Innholdsfortegnelse for 434 i Fortean Times

HAVE WE LIVED BEFORE? With this issue we come to the end of our survey of Arthur C Clarke’s World of Strange Powers with the last instalment in Ryan Shirlow’s epic rewatch of the whole series taking in such fortean favourites as communications from the other side, curses and maledictions and the metal-bending antics of Uri Geller. Previously (FT433:44-45), Clarke had considered the evidence for cases of reincarnation and some people’s belief that they had experienced past lives. It’s a topic we return to in this issue’s cover story, in which regular FT columnist Simon Young undergoes a number of past life regressions and subjects the results – which are sometimes powerful and surprising – to a sceptical analysis. Meanwhile, hypnotherapist Paul Goddard, who has been performing past life regressions…

HOMESICK SNAKE After a highly venomous King Cobra, named “Sir Hiss”, escaped from his tank during maintenance at the Skansen leisure complex in Stock-holm, staff attempted to capture him with glue traps and tempt him out with dead rats, then tried to track his movements by putting flour on the floor and cameras in the wall cavities, all to no avail. Eventually borrowed X-ray scanners located him in the ceiling, but when staff tried to cut into the space using angle grinders, he gave them the slip again, eventually turning up back in his original tank. Times, 31 Oct 2022. FLORIDA MAN Police in Pennsylvania tried to pull over Tony Jay Saunders Jr, of Port Lucie, Florida, who was spotted driving a stolen school bus. After initially complying, Saunders drove…

If you tile a surface, no matter what shape the tile you use is, the pattern almost always repeats. Mathematicians, though, have long sought a tile shape that can produce a pattern that never repeats, what is termed an “aperiodic monotile”, also known as an “einstein”. This has nothing to do with the famous physicist but comes from the German “ein stein”, meaning “one stone”. In the 1970s, mathematician Roger Penrose, who later won a Nobel Prize for his work on black holes, came up with his famed Penrose Tiles. These initially involved four shapes that together would tile a surface without repeating, and he was later able to refine the shapes so that it could be done with just two tiles, but he never found a single shape that…

Fortean Times is the broadest of churches, with scope for many contrasting views, but Barry Baldwin’s column on climate change from a classical history perspective deserves a response from the science corner. In “Weather Or…?” (FT431:15), he notes historical instances of hotter and colder conditions which cannot have been caused by human pollutants. He suggests that the “the overall pattern is that there is no pattern,” that the current climate change may be the result of variations in solar output. In conclusion he says: “I recommend a crash course in meteorological history to Greta [Thunberg] and co.” Climate Change was once an unexplained phenomenon shrouded in mystery, as described in “Climate of Confusion” from 1995 (FT83:14), but the science has moved on. This includes extensive studies of historical climate, from…

COSMIC DEBRIS When a couple from Elmshorn in northern Germany heard a loud bang on 25 April, they knew not what to make of it. Then they found their roof smashed and a strange stone on their lawn. They assumed it was a meteorite and alerted the fire service, who checked for radiation but could detect none (“all meteorites are radioactive”, adds my source). Then, six further stones were found in the driveway of a neighbour. Experts from the German Centre for Air and Space navigation (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt, DLR) were called in, searched for a whole weekend, and found 13 additional fragments, one weighing 3.5kg (7.7lb), one flat and one as large as a tennis ball. All fragments collected resulted in 6kg (13lb) of cosmic debris, which…

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. GREAT REASONS TO GREAT REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE • SAVE ON THE COVER PRICE!• 13 Issues delivered to your door (postage included)* • 3 Issues available on mobile / tablet to keep on your device**• Every issue delivered before it’s available to buy in shops• Enjoy a 10% discount on all merchandise and books In our shop *Print and bundle subscribers ** Digital and bundle subscribers NOW SUBSCRIBE ORDER ONLINE AT SHOP.FORTEANTIMES.COM/FT434P EMAIL US AT HELLO@METROPOLIS.CO.UK OR CALL 020 8752 8195 QUOTING FT434P…

