Innholdsfortegnelse for 431 i Fortean Times

A THOROUGHLY MODERN MONSTER In this issue we celebrate a very special birthday: Nessie’s 90th. It was in May 1933 that the Loch Ness Monster first made waves in the media when the Inverness Courier of 2 May ran the headline: “Strange spectacle on Loch Ness. What was it?” It’s a question that has, of course, exercised zoologists, monster hunters and forteans ever since. Crucially, it was this sighting – made by Mr and Mrs Aldie Mackay from their motor car – that kickstarted the monster-mania that gripped the newspaper-reading public of the 1930s as Nessie’s fame spread far beyond her Scottish home. In our cover story (p32), Ulrich Magin goes back to the early days of the story to demonstrate that far from being a legend-shrouded tale deriving from…

WHALE I NEVER! Following a storm surge on the US east coast, residents of Rockaway Beach Boulevard and Beach 116th Street in Queens, New York, woke up to find large chunks of decaying sperm whale flesh on their streets. They are believed to have come from a whale corpse that had washed up a few miles away a week earlier that had been broken up and swept into the streets by the storm. “Wow, that is something to see (and smell), right there in the business district of Rock Park!” commented a local on Twitter. newsweek.com, 23 Dec 2022. STUCK SANTAS Police responding to a call about a damaged vehicle near Hayle in Cornwall just before Christmas found an armoured personnel carrier full of Santas on a pub crawl jammed…

In the wake of the furore surrounding the shooting down of various balloons over the US (FT430:28), there was an outbreak of fevered speculation in Japan about a large metal sphere of unknown origin that washed up on Enshuhama Beach in the coastal city of Hamamatsu, Japan. About 1.5m (4.9ft) wide, the object was dubbed the “Godzilla egg” by locals, and there were also suggestions it resembled something from the popular manga series Dragon Ball. It soon attracted the attention of the authorities who were concerned that it could be some kind of mine or a spy device from North Korea or China. After cordoning off a 200-metre perimeter around the object, the bomb squad, dressed in hazmat suits, X-rayed it. They determined that it did not contain explosives, or…

A MONTHLY EXCAVATION OF ODDITIES AND ANTIQUITIES BACK PASSAGE There has been much media hullabaloo about the discovery of a secret passage some 9m (30ft) long and 2.1m (7ft) wide inside Egypt’s famous Great Pyramid (the Pyramid of Khufu). Though its presence was actually known about back in 2016, its interior has only now been imaged. Its early detection was by means of muography, used in this case to study how muons, by-products of cosmic rays, penetrated the mass of the pyramid, showing variations in their absorption by the stones. This revealed a void behind a now exposed chevron structure on the north face of the pyramid that had originally been covered by the smooth white limestone facing slabs that had once cladded all sides of the mighty monument. The…

FT: The success of Uncanny has been remarkable. Were you expecting such a high level of interest? DR: Making my previous podcast series The Battersea Poltergeist earlier in 2021, and seeing the response to that, made me realise that there was an appetite for a show that explored the paranormal in a way that felt different to the more traditional ones that very much preach to the converted. I found that our audience for Battersea was divided between sceptics and believers and that even larger group, people who are not sure! After Battersea, I received so many emails from people who wanted to share their own stories – fascinating and often chilling cases that scratched my storyteller’s itch. I felt that if these stories intrigued, puzzled and unsettled me, then…

NEWS FROM THE CRYPTOZOOLOGICAL GARDEN A CRYPTO-HAT TRICK! While visiting New Guinea in summer 2018, British tourist Michael Smith, an amateur botanist, achieved something most professional zoologists can only dream of – he rediscovered (and photographed) a very distinctive creature hitherto known to science from just one specimen collected way back in 1928. Namely, the Wondiwoi tree kangaroo Dendrolagus mayri, a brown-furred, bear-like arboreal marsupial – a single but very much alive specimen of which Smith spotted in the montane forests of West Papua in New Guinea’s western, Indonesian half (not in Papua New Guinea, in this island’s eastern half, as mistakenly claimed in certain media reports; see FT372:21). Four years later, moreover, he has astonished zoologists by rediscovering two more supposedly-vanished New Guinea endemics, both within the same month!…

