Innholdsfortegnelse for 430 i Fortean Times

DREAMS IN THE WITCH FARM A curious case that we reported on back in 1995 (see ‘Paranormal Power Theft’, FT80:19) has now become far better known due to its recent retelling in writer/presenter Danny Robins’s eight-part BBC Radio 4 podcast, The Witch Farm. Building on the success of his Uncanny podcast, as well as a similarly in-depth exploration of The Battersea Poltergeist (FT404:24-36), The Witch Farm told the story of what happened to the Rich family – Bill, Liz (pictured above with Danny Robins) and their four children – when they moved into an old farmhouse in the Brecon Beacons in 1989 and were confronted with an extensive catalogue of strange, and sometimes terrifying, phenomena: phantom footsteps, electrical anomalies, apparitions, illnesses, possession states, oppressive presences and so on. In this…

BAFFLING BIRD While going for a run in Burgess Hill, Sussex, David and Emma Jackson were surprised to see a kookaburra fly over their heads and land in a nearby tree. The bird, native to Australia, seemed completely at home in the Sussex countryside. They reported it to the Tilgate Nature Centre, which could not find anyone who had lost a kookaburra, but it is unlikely that the bird could have made it to the UK on its own. West Sussex Gazette, 18 May 2022. HEADBANGER Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus virtual reality headset, has come up with a new twist on the tech. His latest creation, named “NerveGear”, is intended to create the ultimate immersive experience by killing the user if they die in a game. The…

ANTIVAX ACCIDENTS? Researchers in Canada have published a study in the American Journal of Medicine that suggests a correlation between a person’s Covid vaccine status and the probability of them being involved in a road accident. Examining the medical records of 11 million adults, 16 per cent of whom had not had a Covid vaccination, they discovered that unvaccinated people were 72 per cent more likely to be involved in a severe road accident, defined as one in which at least one person needed hospital treatment, than those who had received the vaccine. The increased risk from unvaccinated drivers “exceeds the safety gains from modern automobile engineering advances and also imposes risks on other road users” according to the researchers, and while it is only half the increased risk of…

You may not have heard of chatbots before, but chances are you have read a recent news story about ChatGPT from OpenAI or rival Bing from Microsoft or Bard from Google. These artificial intelligence apps give apparently intelligent, if occasionally bizarre, responses to questions. They can write an essay on Keynesian economics, produce a Shakespearean sonnet about a nightingale or create computer code instantly to order. Will these digital Frankenstein monsters eclipse humanity, or is it just more hype from Big Tech? Older readers will remember stories or poems “written by a computer” from long ago and may be wary of the latest claims. Experiments with automated text generation were well-enough known in the 17th century for Jonathan Swift to parody them in Gulliver’s Travels. A mad scientist on the…

TOXIC TRACES The train derailment near the small city of East Palestine, Ohio, on 3 February, was an instant human and environmental tragedy, and perhaps a slow-burning disaster in the making. Several elements of the unfolding story suggest that the incident, and the immediate response, may have been the result of negligence and incompetence. Mainstream and alternative media alike have pointed to the length of the train (twice as long as conventional rigs) and the decision to carry out a ‘controlled burn’ on the derailed carriages as contributory factors in the mass die-off of animals, fish and birds, and the stories of people made ill by the fallout. East Palestine has known more than its fair share of difficulties. The area has suffered multiple earthquakes in recent years, a phenomenon…

The myth Georges Simenon once wrote a novel from scratch in three days, sitting inside a glass cage, so that the whole of Paris could watch. The “truth” He didn’t. He probably could’ve, but he didn’t. Nonetheless, thousands of Parisians long remembered him doing it, and even today you can meet people whose grandparents claimed to have witnessed every semi-colon, every puff of the pipe. Simenon (1903-89), the Belgian creator of France’s greatest detective, Jules Maigret, grew up obsessed with crime and with writing. Unusually, his books were admired by both readers and critics, and this despite his astonishing productivity: he wrote several hundred books, including at least 20 autobiographies, as well as journalism and scripts. Once, when another author’s book was advertised as his first for three years, Simenon…

