Innholdsfortegnelse for 428 i Fortean Times

OLD RED EYES IS BACK Mothman, the winged monster with burning red eyes first reported from the previously unremarkable town of Point Pleasant, WestVirginia, in 1966, has enjoyed remarkable longevity and ever-growing fame in the fortean field and, indeed, the wider world: you know you’ve become a paranormal superstar when, like great Cthulhu himself, you’re immortalised with your own plushie. We’ve explored the genesis and development of the Mothman story on a number of occasions – most notably in a special issue (see FT153:26-54) occasioned by the 2002 film adaptation of John Keel’s 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies, the fortean masterpiece that put Point Pleasant and its mysterious visitor firmly on the map. There have been numerous sightings of ‘winged weirdies’ (as our friend Loren Coleman dubbed them) around the…

Fusion has been a staple of science fiction for decades, powering everything from starships to Terminators to Marty McFly’s DeLorean. The technology promises unlimited energy with zero carbon dioxide emissions, if it can be mastered. The US National Ignition Facility (NIF) grabbed headlines in December with their latest breakthrough, and after decades of slow progress, commercial developers are racing to get a fusion reactor to market by 2030. Is fusion here at last, or is it, as cynics say, “the power source of the future, and always will be”? Existing nuclear reactors, and atomic bombs, work by nuclear fission, in which large atoms of heavy elements like uranium split apart producing energy. In nuclear fusion, which powers the Sun, light atoms merge to form heavier atoms, also producing energy. Fusion…

EURO-GHOST SEASON Ask any German (or other continental citizen, I suspect) and he or she will tell you that ghosts are something that exclusively haunt Scottish castles and old English inns. The only time that the German media report on ghosts is around Hallowe’en, and then they unpack old reports and folktales rather than real experiences; 2022 was no different. The Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (20 Oct 2022) listed the three most haunted hotel-castles in Europe, which are supposedly Craig y Nos in Wales, Dragsholm Palais in Denmark and Castle Lockenhaus in Austria. The last was the seat of the Baroness Elisabeth Báthory, famous for allegedly torturing and killing 650 virgin girls (see FT223:38-43). The castle now has a Dracula exhibition and is home to more than 1,000 bats. No spook, though.…

265: OF BOGS ‘N’ BUMS The myth Toilet seats: yuck! The “truth” I recently spent a weekend choosing, buying and installing a new loo seat (here in the jet set, life is basically one long thrill). Among its selling points was that it had undergone an undefined “antibacterial treatment” that would prevent any build-up of “germs and bacteria”. This alarmed me rather than reassuring me because I’d had no idea that such a build-up was a possibility. What if I stumbled in there one night, forgot to put the light on, and the bastards overpowered me? But relax – it turns out the anti-bacterial treatment is a solution to a non-existent problem. Endless research has been done during the last 20 years into the comparative germiness of various home surfaces,…

NAKED STETSON GUY ETs come in all shapes and sizes. As a specific example, the alien visitors detailed in CDB Bryan’s book Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (1996), as described by witnesses called ‘Carol’ and ‘Alice’, are a reality-bending bunch of characters. One such encounter occurred on a night when Carol was sitting in her broken down car and she noticed that the same vehicle kept passing by until it finally parked behind her. To her surprise, she saw a 6ft (1.8m) tall “person” emerge from the car wearing a 4ft (1.2m) wide Stetson hat (p.292). The detail of that unlikely fashion accessory alone stretches most notions of credibility. To discover more about the circumstances of this incident, Carol undertook self-hypnosis, during which she recalled that the man wearing…

There is a persistent rumour that following the US-led invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in October 1983 to depose a newly installed military junta, concerned viewers rang up the Manchester-based TV company Granada in their droves to check none of their favourite soap-opera characters from Coronation Street had been killed or injured during the offensive.1 Ken and Deirdre Barlow may have survived unscathed, but Grenada itself was less fortunate, having been ruled since autonomy from Britain in 1974 by a series of crooks and autocrats whose grip on reality was sometimes every bit as loose as that of those who feared the consequences of a successful cruise-missile attack on the Rovers Return. Grenada’s most flamboyant political actor was Sir Eric Gairy (1922-97), the nation’s first post-colonial PM,…

