After the face-eating in Miami was reported, a bunch of other stories popped up on the Internet, stories that were similar only in that they also featured disturbed people doing awful things with human body parts. There was the man in New Jersey who cut his stomach open and tried to throw his intestines at the police officers who entered his home. The man in Baltimore who ate the brain and heart of a missing person. The chef in Japan who fed his cooked genitals to the people in his restaurant. These stories and others like them (enough that one blog has started diligently collecting all of them in one place) all started showing up on the Internet and adding to this mystery.

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Why are all of these horribly gruesome and violent (but otherwise unrelated) events happening right now, of all times? Why has it only been happening in the last month?

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Bath salts again?

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The boring truth is probably that they haven't been. I'm not saying these stories didn't happen -- they all did -- I'm saying that stuff like this almost definitely happens all over the world, all the time. Remember last year, when everyone thought the world was ending because birds kept dying? Five thousand birds dropped out of the sky in Arkansas, and then thousands of dead fish washed up on the shores of the Arkansas River, and then 500 birds died suddenly in Louisiana, and then a bunch of other birds died in a bunch of other places all over the world, all within the same two-month span.