said a representative of Ripley Entertainment, the parent company for Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks. She said crowds had similar reactions to installations of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. “Political figures can be a little bit more polarizing,” the spokesperson said. 

 

TEXAS CITY // A woman was arrested at an Office Depot for refusing to wear a mask—just days after she had been arrested for refusing to comply with another business’s mask rule, Fox News reports. Terry Wright, a 65-year-old from Oregon, had allegedly broken the mask policy of a Bank of America branch in Galveston. Police officers in Texas City, recognizing Wright from video footage of the bank incident, arrested her in connection with an outstanding arrest warrant.