It was like something out of a science fiction film when in early February 2023 TV news reported an unidentified aerial object flying over northern USA. The Pentagon quickly stated that this was an “intelligence-gathering balloon, most certainly launched by the People’s Republic of China.” More worryingly, it was spotted over Montana where there is a base for 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles. At first President Biden was advised not to shoot down the high-altitude balloon as the debris from it could pose a risk to those under its flightpath. The Chinese foreign ministry said it did not pose a threat and was merely a civilian weather airship that had limited steering capacity, causing it to deviate far from its planned route. Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry,…

Buddhism gets a good press in the West for its positive relationship to science. Three kinds of claims are made. The first concerns similarities between Buddhist and scientific styles of thinking. The Buddha was sensitive to experience and causality, and condemned appeals to tradition as an authority – qualities central to scientific enquiry. Second, Buddhist theory apparently anticipated key scientific concepts, from magnetism and radioactivity to insights of cosmology and neuroscience. Similarities and anticipations sometimes feed a third sort of claim. Buddhism can be naturalised – rendered consistent with the modern natural scientific understanding of the world. One philosopher says Buddhism, to become “acceptable”, must be “stripped of mind-numbing and wishful hocus pocus” like rebirth and karma.1 Naturalised Buddhism must be ‘tamed’ by having its supernatural elements excised and replaced,…

Most church services end with a hymn and a prayer and the congregation goes home, lingering only perhaps for friends to chat over coffee served at the back of the church. On 8 February, after a Wednesday morning service on campus at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, USA, a gospel trio sang a final song and the service ended; but not everyone left the building. Some 20 students stayed behind. They were scattered around the chapel, and continued to pray. After an hour or so they started singing and students, curious to see what was going on, joined them. Word quickly spread around the campus of the Methodist college that a ‘revival’ was underway. In the Protestant, charismatic tradition of Christianity, a revival is understood to be a rare, once…

The Last Witch Craze John Aubrey, the Royal Society and the Witches Tony McAleavy Amberley 2022 Hb, 287pp, £20, ISBN 9781445698427 One of the features of the past few years has been a boom in good local studies of witch trials and beliefs, produced by academic and independent scholars alike. Tony McAleavy’s new book fits partly into this framework, being the work of a very able independent scholar in love with North Wiltshire, and especially the town of Malmesbury. It is anchored in events and personalities connected with the area. It is also, however, a much larger and more important enterprise, being a contribution, based on careful primary research, into the relationship in Britain between witchcraft beliefs and the new experimental science of the late 17th century. During the late…

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE EDITOR AT DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM Beyond the Trail: The Alaskan Coastal Sasquatch, Part One Dir Aleksandar Petakov, US 2022 Small Town Monsters YouTube channel Seth Breedlove’s Small Town Monsters series has created an impressive roster of documentary films tackling everything from Champ to Mothman and even UFOs; but it is relic hominins that seem to be their bread and butter. The STM films are distinguished by beautiful cinematography and a level-headed approach that avoids the sensationalism that mars many other offerings in the genre. Aleksandar Petakov has featured in the fims several times, mounting expeditions, often on his own, into deep wilderness in search of Sasquatch. As a field cryptozoologist, I always admire those who get their boots dirty, physically searching for their quarry rather than…

CROSS AT LINDISFARNE In Sept 2016 my partner Jason and I were holidaying in Spittal, Northumberland, and decided to visit the holy island of Lindisfarne. We parked our car and started to make the trek on foot to Lindisfarne Castle. We made slow progress as I was walking with two walking sticks, which I needed after I had hip surgery a few months earlier. About half way through our walk, Jason suddenly fell on to one knee. As he was getting up I asked if he was OK, and he said, “That was the weirdest thing; I didn’t trip – it felt as if I was pulled down to the ground.” We stood for a while as he was very shaken, and then we carried on. After having a look…

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FORTEAN TIMES is a monthly magazine of news, reviews and research on strange phenomena and experiences, curiosities, prodigies and portents. It was founded by Bob Rickard in 1973 to continue the work of Charles Fort (1874–1932). Born of Dutch stock in Albany, New York, Fort spent many years researching scientific literature in the New York Public Library and the British Museum Library. He marshalled his evidence and set forth his philosophy in The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). He was sceptical of dogmatic scientific explanations, observing that some scientists tended to argue according to their personal beliefs rather than the rules of evidence and that inconvenient data were ignored, suppressed, discredited or explained away. He criticised modern science for its reductionism,…