267: BAD-SMELLING HUMANS The myth Dogs have a great sense of smell, thousands of times more sensitive than that of humans who are essentially “nose blind”. The “truth” There is no hierarchy of mammalian olfactory ability, at least according to current thinking. The idea that there must be goes back to French anatomist Paul Broca (1824-80), who came up with the idea that humans were “non-smellers”, later known as “microsmatics”, because evolution had equipped us with free will at the expense of our “animalistic” senses, letting some parts of the brain wither while building up others. As is always the case in such stories, subsequent generations of scientists simply accepted what had been passed on without actually checking it. Broca and his successors never made any empirical examination of the…

MEASURING A MYSTERY In the late 1980s the interest in alien abductions reached its peak, and the scholarly two-volume UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery by folklorist Thomas Bullard inflamed a debate between those who regarded abductions as real events and those who saw them as the product of psycho-sociological factors. The former faction tended, with a few notable exceptions, to be based in the USA, and the latter in Europe. Much of the debate was carried out from 1989 onwards in the pages of Magonia magazine, and was mainly kicked off by Bullard in his article “The American Way: Truth, Justice and Abduction” (Magonia 34, Oct 1989). His main point was that: “The belief in abduction by extraterrestrials has a firm rational basis, whether that belief is right…

Be sure your sin will find you out. It sounds like a warning, a threat of fire and brimstone. It’s a fitting epitaph for the so-called ‘Sinner’s Grave’. In the corner of a quaint churchyard, deep in the Lincolnshire countryside, sits one of the most disturbing graves in Britain. St Andrews Church at Irby Upon Humber is in the middle of a pretty little village. Towards the back of the church, close to the gate and set back from the little path, sits a tiny headstone. From afar, it looks unremarkable; small, mossy and often lost to sight when the grass is left to grow a little too wildly. The modest headstone is dwarfed by its grander neighbours and easily overlooked. There are no dates, no story, no grand carvings…

Deep Weird The Varieties of High Strangeness Experience Jack Hunter, ed. August Night Press 2023 Pb, 409pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781786772244 August Night Press is an imprint of White Crow Books, the publisher of a substantial catalogue of titles arguing, generally, that we are more than “animated meat”. These include Dr Hunter’s previous anthology of papers Greening the Paranormal [reviewed FT388:59]. What is significant here is that under Hunter’s editorial vision, Deep Weird not only recapitulates Greening but builds upon it, making a formidable case for an innovative approach to the unanswered mysteries of our world and existence. Significantly, expressions of “scientific reasoning” are not solely modern but can be found in the studies of phenomena by the natural philosophers of ancient cultures well before the Common Era. What distinguishes the…

Glen Coe Alan Murdie’s article “Spirits of Glencoe” [FT428:18-21] describes the infamous massacre, along with latterday commemorations of the event, and the general atmosphere of foreboding that seems to pervade the Glen and surrounding area. Glen Coe is an area we have stayed in and passed through many times, and it certainly does have a power and brooding majesty all of its own, aided and abetted by the quite severe weather the Glen sometimes ‘enjoys’. The stretch of the A82 heading northbound just past the Falls of Coe, with the ‘Three Sisters’ to the left and Aonach Eagach ridge to the right being particularly impressive, the towering mountains which buttress each side of the Glen imposing their presence and grandeur. Nestled between two of these ‘Three Sisters’ lies the ‘Hidden…

My trip to the forest of Aokigahara started from Shinjuku station in central Tokyo. From here, I could travel straight to the town where my guesthouse was located. The bus was rather empty, so I had both seats to myself for relaxing and looking out the window as we left Tokyo, first by the highway and then on to smaller roads that revealed dense forests and lush vegetation. We passed streams and small towns, and after about two hours arrived at my destination: Mount Fuji Station, in the small town of Fujikawaguchiko. Since there were still strict COVID controls against entering Japan, there were hardly any foreign visitors, even though this is usually a popular tourist destination. The town seemed deserted. There were no people to be seen on the…

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,…

DOG AT THE WHEEL! Responding to reports of mayhem in a Walmart parking lot in Kilgore, Texas, police found several vehicles had been rammed by a recklessly driven SUV. When they approached the vehicle to apprehend the driver, they found that it was a dog. It seemed that the animal had been left in the vehicle while his owners shopped, and, having got bored, started jumping around the car. “He apparently got a little antsy and bounced around the cab setting this truck in motion,” the police said. “The steering column had some prior damage and this pooch must have placed the vehicle in drive.” He was also wearing a lead, and this appears to have snagged on the parking brake and released it, allowing the car to pinball around…

