Innholdsfortegnelse for 432 i Fortean Times

WHAT ARTHUR DID NEXT Welcome to our June issue, in which we kick off a three-part retrospective of a classic fortean television series. Regular readers will recall that in 2021 Ryan Shirlow took a deep dive into Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, the 1980 series that introduced a generation of TV viewers to a wide range of fortean topics, from entombed toads and dinosaur survivals to mysterious falls and UFOs. In 1985, Clarke was back with another series, this time focusing more on the human and esoteric dimensions of forteana: mind-over-matter, ghosts and poltergeists, stigmatics and fire-walkers, dowsing and telepathy. Arthur C Clarke’s World of Strange Powers was a worthy follow-up to Mysterious World, serving up some serious weirdness (including “a now unthinkable teatime gorefest that showcased the wounds of…

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER Christopher Fowler, who died at the beginning of March from a rare cancer, was a prolific writer of horror, fantasy, science fiction and detective thrillers, often with fortean themes. His early novels and short stories such as Rune (1990), Spanky (1994), Disturbia (1997) and Personal Demons (1998), ranged from supernatural tales of curses and Faustian pacts to black comedies and nightmares of urban alienation. From 2004 he wrote a series of 27 books featuring the London-based detectives Arthur Bryant and John May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, a shadowy department of the Metropolitan Police who investigate unusual and esoteric crimes that lead them into curious and forgotten byways of London history. He capped the series with Bryant & May’s Peculiar London (2022), a non-fiction book in the form…

For many years I have been seeking to understand why what I call the ‘Oz Factor’ seems important to close encounters. It is a consistently reported set of events almost occurring as a sideline to the event itself but I suspect ultimately more significant than what kind of UFO was seen, as its consistency may help us understand the deeper nature of the Universe. I think what this odd state of consciousness tells us about how close encounters lead down the yellow brick road is important. And a fascinating new idea posed by a Scottish scientist on the nature of time and space gives intriguing context. An illustrative case that has long seemed important to me started on a morning shopping trip across Bedfordshire on 8 August 1992. The husband,…

Thanks to Covid, it had been some time since the Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) had undertaken an expedition. With restrictions lifted, we decided on a return to Sumatra in autumn 2022 – our sixth visit – on the trail of the orang pendek (the ‘short man’ in Indonesian), an elusive upright walking ape (see FT83:19, 176:26, 181:20, 304:20, 398:25. For previous CFZ expeditions to Sumatra, see FT182:32-39, 208:30-34, 266:50-53). We contacted our Sumatran guide Dally Sandradiputra – trained by our original guide, Sahar Dimus – who would seek out the latest sightings and witnesses and find us places to stay. The team would consist of me, Carl Marshall and Andrew ‘Geordie’ Jackson, along with Dally and the local porters. Carl and Geordie were bringing professional cameras, a drone camera…

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CONTACT US BY POST: PO BOX 1200, WHITSTABLE CT1 9RH, OR E-MAIL SIEVEKING@FORTEANTIMES.COM PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS Major Jesse Marcel With reference to his article on Nazi UFOs [FT430:44-49], I would be curious to know what evidence SDTucker has for suggesting that Major Jesse Marcel was a liar. Researchers, who I suspect have spent a lot more time than Mr Tucker in researching the Roswell incident, have come to the conclusion that he was a decent and honourable man. Mr Tucker himself admits that Marcel’s account of what happened in New Mexico in 1947 was fairly muted compared to later claims. Marcel was the chief intelligence officer at the then only nuclear armed air base in the world. It may suit Mr Tucker’s agenda to portray such…

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The initial panic over a Chinese ‘spy balloon’ shot down by American jets in February may have died down (see FT430:28-29), even though two subsequent unidentified balloons were also downed, but many questions remain about just what they were and what they were doing. First, a little history. The Japanese attacked the US Pacific coast with a wave of small Fu-Go balloons dropping incendiary bombs in 1944-45, in an attempt to set the Pacific forests on fire (see FT378:28). Were the balloons launched from merchant ships off the coast, or from submarines? Did they come from inside the US, maybe even from internment camps? Analysis of Fu-Go sand ballast revealed that, incredibly, they came all the way from Japan. Japanese scientists had discovered the jet stream, a fast-moving ribbon of…