For more than three months, Iran has been in the grip of an apparent wave of schoolgirl poisonings. This started on 30 November, when 18 students at the Nour Technical School in the holy city of Qom fell ill with respiratory problems and had to be taken to hospital. Since then, at least 10 other schools in Qom and the surrounding province have experienced alleged poisonings. Further incidents have been reported from the capital Tehran, Ardebi in the northwest, and Bourjed in the west of Iran, where 194 girls have been reported as being poisoned at four schools. In the Iranian parliament, one MP speaking in a session on the incidents said that more than 15 cities had reported poisonings, although he did not name them. At least 700 students…

FARMING ORIGINS Animals were being farmed for food as early as 13,000 years ago, an analysis of ancient dung suggests. Hunter-gatherers living in Abu Hureyra – the Upper Euphrates valley in Syria – were bringing sheep and other live animals and tending to them outside their huts. This is almost two millennia earlier than what is seen elsewhere. Soil samples were gathered from Abu Hureyra in the 1970s, but have only recently been analysed. The scientists looked at substances present in the soil known as dung spherulites – tiny balls that form in the intestines of plant-eating animals before being excreted from the body as part of dung. These spherulites provided an approximate date for the dung deposits, sometime between 12,800 and 12,300 years ago. The dung is thought to…

SETI DATA CRUNCHED At the start of this year a University of Toronto project that used artificial intelligence (AI) in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) published its first results. The team used AI to comb through years of data collected by the Robert C Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia as part of the Breakthrough Listen SETI initiative to see if there were potential alien signals hidden in it that scientists had missed. Peter Ma, lead author of the paper, said: “In many of our observations, there is a lot of interference. We need to distinguish the exciting radio signals in space from the uninteresting radio signals from Earth,” and so an AI system had been trained to do precisely that. To qualify as potentially alien, the signals…

When mortgage advisor Nicola Bulley went missing while walking her dog on the banks of the River Wyre in Lancashire on 27 January, police were initially baffled. She left her phone, still running a work Teams session, on a bench; her dog was nearby, and while investigations narrowed things down to a 10-minute period when something must have happened to Bulley, they could not find any obvious clues as to her fate. They assumed that she must have gone into the river as there was no evidence of her leaving the site in any other way. Media scrutiny of the police investigation was intense, and their admission of a lack of any clues created an explosion of speculation on social media, particularly TikTok, that was followed by members of the…

KAI ROBERTS Folklore and the world of forteana lost a rising star with the untimely death of Kai Roberts following a short illness. He was the son of my friend and long-time FT contributor Andy Roberts. I first met Kai when he was just four years old at his home in Brighouse, West Yorkshire, where he continued to live with his mother Helen. In 1986 I had begun writing for the legendary UFO Brigantia magazine, edited at that time by Kai’s father Andy. As we shared so many common interests in Earth Mysteries and ufology, we began writing and researching as a team. Working on book projects often entailed long and sometimes surreal field trips to investigate all forms of strange phenomena. Before he could walk, Kai was regularly dragged…

“I LOOKED UP AND A FIGURE WAS LOOKING DOWN AT ME. HER FACE WAS BLANK, BUT SHE WAS LOOKING AT ME. THERE WAS NO EXPRESSION…” LIZ RICH Imagine seeing this apparition in any context. How would you feel? Now imagine you are walking up your drive, pushing your baby in a pram, and the figure is looking down at you from the empty nursery. How would you feel? Now imagine this incident comes after months of unexplained phenomena including phantom footsteps, noxious smells, loud banging noises, electrical disturbances and possible demonic possession. How would you feel? Now imagine you live in a remote old farmhouse deep in the Welsh countryside and you are on your own. How would you feel? Later, you walk into the nursery and see the same…

Beginning in 1946, the year after he had supposedly shot himself dead in a Berlin bunker, no less an individual than Adolf Hitler began mailing out a long-running series of letters to persons living in the rural eastern US States of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. These letters – in which Adolf strangely billed himself as “the Furrier” rather than ‘the Führer’ – came soliciting donations for a cunning new Nazi plot to enslave America, the world, and finally the galaxy itself. It turned out Hitler had been taken alive after all, and had escaped across the Atlantic, where his latest communications, written in the kind of barely literate English you might expect from a non-native speaker, made their recipients a tempting offer: in return for charity in the form…