The small outback community of Lajamanu, 560km (348 miles) south-west of Katherine on the northern edge of the Tanami Desert in Australia, is gaining a reputation as fish fall central. It hit the news on 21 February after it was reported that fish had fallen there, but Lajamanu had also experienced documented rains of fish in 2010, 2004 and 1974, while after the latest event Penny McDonald from Alice Springs recalled experiencing a fall there in the mid-1980s. “I got up in the morning, I was working in the school at the time, and the dirt streets outside my home were covered in fish,” she said. The latest event was experienced by Central Desert councillor Andrew Johnson Japanangka, who lives in the settlement. “We’ve seen a big storm heading up…

GHOSTS OF THE PALATINATE In July 1938 a gentleman signing himself Herr Franz Jungbauer of Oberdonau (a German province created by the Third Reich after the Anschluss with Austria in May 1938) wrote to The Times newspaper in Great Britain, having gleaned from German newspapers there were currently 150 haunted castles in England that were proving difficult to sell. He stated: I am very interested in these ghosts and guarantee to ‘lay’ them if one of the owners would give me the run of the castle and are willing and pay expenses of myself and helpers. Fee would only be payable after successful conclusion of affair. “Please let me have the address of some person afflicted with a haunted house. Thanking you in anticipation, I am Yours Franz Jungbauer (Published…

HOBGOBLINS As US journalist HL Mencken once famously opined, “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the population alarmed (and thus clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with a whole series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Our Henry would no doubt recognise the contemporary political atmosphere as one rife with the little critters: the Russians, the Chinese, the Bug and its lurking descendants, people who don’t believe in the Bug, dissidents in general, and of course (perhaps more so than in Mencken’s pomp) conspiracy theorists. Conspiracists have become the hobgoblins du jour of the political establishment and the news media, somehow presented as a threat on a similar level to the countries the international community doesn’t like. And, interestingly, they are segmented in the…

RICHARD BELZER Richard Belzer spent decades as a stand-up comedian and comic actor, but judging from his post mortem press he is destined to be remembered as John Munch, the cynical detective on NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. But Belzer also gained some attention in his later career for promoting conspiracy theories in the popular media. According to his IMDB bio, Belzer was “a social misfit” who was “kicked out of every school he ever attended”, including college. He told NPR’s Terry Gross he got an “honorable discharge” from the Army for being “too funny to carry a gun.” More traumatically, he was a teenager when his mother died of breast cancer and a young man when his father committed suicide. A cousin of Henry Winkler, famous for…

We tend to think of UFOs in many ways – often romantic or exciting ones. As UFO witnesses, we may react by asking: Is this when history changes, and I am witnessing an alien arrival? Or: Can this event tell us something startling about nature or consciousness and provide a new insight into how the world works? However, there are cases where what happens is almost secondary to the consequences it has on those directly involved. Sometimes, events have a profound impact on the body of a witness who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a catastrophic impact on their subsequent lives. Barring psychosomatic factors – or of course outright lying – any serious impact on the human body reported during a close encounter…

In some of my early writing on telephone anomalies (see “Phone calls from the Dead”, FT405:30-35), I stumbled across the book They Knew The Unknown by Martin Ebon,1 who produced many popular works on psychic phenomena. This particular book focused on well-known public figures – typically scientists – and their links to psychical research. My main interest was Ebon’s coverage of Thomas Edison and his interests in Spiritualism and contact with the dead (see FT363:30-37), but it also provided insights into many other figures and their links to the field, including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Dickens. When the Covid-19 lockdown began, my reading tended to biographies of figures of interest to me throughout my life. This included parapsychologists, of course – I worked my way through…

Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan Infernal Wisdom from the Devil’s Den Carl Abrahamsson Inner Traditions 2022 Pb, 424pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781644112410 Given the scope of available candidates for the title of Devil incarnate, one finds it difficult to imagine that Anton LaVey would even get a look in! LaVey was born in Chicago in 1930, and his ascendancy to High Priest of his very own Church of Satan is the stuff of “pulp” itself. He was a talented musician (affirmed by all who knew him), but a far from dependable narrator; his fanciful tales of working the burlesque bars and seedy carnivals are recalled here with tongues firmly in cheeks. That noted, Carl Abrahamsson’s collection of interviews with friends, lovers and fellow devotees provides a very human, humorous…

