Hello, would you like to buy something weird? Hammer Time is our guide to things that are for sale in New York City: fantastic, consequential and freakishly grotesque archival treasures that appear in public for just a brief moment, most likely never to be seen again.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was never one to shy away from controversy. When Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie endorsed Mein Kampf without his approval, Jung attempted to eradicate pro-Nazi influence from his publication.1 He parted ways with Sigmund Freud, who once called Jung “his adopted eldest son, his crown prince and successor,” over differing theories on the unconscious. And, as the sex scenes so dispassionately depicted [...]

In its 1990s prime, the late-night radio show "Coast To Coast AM" was an unscripted audio mix of "Twin Peaks" and "The X-Files." It was corny, uncomfortable, laughable, utterly paranoid, completely of its time, and occasionally terrifying. Because it was broadcast in the middle of the night, if you listened it was generally because you were alone: driving a deserted highway, fighting insomnia, cramming for a test, finishing some code, working a graveyard shift.

A parade of crazies appeared every night, people with no apparent sense of humor, explaining the most obscure and ridiculous theories and conspiracies. And then, because this was also the golden age of weird [...]

Part of a series about monsters and other scary things happening here through Halloween.

I fed myself a steady diet of the paranormal growing up, in between all the comic books and all the television. The enthusiasm does tend to wane the further away from childhood you get, but it never really goes away. I grew up hoping, believing, that the world was weirder than the grown-ups would tell you. And I liked it that way. It helped that I grew up in West Virginia, where you're never too far from the woods or a mountain or a swamp, places for mysterious things to hide and then jump out [...]

1. Naming baby girls "Layla," "Leila" or "Lila."

2. Menus written in chalk on walls of restaurants

3. Conversations about how mosquitos seem to be around longer this year

4. INXS songs on the radio

5. UFO sightings

"A few weeks later, Mr. Halt was told by his boss that the lights were back and so he went back out into the forest with a couple of policeman, a camera and a cassette recorder. At the site he saw 'indentations of around six to eight feet wide' and increased levels of radiation as well as broken branches on the trees. Mr. Halt said: 'Milling around, one of the individuals saw a bright glowing object like an eye. It would appear to be winking and was shedding molten metal and silently moving through the trees and at one point it actually approached us.' He said that the object [...]

On the night after the Heaven's Gate UFO cultists were discovered dead by mass suicide in a San Diego suburban McMansion, I was standing in a dark patch of the Presidio, watching the Hale-Bopp comet and its forked tail over the Marin Headlands. Someone passed around binoculars, somebody else passed a little pipe around, and after a half hour everyone was cold and bored and we drifted back to the battleship-gray Victorian on Haight Street that I shared with a rotating group of five or six pals.

My bedroom was just a large closet on the upper floor, with enough room for a narrow mattress and a chest [...]

NORTH LAS VEGAS—An inflatable space pod to be attached to the International Space Station in a couple of years will be like no other piece of the station. NASA is contracting a private company to build an inflatable space pod for the International Space Station. Instead of metal, its walls will be made of floppy cloth, making it easier to launch (and then inflate). NASA said Wednesday that it had signed a $17.8 million contract with Bigelow Aerospace to build the module, which could reach the space station as soon as 2015.

We were driving to Lake Tahoe, my wife and I, headed north on one of the [...]

These ridiculous amateur astronomers don't recognize extraterrestrial craft, and mistake them for horrifying NATO drone-mother crafts who give birth to thousands of drone babies.

"That such a strong drought should follow the 'One in 100-year' drought of 2005 only five years afterwards in 2010 is exceptional, and of concern. The 2010 drought appears to have been more widespread than in 2005, and this may have important consequences in regions across Amazonia already prone to drought stress. The underlying climatic cause needs to be understood more fully, and its impact quantified, not just on the ecology of the region, but also on society." —Patrick Meir, professor of ecosystem science at the University of Edinburgh, on satellite measurements of rainfall that indicate 3 million square kilometers of rainforest went dry last year. The resulting [...]