For anyone with a sense of adventure, an enquiring mind and a love of the weird and wonderful… Every month, Fortean Times takes you on an incredible journey into the unknown where you’ll encounter some of the most fantastic phenomena on Earth… and sometimes beyond. SUBSCRIBE TODAY AND GET 3 MONTHS FOR £3 + FREE! A FANTASTIC FORTEAN TIMES MUG GREAT REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE • 13 Issues delivered to your door (postage included)* • 13 Issues available on mobile/tablet to keep on your device** • Save on the cover price • Every issue delivered before it’s available to buy in shops SUBSCRIBE TODAY! Order online at SHOP.FORTEANTIMES.COM/FT430P Email us at hello@metropolis.co.uk or call 020 8752 8195 quoting FT430P The trial offer will automatically revert to a 6-month direct debit which will auto…

The Occult in National Socialism The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich Stephen E Flowers Inner Traditions 2022 Pb, 544pp, £26, ISBN 9781644115749 Everybody knows how deeply the Nazis were into the occult; between Indiana Jones, the Hellboy franchise, Captain America’s foes Hydra and video games from Wolfenstein onwards, Occult-Nazi lore has now seeped into every corner by sheer osmosis. These pop culture takes are derived from 1960s “non-fiction” bestsellers like The Spear of Destiny and Morning of the Magicians, which in turn draw on sensational memoirs and post-war attempts to literally demonise the Nazis. Stephen Flowers bravely attempts to hack through this jungle to get to the facts buried beneath a luxuriant growth of fiction. Nazism is at its roots mystical, with a fundamental belief in…

Mentioned in passing in this column last year, The Bigfoot Files was originally shown on Channel 4 in 2013, and features Mark Evans, Prof Brian Sykes and Sykes’s disappointing and/or surprising DNA results. It’s now available on Prime and worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. Episode 1 sees Evans in the Himalayas on the trail of the Yeti (cue prayer wheels, lamas and Yaks, the Shipton print etc). “It’s judgement day for the Yeti!” says Evans, a tad prematurely. A quick troll through the usual suspects, with helpful silhouettes of a bear, a gibbon, a human and aYeti, and the various names given to it in different areas. Evans, in his huge anorak and sunglasses before a sheer Nepalese cliff face, introduces Prof Brian Sykes in his Oxford…

In 2017, bar worker Miyuki Ueta, 49, was sentenced to death for the 2009 killing of two men to whom she owed money. She had drugged and drowned Kazumi Yabea, a 47-year-old truck driver, and Hideki Maruyama, 57, an electronics store owner, in separate incidents, with the court saying that Ueta bore “grave criminal responsibility” after carrying out the premeditated and “cruel crimes based on firm intentions to kill”. She was awaiting execution on death row in a Hiroshima prison when she choked on her food while eating a meal in her cell, collapsing and losing consciousness. Guards attempted to dislodge the blockage and resuscitate Ueta, but she died in hospital three hours later. msn.com, 17 Jan 2023. A maintenance worker was crushed to death while working under a telescopic…

Gerald Johnson, a priest from Michigan, made a TikTok video to publicise his experiences following a heart attack during which he says he died before being revived by medics. In the brief period that he was dead, he had an unusual near-death experience (NDE) in which he visited Hell, seeing things that shocked and horrified him. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” Johnson says. “I don’t care what he did to me. No one deserves that.” He entered Hell through “the very centre of the Earth” and says that “the things I saw there are indescribable,” but still goes on to describe them. He claims to have seen a man walking on all fours like a dog, burning from head to toe: “His eyes were bulging and worse…

As one considers the multitude of reputedly haunted places in the UK, one notices that a small number of locations persistently generate reports of activity, year in, year out. One such location that has done so over the last 70 years in Britain is Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, a place which many ghost hunters have heard about but few have entered. Now a new book by Damien O’Dell, Chicksands Priory – England’s Most Haunted House? published in November 2022, provides the most detailed study yet to appear of a long-term haunting at the site. The difficulties of penetrating the mysteries of ancient Chicksands Priory are due to the sensitivities of its modern military role and location. Prior to 2005 only a handful of ghost hunters were granted access. One was…