In an attempt to find a new angle in paranormal TV, Help! My House Is Haunted hit upon the innovative idea of sending investigators into haunted locations and filming the results. The doughty team of world-renowned psychic Chris Fleming, truth-seeking Parisienne Sandy Lakdar (“Mah bod-y is mah first deetect-or!”) and tech expert Barri Ghai stroll about purposefully in classic British sites. There is tech, there are séances, there’s low-light and people going “Oh my God! What was that?” A breath of fresh air, in other words. A spin-off materialised almost immediately: Celebrity Help! My House Is Haunted (Discovery). A 66 per cent different squad for this one, comprising “Dark arts specialist” Ian Lawman, psychologist and historian Jayne Harris, who occasionally describes herself in the third person, and Barri Ghai returning…

FT’S FAVOURITE HEADLINES FROM AROUND THE WORLD VIRGIN CHOSEN TO CARRY OUT FIRST UK SPACE LAUNCH <i> 22 Dec 2022. Devil otter ate my mini van Irish Sun, 19 April 2011. POLICE DEFYING GRAVITY IN FACE OF CONSTANT CUTS, WARNS CHIEF (Wolverhampton) Express & Star, 4 Nov 2022 Biscuit bombs all clear Daily Star, 30 April 2022. GHOST SHIP MYSTERY LEAVES US ADRIFT IN AN OCEAN OF TEDIUM Irish Independent, 19 Nov 2022. Police shoot man with knife (Queensland) Gold Coast Bulletin, 22 Aug 2022. ‘UNICORN’ IS BORN AT ZOO Daily Star, 5 Mar 2021.…

ROMANIA’S BIRTH STONES Romania is home to the bizarre geological phenomenon of trovant stones, which have a reputation as “living rocks” that can “give birth” to smaller rocks. Trovant stones consist of a hard stone core with a shell of sand; chemicals within the sand react with rainwater percolating through the formations to produce new minerals that expand and make the formations appear to grow. The process adds about two inches (5cm) to the diameter of the rocks every millennium and causes them to take on bulbous, bubble-like shapes that range from a couple of inches in diameter to several feet. When cut, the trovants reveal layers, each representing a period of growth. On the surface of many are “microtrovants”, small spherical structures that sometimes break off, gaining the stones…

BOOZY FUNGUS EATS TENNESSEE In Lincoln County, Tennessee, the whiskey distiller Jack Daniel’s has come into conflict with local residents over the six large barrel houses they have built to age their product. During this process, a proportion of the alcohol, often known as “the angel’s share”, evaporates from the barrels. This alcohol, wafting out of the barrel houses, provides the ideal conditions for the growth of the fungus Baudoinia compniacensis, better known as the whiskey fungus, which thrives on alcohol fumes, and is steadily spreading across the country covering everything in its path. Residents have been complaining of a sooty, dark crust of the fungus that has blanketed homes, cars, road signs, bird feeders, patio furniture and trees and which has proved highly resistant to eradication. “If you run…

Over the last 18 months Danny Robins’s BBC Podcast Uncanny and his series on the Battersea Poltergeist and The Witch House (all available online on BBC Sounds) have become a cult phenomenon in a way that no fortean programme has since the 1990s heyday of The X-Files. Robins’s approach is to find a new or neglected fortean case and explore it with the help of first-hand witness testimony, audio recreations and experts from both sides of the believer/sceptic divide. By treating his witnesses and experts with respect and taking an eminently fortean, open-ended approach to his investigations, Robins makes broadcast paranormal investigation fresh and lively again, rescuing it from the showbiz clichés of Zak Bagans and his ilk, and the low-budget jump-scares of cable channel “ghost hunter” LARPing. Most of…

MYSTERIOUS SOUNDS Mysterious booming noises in India and Belgium were discussed by Charles Fort, and various humming sounds have become famous in their local areas (see FT429:17 for a recent round-up). However, strange sounds come in many shades and intensities – sometimes they are barely audible, sometimes untraceable, while in other cases recordings have been made. The strange noise in Steinfurt-Borghorst in northern Germany was recorded on tape. It has occurred for years, but only hit the headlines in January 2023. It resembles a draught of air blown over a bottle neck, lasts only a few seconds and repeats roughly every quarter of an hour. It is very loud and can be heard even behind closed windows. Some locals are at their wits’ end. “It has no rhythm whatsoever. It…