The Haunting of Borley Rectory The Story of a Ghost Story Sean O’Connor Simon & Schuster 2022 Hb, 496pp, £20, ISBN 9781471194771 Writing about Borley Rectory – “the most haunted house in England” – is a fraught business. The ugly red-brick rectory itself, once situated in a hamlet on the borders of Suffolk and Essex, burnt down 84 years ago and its plot was built over half a century ago. Yet it persists as the topic of numerous books, articles and debates about the genuineness or otherwise of its ghosts, with the details minutely picked over by fervent believers and sceptics alike. In 2003 a book appeared under the optimistic title Borley Rectory: The Final Analysis offered by locals Ted Babbs and Claudine Matthias, but obviously it wasn’t. In 2009, I…

When a paranormally-themed TV series wants to set out its stall as serious, it will invariably reinforce its cred by having it fronted by an investigative journalist (presumably lifestyle journalist, gardening correspondent or, Heaven forbid, television reviewer would immediately lose it some points). Paranormal Declassified (Discovery) is quick to reassure us that Paul Beban, investigative journalist, is just that. He’s a serious guy, who looks at files, looks at screens, frowns a bit and looks slightly like David Duchovny. You just know that he has a Dictaphone in his pocket and frequently rings the ever-supportive Mrs Beban to tell her he’s pursuing a lead and isn’t going to make it home tonight. Paul is going to delve properly. In S1 E4, ‘Alien Cover-up’, he delves into the fertile territory of,…

The Shadow of James Dunsby Corporal James Dunsby died in hospital on 30 July 2013 from multiple organ failure caused by dehydration during a Special Forces selection march in the Brecon Beacons. The accident made major headlines in the national press at the time. This year marks the 10th anniversary of his death, and a respectable distance to explore some unusual experiences I had around my friend’s untimely demise. James had sat next to me in a ramshackle Portacabin on Salisbury Plain where we prepared training courses for the British Army in Afghanistan, where James himself had served as commander of a tank unit. Alongside our day jobs, we would break the tension with ridiculous pranks and long-running jokes about the decline of the Empire – the farthest-flung corner of…

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE ANNUAL SUB of 12 issues (inc p&p) UK £50.58; Europe £62; USA £70; Rest of World £70. Please see house ads in the latest issue for details of special offers. UK, EUROPE, NORTH AMERICA & REST OF WORLD Major credit cards accepted. Cheques or money orders should be in sterling, preferably drawn on a London bank and made payable to Diamond Publishing Limited. Mail to: Fortean Times, Diamond Publishing Limited, 2nd Floor, Saunders House, 52-53 The Mall, Ealing, W5 3AT. NB: This address should be used for orders and subscriptions only. Telephone payments and queries: +44 (0) 208 752 8195. E-mail payments and queries: hello@metropolis.co.uk HOW TO SUBMIT Fortean Times reserves all rights to reuse material submitted by FT readers and contributors in any medium or format.…

TRAIL CAMERA MYSTERY Having found a dead deer at the bottom of her garden in Powell River, Canada, Corinea Stanhope, 36, rigged up a trail camera trained on the carcass to record any wildlife it might attract overnight. Reviewing the recorded footage the next day, Stanhope and her grandfather, Bob, 76, spotted a bobcat visiting the remains, but also something more unusual. “Grandpa said he’d got naked people on the camera, and I said ‘No, no you didn’t. Bullshit!’ So he showed me,” said Stanhope. Ten minutes after sunset, two half-naked women, one wearing just a loincloth, the other ragged trousers, with long, matted black hair covering their faces come into shot. They squat down next to the carcass and probe it with their fingers before one picks up a…

DEEP DIVES The loss of the submersible Titan on a trip to view the wreckage of the Titanic captured the attention of the world’s news media, and with it, much of the world’s attention too. For five days, reports appeared agonising over the air supply, the (apparently desultory, according to some) rescue efforts, and the people on board. Some of the reports hinted at the mysterious legacy of the original disaster, as if all activities connected to the illustrious wreck were doomed. In the Conspirasphere, the drama was equally gripping, but for different reasons. Old stories resurfaced, of course; how the Titanic was secretly withdrawn from service at the last moment and replaced by her sister ship in a gargantuan insurance swindle; that the wreckage contained secrets in the form…