Home To Stay! The Complete Ray Bradbury EC Stories Various writers and artists Fantagraphics 2022 Hb, 204pp, £75, ISBN 9781683966562 One of the constant questions that plagues writers is: what do you do if you find someone ripping off your work? If you are Ray Bradbury, and the plagiarist is EC Comics, you send them a good natured letter asking where your royalty cheque is and suggest that it might work to everyone’s advantage to collaborate. Caught fair and square (publisher Bill Gaines admitted: “We swiped his stories, and he caught us.”), EC and Bradbury began a mutually beneficial relationship which saw many of Bradbury’s stories adapted in EC’s inimitable style. This is an excellent collection, bringing together not only those comic strips adapted from Bradbury stories such as “The…

PRECOGNITIVE DREAMS On the topic of precognitive dreams, I think one has to regard them in the light of how the subjects of dreams arise generally. I think there is not much doubt that the dreaming mind selects images or subjects from waking life more or less randomly, and mixes them up and distorts them. Thus if you happened to see a famous musician busking in your high street, and the next night you dreamed about some other famous musician busking in the high street, it would not be controversial to say that the one was the cause of the other. Following JW Dunne, one can speculate that these random images can be collected not just from the last few days, but also from the next few days. I can…

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A 69-year-old Danish man named only as “AC” took a sip of coconut water from a coconut that had been left on his kitchen counter for at least a month, when it should have been refrigerated. As it tasted disgusting, he only took a tiny sip and immediately spat it out, then rinsed his mouth repeatedly to get rid of the awful taste, only swallowing a very small amount. Several hours later, he felt sweaty and ill, vomited copiously and then collapsed in a contorted position. He was rushed to hospital where his condition declined dramatically, with his liver and kidneys failing, his brain swelling so much that cerebrospinal fluid oozed through the sutures in his skull, and his muscles starting to break down. He died less than 24 hours…

THINGS TO COME? Prediction is a slippery business at best; unless you’re Baba Vanga, you’re unlikely to get a government pension for it. But this time of year seems to bring out the Nostradamus in even the most sober of commentators. The Conspirasphere is generally shy of predictions, but I found one list that was posted on a number of sites, originally put out there by Ben Sellers, the editor of a patriotic news platform called Headline USA. Sellers offers 10 predictions, which I’ll list briefly here: Jan 6 will be revealed as a psy-op; the deadly impact of Covid vaccines will become apparent; the scope of China’s control over the US Government will become clear; the true nature of David de Pape’s relationship with Paul Pelosi will become clear;…

Last issue I suggested an explanation for UFOs that does not require ufonauts to come from an alien world or to be time travellers from our future. If real entities are being seen in some close encounter cases, then a third possibility exists, which has gained little attention up to now: visitors from a parallel universe alongside our own. The theory goes that potentially millions of such universes exist, and they occasionally intersect with ours. This is something modern physics finds increasingly plausible. Pat Phoenix, who played Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street, had an intriguing story to tell me. She – and several others who visited her home in Sale – saw a woman walk through the house, but she appeared only as long as you stared at her. If…

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TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE EDITOR AT DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM The Outer Limits: The Complete Original Series Dir various, US 1963-65, Medium Rare Entertainment, £74.99 (DVD), £94.99 (Blu-ray) The Outer Limits has been unfairly hidden in the shadows of The Twilight Zone, yet it is an equally fascinating television science fiction series that entertained, astonished and amazed audiences when it was broadcast in the USA from 16 September 1963 to 16 January 1965. It began with an opening voice over by actor Vic Perrin that warns viewers: “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to…