SEND FORUM SUBMISSIONS TO THE EDITOR: DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM It was 1980 when I first dipped my toes into the muddy waters that we call ufology. Living just outside the city of Leeds in West York shire I had been notified of the formation of a new UFO group. This was the Yorkshire UFO Society (YUFOS). This small group was set up by brothers Graham and Mark Birdsall. After spending eight years with YUFOS I helped form the Independent UFO Network (IUN) and I also joined both the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). I didn’t just join these various organisations, but became an active UFO investigator/researcher almost from day one. For BUFORA, for example, I helped with various roles – Press Officer, Conference Organiser and Director…

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM The perfumed cesspit Crowley’s ‘dear vile London’ was peopled with a bohemian demi-monde of artists, writers, courtesans, catamites, actresses, ragged ragtime girls, acolytes, wizards, swamis and more, says Nina Antonia City of the Beast The London of Aleister Crowley Phil Baker Strange Attractor Press 2022 Pb, 280pp, £21, ISBN 9781913689322 Like a literary showman, author Phil Baker pulls back a heavy scarlet curtain embroidered with occult symbols to present the London of Aleister Crowley’s decadent æon. For Crowley, a man of privilege with a handsome inheritance, the city was a playground of delight, vice, mystery and Magick, peopled with a bohemian demi-monde; artists, writers, courtesans, catamites, actresses, ragged ragtime girls, acolytes, wizards, swamis, army men gone astray and society…

Jonathon Ross has been such a fixture of British broadcasting for the last 30-odd years, appearing on TV and radio in such diverse projects as Film 2000 to The Masked Singer, it’s easy to forget that he’s long been into fortean interest stuff, even fronting his own, now largely-forgotten series The Incredibly Strange Film Club and Fantastic Facts, an ITV mid-evening offering from 1992 in which Ross, assisted by Wilf Lunn, “looked at strange but true stories from around the world, including sheep who faint” (it prompted correspondence in FT if memory serves, when he chatted with a chap who claimed to speak alien languages, echoing Patrick Moore’s similar interview with a man who “spoke Venusian” 20 years earlier). Anyway, he’s returned to the general theme with his new series…

Erroneous announcement A few years ago in the early 2000s my wife and I were at home with the radio playing in the background. The news was on and it was announced that Stephen King had fallen to his death from a balcony in a theatre in London. I looked at my wife and it was obvious she had heard the same news. We were both asking ourselves: “Did we just hear that correctly?” I went online right away and found that King hadn’t died; he was neither in London nor in a theatre at the time, and there was also no other mysterious death along those lines reported elsewhere. I am a big horror fan, so on occasion may think about the author, but my wife has zero interest…

The Ghosts of Sawston Hall ALAN MURDIE goes in search of the stately ghosts of one of England’s premier haunted houses Back in February, I attended the funeral of my cousin Stephen, held at St Mary’s Church, Sawston, near Cambridge. Sadly, it was the second funeral at this ancient church for me in the last year, having previously attended in August 2022 that of his younger brother Ian who predeceased him. Stephen was a shade eccentric, keen on tweed suits and a devotee of smoking pipe tobacco. A gentleman possessing firm opinions perhaps best fitted for another age, he had long deplored the decline of the country and considered the 2008 smoking ban in public places the worst restriction of civil liberties ever imposed upon a free people. But he…

268: BABY BLUES The myth All human babies have blue eyes when they are just born, no matter what colour their eyes end up being in later life. The “truth” In 2016 a study by Stanford University into “iris colour at birth” found that 63% of the newborns examined had brown eyes. Blue was in second place with 20.8%. So where does the strange belief come from that all baby eyes are blue? One possible hint lies in the fact that blue birth eyes are much more prevalent in Caucasians than in other groups; is this a myth only found in majority-Caucasian communities? The colour of human irises can (but doesn’t always) change during the first year or so of life, depending on how much melanin each individual produces, and…