COOPER’S ODYSSEY After his original owners handed him in to an animal rescue charity, Cooper the Golden Retriever was adopted by Nigel Fleming, a photographer from Dungannon in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, as a companion for his other dog, Molly. However, Cooper’s transition to this new life was not smooth. “I was just about to get the dogs out of the car on their leads for their first walk together when Cooper bolted. He literally jumped over Molly, prised the car door open enough to get past me and ran for it,” Fleming said. “It was a disaster. The poor boy had no idea where he was… I tried to chase after him but he was gone in an instant – so then the search was on.” Fleming could not…

KENNETH ANGER Kenneth Anger, who has died aged 96, was a countercultural polymath, who, while never achieving widespread public recognition, was a significant influence on many who did. He was primarily an experimental filmmaker, but also an occultist and a celebrated purveyor of Hollywood gossip. Anger’s reputation is based on a succession of extraordinary, sensuous short films, starting in the late 1940s with Fireworks. He was influenced by Maya Deren, Eisenstein, and the surrealists, but more significantly by Hollywood Technicolor epics and silent film, particularly the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, and Douglas Sirk. Indeed, he claims to have made his first film appearance back in the classic era of Hollywood, as a child playing the Changeling Prince in the 1935 Warner Brothers film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although this is…

SEND FORUM SUBMISSIONS TO THE EDITOR: DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM Some people collect autographs as a hobby. There are also those who hunt down the famous and take selfies with them. Other folk, however, might prefer the more peaceful pursuit of celebrity gravespotting. The focus is not on the great monuments and shrines to kings and saints in cathedrals and abbeys, but on the unexpected finds in ordinary churchyards and municipal cemeteries. Recently an historian friend in Lerwick, Shetland, was taking us on a tour of the war graves in the town cemetery. He told us the often poignant stories he had researched of ordinary people who had died in the course of two world wars. Quite unexpectedly we found ourselves in front of the grave of Pilot Officer GG Macaulay. It was…

The Witch of Criswell John Michael Greer Sphinx Books 2023 Pb, 180pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781912573851 John Michael Greer’s name will be familiar to many FT readers as one of the foremost and most reliable writers on the occult. The Witch of Criswell is a young adult novel about 18-year-old Ariel, who is sent to stay with her grandfather for the summer in Adocentyn, an American city with a statue of Elias Ashmole and an occult library, the Heydonian Institution. Intelligent and inquisitive, Ariel discovers that her grandfather is an occult investigator and becomes caught up in his investigation into what seems to start off as poltergeist activity at a nearby farm, but quickly becomes considerably more threatening. Could an 18th-century witch be working dark magic from beyond the grave, or…

RAF Lt Kate Sinclair is having a bad day. First, she’s shot down over Afghanistan; then she watches her colleague splutter blood and die. Next, she’s shot at by ground troops. When she finally finds shelter in an abandoned Russian bunker, it’s another ‘Doh!’, because she meets a horde of half-human freaks hungry for flesh. Worst of all? She must tackle these hassles in figure-hugging combat gear while brooding narrowed-eyed into the camera (every four minutes). The Lair (Blu-ray, DVD and digital) is a video game of a movie… which has its plus points. The opening chase is nicely free of chat and sets the tone for almost constant action. The Resident Evil imagery is striking in parts, too: I loved the creature’s tongue. A scene where the mutants descend…

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,…

AQUAMAN RESIGNS FROM COMMITTEE FOR BUILDING GIANT COLOSSAL BOB DYLAN STATUES Flipboard (Duluth, MN), 28 Mar 2023. ‘Penguin’ spotted on Dover promenade stuns residents Kent Online, 18 Jan 2023 COPS: S.C. WOMAN STABBED SPOUSE WITH CERAMIC SQUIRREL OVER BEER Father bludgeons sex offender to death with moose antler D.Telegraph, 12 Mar 2023. FATHER KILLED BY ‘VIOLENT CHICKEN’: MAN DIED WITH ‘MASSIVE BLEEDING’ WHILE WHISPERING ‘ROOSTER’… dailymail.co.uk, 16 Feb 2023…

Retired nurse, Bella Montoya, 76, from Babahoyo, Ecuador, was rushed to hospital after suffering from a possible stroke and cardiac arrest, arriving at the emergency room unconscious. A few hours later doctors told her son Gilberto Barbera that she had not responded to resuscitation and had been declared dead, handing over her identity documents and a death certificate. The family then had her body taken to a funeral home and began to hold her wake. “There were about 20 of us there,” Barbera said. “After about five hours of the wake, the coffin started to make sounds. My mom was wrapped in sheets and hitting the coffin, and when we approached we could see that she was breathing heavily.” The family rushed Montoya back to the hospital where she was…