COVID’S CONTESTED ORIGIN [FT408:6-7] An updated and classified study from the US energy department, which manages a number of biomedical research institutions, has concluded that the Covid-19 virus probably emerged from a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but was not part of a weapons research programme. The update “was done in light of new intelligence, further study of academic literature and consultation with experts outside government,” says the department, but it also said it had “low confidence” in the conclusion. This means that while they feel that, on balance, this is currently the most likely explanation, the evidence is far from conclusive. The Covid-19 virus was not found in the wild in the Wuhan area, but was endemic in bats elsewhere in China, from whom the Wuhan…

The world of strange phenomena is what makes the team at FORTEAN TIMES tick. In every issue we present an array of odd and interesting stories from across the globe, investigating modern-day mysteries and delving into historical curiosities. From cryptozoology and conspiracies to paranormal research and weird science, we deliver the news you won’t find anywhere else. And strange but true… an advert in FORTEAN TIMES probably costs a lot less than you would think. If you would you like to promote your business to over 14,000 likeminded and loyal FORTEAN TIMES subscribers, who have plenty of disposable income to boot, then email james.kellock@metropolis.co.uk for further details.…

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Lightbringers of the North Secrets of the Occult Tradition of Finland Perttu Häkkinen & Vesa Iitti Inner Traditions 2022 Pb, 440pp, £25, ISBN 9781644114636 A history of Finland’s esoteric traditions is long overdue; for centuries, Finns have had a reputation as powerful magicians and sorcerers, perhaps owing to their conflation with the nomadic and shamanic Sámi. While Scandinavian pre-Christian magical practices are well-documented, thanks to the Prose and Poetic Eddas and to runic inscriptions (largely unknown in Finland), the same cannot be said for their Finnish equivalents. In part due to the impenetrability of the Finnish language – neither Germanic, Romance nor Slavic – Finland’s subaltern status as a colonial possession of Sweden (for several hundred years) and Russia (for over one hundred more) is also a factor. Originally published…

Universal and NBC joined forces in 1973 to make “the most faithful adaption of Mary Shelley’s famous novel”, but calling it Frankenstein: The True Story (1973) was a bit misleading: this bears little resemblance to the book. Compared to previous incarnations, the film feels a tad ‘true-er’. Gone is the shambling, loveable dunce portrayed by Boris Karloff. This jigsaw zombie is a handsome and cultured gentleman, albeit barefoot. Yet having excellent hair, nice teeth and a love for opera is still a far cry from the erudite and philosophical New Adam Shelly imagined. This creature is still a child, and his saying words like ‘Figaro’ and ‘Beautiful’ every two minutes isn’t much of a step-up from Karloff’s grunts. But then the teeth go, the warts start, and we’re back in…

Osborne Paul Hart was born in Chobham, Surrey, in 1878, the son of the gardener James Hart and his wife Annie. On 23 October 1906, he set off on an excursion on his bicycle, pedalling along Westwood Road. Another cyclist, the labourer Frederick Butler, saw him coming and dismounted from his own machine to allow him to pass. Butler saw Hart cycling towards the main London Road, when there was a sudden crash and an outcry. When Butler reached the London Road, he could see Hart lying in the road, with a motorcar nearby. His bicycle had been hit with some considerable force. Hart was taken to the Ascot Cottage Hospital, but his spine had been fractured and he died the same night. George Alexander Lechmere Paton was born in…

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Despite Turkish authorities deeming Ozgur Gevrekoglu’s death after being shot by his dog (FT428:72) so improbable that they were treating it as a possible murder, only a few weeks later an unnamed 32-year-old man from Wichita, Kansas, met with a similar end. The man was found dead near Geuda Springs, Oklahoma, sitting in the front passenger seat of a pick-up, with hunting gear, his dog and a rifle in the backseat. The sheriff’s office said: “A canine belonging to the owner of the pickup stepped on the rifle causing the weapon to discharge. The fired round struck the passenger who died of his injuries on scene.” mirror.co.uk, 24 Jan 2023. A 61-year-old butcher working in the Sheung Shui Slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Hong Kong had immobilised a pig with…