Murder hornets, aliens and rioting animals: 2020 has been weird

’Tis now the season for reviews of the year, and inherent to the past 12 months is tragedy that would be disrespectful to ignore. Coronavirus obliged millions into lockdown worldwide, but it carved a trail of grief around the world. Today, 272,633 Americans alone lay dead. Click here, refresh and there will, alas, be more tomorrow.

Alongside tragedy – inevitably – came farce. There’ll be a time to explain 2020’s punch-ups over toilet paper, the sourdough frenzy, the lethal movement of virus-denialism and the domestic chaos of enforced proximity.

Related: 'They give me the willies': scientist who vacuumed murder hornets braces for fight

Serious words have and will be written about how the virus spread, tensions rose, economies crashed, systems failed, politics churned.

But to truly appreciate the uniqueness of this pandemic year, we need also to seriously chronicle a list of the absolutely OFF-THE-HOOK events that took place while everyone was either locked inside or kicking off.

Murder hornets

Vespa mandarinia turned up in parts of the US and Canada this year, which was bad, because a) they’re from all the way over in Asia b) they’re the largest hornets in the world and c) anything nicknamed “murder hornet” is not something you want crawling around in your pants – certainly not when Reuters reports the bug can sting multiple times, its venom is toxic and a wound “creates localized necrosis … so you’ll see melting flesh.”

Some poor bastards had to suit up like puffy astronauts and spend months hunting down and tying dental floss to the killer bugs so they could track them to a nest and vacuum them out. The good news? They destroyed the first nest! The bad? Climate change is making North America more habitable for invaders such as these and the nature of globalised trade routes may make elimination impossible. In case you can still sleep at night, America, February reported similarly foreign Burmese pythons – which can kill and swallow a deer – are now officially out of control in Florida.

Contact with aliens?

In what was genuinely the most underreported news of 2020, in April the US Department of Defence approved the official release – on to the internet, no less – of three Navy videos containing “unidentified aerial phenomena” which is the fancy new technical term for good ol’ UFOs. “The videos, captured by naval aviators, show objects hurtling through the sky, one rotating against the wind, and pilots can be heard expressing confusion and awe,” reported the New York Times. The objects might just be, you know, “breakout aviation technology” from other nations “that could threaten the United States” but the Pentagon isn’t sure. There’s a confirmed Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force operating within the DoD; retired officials associated with it have said they “hope the program will seek evidence of vehicles from other worlds”.

2020 is yet to throw any bleeding mountains at us, so we should be fine

This is the kind of stuff you used to read in the commentary sections at the back of comic books. Do please note: in 2020 a group of astrophysicists ran enough data models to conclude there are “likely between four and 211 civilisations in the Milky Way today capable of communicating … with 36 the most likely figure.” It’s also the year sensors picked up 1.5 milliseconds of a strange “fast radio burst”, a phenomenon that some space theoreticians believe may originate from alien spacecraft. But, pfft, I’m sure it’s nothing.

Animal crackers

As human beings were hiding inside from the invisible killer virus, murder hornets and deer-eating pythons weren’t the only creatures outside having fun. Coronavirus itself originally jumped from animals to people; fittingly, plague-emptied streets have become animal playgrounds. In Chile, a puma took a night tour of a deserted Santiago before visiting someone’s backyard. The sacred deer of Nara, Japan – deprived of their tourist-fed diet of crackers – returned to foraging, improved their gastrointestinal health … and had a squiz at the local shops. In Thailand, a riot broke out among a group of macaques over a pot of yoghurt, and goats took over an entire town centre in Llandudno, Wales.

But there were a couple of animal events in 2020 that were even more on-brand. In India, foraging monkeys attacked a laboratory technician on the campus of a state-run medical college, stealing actual contaminated blood samples from positive coronavirus patients, and provoking the question “can monkeys spread coronavirus?” way before anyone was emotionally ready to take it on board.

And then – last month – Denmark decided to mass-produce human terror when their government mandated the cull of all 17 million locally farmed mink, having discovered 12 people had been infected by a mutated strain of the virus that bounced from humans to mink and back again. That wasn’t even the worst part. The gas used to kill the mink inflated their corpses, causing their dead bodies to rise from the 2 metre depth of their mass graves and the words “Danish Zombie Mink” to enter the collective memory of this profoundly shitty year. The current plan is to now exhume the zombie mink … and set them on fire.

The monoliths

While India was getting a bit Planet of the Apes, the US state of Utah went full 2001 - A Space Odyssey when a mysterious three-sided, 11-ft steel monolith appeared, apparently out of nowhere, rooted in the rocks of a remote desert outcrop. Although authorities who’d spotted the unexpected monument tried to keep its location secret, internet sleuths pinpointed its location, and curious pilgrims – and, with them, Instagrammers – started to turn up. Barely had the world learned of the unexplained object when four men presented before it one night, dismantled it and wheelbarrowed the broken pieces into the desert, instructing pilgrims, as they departed, to “leave no trace”.

Related: New mystery metal monolith appears on a California mountaintop

These men have since been identified as environmentalists concerned about crowds drawn to a delicate ecosystem, but the builders of the monolith remain frustratingly anonymous. Now, more monoliths are turning up, one in Romania and one in California. Are they copycat? Are they linked? Is there a global cabal of installation artists running loose? Questions are many, answers are few.

Not to be outdone, Germany reported this week that a two-metre-tall (7ft) wooden phallus that materialised without explanation on a Bavarian mountainside a few years ago had been the subject of a sudden, mysterious theft, and all that remained of the alphine landmark was a sad puddle of sawdust. On Thursday, however, the Washington Post reported that – in true 2020 spirt – “a new, slightly larger carving of male genitalia had appeared at the site, propped up with wooden beams”. The new phallus is thinner, the German reputation for humourlessness is clearly undeserved and the police continue to “probe the disappearance” of the original, as the location of the stolen cock-and-balls remains unknown.

The missing star

Yes, a star that was 2.5m times brighter than the sun has vanished from the sky. Astronomers observed the unstable blue star – located 75m light years away in the Kinman Dwarf galaxy - between 2001 and 2011. But now it’s … just not there.

While scientists try to discern whether the star just faded out and became obscured by dust, or managed to collapse into a black hole without the usual preceding supernova, doomheads among us may be more inclined to scan religious documents for signs of prophecy. There’s a bit in Isaiah 34 that mentions stars falling from the sky amid broader chaos as a “judgment against the nations” – but 2020 is yet to throw any bleeding mountains at us, so we should be fine.

There are, of course, still a couple of weeks of this year left to go. Sure, it could be the end of the world … but given the overwhelming events of 2020 so far, we might yet remain too distracted to notice.