THE UFO CIRCUS UFO festivals and conferences are now back in full swing after the COVID crisis, and we can actually meet face-to-face again. In the US there is a penchant for holding annual festivals at UFO hotspots: these locations inevitably include Roswell; then there is the McMenamins UFO Fest (to celebrate the McMinnville/Trent UFO photographs taken in 1950), the Kecksburg UFO Festival (celebrating the 1965 acorn-shaped UFO crash), the Exeter UFO Festival in New Hampshire and many more. Plus, there are such things as the Ancient Aliens Live tour and UFO themed cruises. Most of the festivals are for charity and feature alien-themed parades, food, beverage and merchandise vendors, live music, film screenings, talks and presentations. They are a fun opportunity for exchanging stories, making friends and hearing talks…

Almost every child in Britain or America has encountered the legend of Bloody Mary. The idea is that if you stand in the bathroom, stare into the mirror and chant “Bloody Mary” three times before turning around, the ghostly figure of Mary will appear behind you. Sometimes she will be dripping with blood; sometimes she is holding a dead baby. Sometimes she is relatively benign, but on other occasions she foretells death for her unfortunate summoner. The usual practice is for this to be a school bathroom dare – one that usually descends into screaming long before the chanting can be completed. The legend has proved to be both powerful and enduring, spawning numerous horror films and television programmes.1 But what is the truth and who is the woman behind…

Marking the ninth anniversary of the disappearance of flight MH370, Netflix’s three part investigation of the factors underlying the biggest aviation mystery of all time is curiously titled. For, as the series makes clear, it is the fact that MH370 reappeared that makes the case so baffling. And herein lies a tale… The circumstances, well-known nine years on, are these. MH370, a Malaysian 777-200 aircraft flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, vanished on 8 March 2014 after sending a final, routine, sign off message to Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control. It was an apparently routine red eye flight until its arrival at way point IGARI at the boundary between Malaysian and Vietnamese Air Traffic Control space. And here, the plane… well, disappeared… Thus far the series, then, seems well-named. But…

“Please treat the church and houses with care,” reads an anonymous but heartfelt note, pinned to the wooden door of a Dorset church since December 1943. “We have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly…” The story of Tyneham (FT216:40-43, 333:76-77), is one of great sacrifice and – ultimately – unbearable yearning. With plans afoot for the 1944 Normandy landings, this sleepy village was requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence for military exercises, its 225 residents permanently rehomed. And, despite the bittersweet optimism of one concerned note-writer, they were never to return. Eighty years later, the village remains uninhabited and partially reclaimed by nature,…

Have you heard the cringey new term ‘elevated horror’? It’s used for films like The Witch, Get Out and Hereditary by people who think horror has only just achieved ‘art’ status. It’s bunk, of course; so it’s nice to see Second Sight release three films that firmly remind us that ‘horror’ and ‘masterpiece’ are not recent bedfellows. By 1977, audiences had thoroughly tasted the blood of Dracula through Hammer, Dark Shadows, The Night Stalker, and Blacula. There seemed little more to say about vampires (Dracula’s Dog was going into production the same year). Then George Romero brought us a vampire who uses syringes to extract blood and hisses into the camera with plastic novelty fangs. Romero’s reputation as an intelligent and provocative filmmaker is often linked to his superb Dead…

In New York, a 50-year-old woman, originally from the Congo, was found to be carrying a lithopædion, a calcified fœtus, that was compressing her intestines and major blood vessels, preventing her absorbing nutrients. Lithopædia is an extremely rare condition, only ever recorded 290 times since 1582, and occurs after an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fœtus grows outside the womb. Such pregnancies are not viable, so the fœtus dies and, as it is not in the womb, cannot be expelled from the body. If it is too large to be reabsorbed, the immune system gradually calcifies the fœtus, turning it to stone. Sometimes, the calcified fœtus causes the carrier severe problems, but they can also go undetected for decades. In this case, the woman had visited doctors complaining of stomach…