CAT SHAVER MYSTERY [FT414:4] The UK seems to be in the grip of an outbreak of cat shaving, with “Phantom Cat Shavers” on the prowl in both Kent and Coventry. Coventry experienced a flurry of cat shaving in 2021, after which all went quiet, but the Shaver appears to have returned at the start of 2023, when a cat named Tallulah arrived home with the Shaver’s trademark perfect square cut into her stomach fur. “‘I thought maybe she licked the fur off her stomach or she had itchy skin,” said Tallulah’s owner, Bonnie Towe, “but once we lay her back we noticed it was quite a big patch and it was a perfectly cut square. It felt prickly like it had been shaved off. It had been done quite carefully…

CORVID COURTS I wrote last month about the way that rooks are supposed to abandon rookeries before the death of the human owner (FT429:29). Another chapter in corvid forteana is the notion of the ‘court’. A human witness watches as a group of corvids (usually rooks or crows) meet in a circle and then judge and kill one of their own. Consider this vivid example from 1956 (thanks to Bob Skinner). Two men “saw scores of rooks converging from all quarters towards a large mound… Their full-voiced cries were unwontedly raucous, seeming to be evoked more by anger than by alarm, and their flights above the mound were erratic. Then suddenly, as if at a given signal, the noise stopped. The birds alighted in a large company on the grass…

1989 MAY The Rich Family first view Heol Fanog. A last drink in the pub before they move house – the bar bill is £6.66. The first supermarket bill after they move in is £66.60. SEPTEMBER Bill and Liz marry on 28 September. OCTOBER Ben is born on 23 October. NOVEMBER Bill hears the first footsteps on the landing (thinks it is Laurence). The Haunting begins. The next day an electricity bill arrives for £750 for a quarter. Laurence starts behaving oddly. Bill and Liz hear banging noises; they think it’s a door slamming, but it isn’t. They also hear footsteps descending stairs; footsteps continue at 6.15pm every day. DECEMBER Bill smells sulphurous odour in kitchen – calls plumbers, but smell has vanished. Liz smells incense in kitchen. Sulphur/incense smells…

SEND FORUM SUBMISSIONS TO THE EDITOR: DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM You would not have taken Wyndham Lewis to Woodstock. This pugnacious painter, pen-propeller and polymath, who died in 1957, spent 40 years in pitched battle with irrationalism. What he’d have thought of this magazine I shudder to imagine. But his 1928 novel The Childermass foreshadowed much of our science fiction (as well as bewildering booksellers; “John Wyndham? Quatermass?”) Lewis fought in the Great War, and the premise is simple: two of its soldiers, Pullman and Satterthwaite, in the Hereafter. The Childermass is most often seen as an allegory, but it is also an attempt by a mighty intellect to envisage what happens when we die. At first they struggle to walk, like astronauts, in a foggy reddish atmosphere familiar from Robert Crookall’s analyses…

The Green Man of Eshwood Hall Jacob Kerr Serpent’s Tail 2022 Hb, 212pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781800811492 Strange, disturbing, sometimes disorientating and more than a bit scary, with strong mythological elements, The Green Man of Eshwood Hall is the essence of folk horror. Izzy is 13; she has just moved with her family, in 1962, to Eshwood Hall in Northalbion, a mythical version of Northumber-land, where her father will be a general handyman for the old lady who lives there. She has an eight-year-old sister and a baby brother, and her mother is domineering and selfish; she claims to have heart trouble, so Izzy has to do all the cooking and cleaning and looking after the baby, to constant sniping from her mother. In an old deserted chapel in the woods…

Christmas truce The unofficial Christmas truce of 1914 certainly did occur [Mythconceptions #263, FT426:19]. In her book 1914-1918: Voices and Images of the Great War, Lyn Macdonald, the noted historian of WW1, quotes Lieut Johannes Niemann of the 133rd Royal Saxon Regiment. Niemann describes an hour-long football match between British and German troops, initiated by a Scottish soldier, which ended in a 3:2 victory for Germany. The same page quotes an account from Gunner Herbert Smith, 5th Battalion, Royal Field Artillery, detailing meetings between British and German soldiers to exchange cigarettes for German cigars. The practice was widespread enough that senior British officers felt compelled to issue orders prior to Christmas 1915 specifically stating that the “unauthorised truce” of Christmas 1914 was not to be repeated, (for example, see…