PAUL SIEVEKING reports on some amazing detectorist discoveries and a trove of Etruscan statues RECENTLY UNEARTHED • Adam Clark bought a Lagotto Romagnolo puppy for his daughter Alicia. Ten minutes into his first walk in Bispham Gala Field in Blackpool, the 10-week-old puppy, named Ollie, started digging, and unearthed 15 gold sovereigns, valued at £5,944. “I can’t wait to take him out again,” said Mr Clark. “He cost me £2,000, so after sniffing out the gold he tripled my investment.” D.Mail, 21 April 2022. • During the summer of 2022, amateur historian Edward Hynes found a gold coin on the south coast of Newfoundland that may challenge the traditional historical narrative, as it predates explorer John Cabot’s 1497 arrival on the island by at least 70 years. The coin is…

Looking at historic maps of Scotland, you will see the land represented is peppered with crosses, marking the sites of battles and murders. Many of these locations are said to be haunted. The whole country was once blood-drenched, reeking with violent feuds, death and treachery. A cycle of violence and wars wracked the land as clans murdered each other, sold each other out in vendettas spanning generations, or battled with the Northumbrians or the English. Scotland during this unhappy chapter of its past resembled Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, parts of the Middle East and more recently what we hear from Ukraine. From out of this litany of bloody crimes it is the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692 that remains particularly remembered, marked each 13 February in the village…

For most of the 18th century, border provinces of what’s now the Netherlands and Belgium were gripped by a reign of terror. Mysterious gangs of armed robbers carried out nocturnal raids and blackmailed the population with brandbrieven (arson letters): if the gangs’ demands for money were not met, your house would be burnt down. These bendes (gangs) carried out arson attacks and robberies with great violence. Victims were tortured, raped and killed during their operations, with children among those murdered. Gang leader Joseph Kerckhoffs allegedly gave the order during one robbery “in the event of resistance to shoot dead or strike down everyone.”1 Preferred targets were church estates, priests’ homes, farmhouses (preferably isolated ones), inns, monasteries and castles. The gangs had an apparently supernatural ability to cover distances at speed…

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Cloven Country The Devil and the English Landscape Jeremy Harte Reaktion Books 2022 Hb, 296pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781789146509 One of the most beloved of Doctor Who stories has long been 1971’s “The Daemons”. Over the course of its five episodes, the Doctor battles against ancient forces, unleashed after being long buried beneath a seemingly sedate English rural village. To exemplify the apparent super-natural qualities of the storyline, the village and the Neolithic burial mound from which these dormant horrors emerge are named Devil’s End and the Devil’s Hump. These names were not acts of poetic licence on the part of the writers of “The Daemons”; as Cloven Country shows, the English landscape is studded with many a placename or…

CONTACT US BY POST: PO BOX 1200, WHITSTABLE CT1 9RH, OR E-MAIL SIEVEKING@FORTEANTIMES.COM PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS Wodewose clubs “In search of British Bigfeet” [FT425:30-36] mentions the wode-wose (the wild man of the woods). The article says that wodewose in mediæval manuscripts were often depicted with clubs. There is a good example of this in a book I possess called The Chronicles of the Wars of the Roses (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1988). On page 138 is a picture of the martyrdom of St Apolline, beneath which are four wodewose. Two are female holding shields which conveniently cover their bodies; the other two are male with clubs on the floor by their side. In children’s television programmes, cartoons, comedy sketches and so on, cavemen are often depicted with…

33. THREE AMERICAN TALKING DOGS As regular readers will know, talking dogs were all the rage in Edwardian times: their doyen was the German dog Don (FT282:32-37) who had a vocabulary of nine words and was said to sometimes use them intelligently. A star of the Berlin music hall in the 1910s, he later crossed the Atlantic and spent some considerable time in New York. But in America, Don had three later rivals, who all issued postcards to advertise their loquacious exploits. In the 1930s, the American housewife Mrs Hilda Lenhart, of Roselle Park, New Jersey, amused herself by teaching her two mongrel dogs to imitate the human voice. In September 1938, she brought her two dogs, Buddie and Brownie, to Uncle Ben’s Show on the local radio station. The…