MUSTATILS Mustatils, huge stone monuments concentrated in northern Saudi Arabia, were the site of rituals and early pilgrimages according to new research. Researchers discovered the first mustatils, dating back to the Late Neolithic period, in the 1970s. Since then, 16,000 have been discovered, primarily in northern Saudi Arabia. Mustatils are rectangular, low-walled, stone structures that range from 20m (66ft) to 600m (1,968ft) in length. The researchers identified 7,000-year-old fragments of animal skulls and horns, primarily from domestic cattle, found close to a large upright stone that is part of a 140m/460ft-long mustatil located 55 miles (88km) east of the city of AlUla. The close proximity likely indicates the area is a site of animal offerings. “We believe these remains are offerings to an unknown deity or deities represented by the…

Of all the types of apparition you might see, the ghost of a lost child must surely rate as one of the most poignant. It is the variety most likely to bring forth a sympathetic reaction rather than a fearful response in the eyewitness, and collectively on the part of any audience told of one. The enthusiastic reaction to a ghostly image interpreted as the ‘side profile of a little girl’ when released in April 2021 suggests a strong emotional appeal and resonance inherent in reports of spectral children. Obtained at a reputedly haunted house in Savannah in Georgia, USA, and posted on TikTok by Kalani Smith, 24, a ghost hunter from Nashville, Tennessee, by the middle of January 2023 it had garnered some 12.8 million views. Smith states his…

TWO IN ONE Doctors at Fudan University, Shanghai, treating a one-year-old girl who had an enlarged head and problems with her motor skills, gave her a CT scan. This showed that her brain was compressed and that there was a significant build-up of fluid caused by a large growth within one of her brain’s ventricles. Further examination showed that the growth was the fœtus of the child’s unborn twin that had developed within her brain. The “fetiform mass” was only partially developed, but had grown upper limbs, including finger-like projections, and was removed by the doctors. Known as fœtus-in-fetu, these cases come about when, early in a twin pregnancy, the cluster of dividing cells fails to separate properly, so that one of the early embryos becomes enveloped by the other.…

The revelation by David Charles Grusch that vehicles of non-human origin have been recovered by US intelligence agencies sent a ripple of excitement through the world of ufology. The news came in an article posted on The Debrief website (5 June 2023) by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal. Grusch’s credentials seem pretty impressive as he has worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and from 2021 to July 2022 he was a UAP analyst for the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). He left government on 7 April 2023, after being threatened and intimidated for interviewing high-level intelligence officials who told him about the retrieval of these craft and programmes to reverse-engineer them.1 A typical response from Michael Mac on Facebook was: “By Christmas…

For many decades British folklorists have been largely silent on the difficult question of where fairies come from. There has been a great deal of discussion of where fairies go – “always going, never gone” – why fairy belief declined, and the fairies’ modern and literary transformations, but when it comes to their origin scholars are usually content to report what people say about the origin of the fairies rather than to delve into this contested history. One exception to this was Diane Purkiss, who in her book Troublesome Things (2000) tentatively linked Europe’s fairies with the bogeys of the ancient Greek nursery; but this was more historical psychoanalysis than history. This reticence among modern folklorists contrasts with the confidence of earlier scholars like Walter Evans-Wentz, Lewis Spence and even…

This July sees the 70th anniversary of the broadcast of The Quatermass Experiment, and with it a revolution in the possibilities of television. Writer Nigel Kneale and producer Rudolph Cartier delivered an enduring SF classic – but it was also the first real example of what we would now describe as event television. The character of Professor Bernard Quatermass and the three pioneering serials of the 1950s in which he appeared would have a profound and lasting influence, not just on TV but on the wider cultural landscape. The three serials – The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958/59) – each present a different take on the same basic scenario: an alien invasion. They weren’t the first science fiction stories shown by the BBC,…

Kunstkammer Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire Jeffrey Chipps Smith Reaktion Books 2022 Hb, 336pp, £35, ISBN 9781789146127 The Kunstkammer (plural Kunst  kammern), or (more fully) the Kunst-und Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosity, was a world in miniature, an assembly of the recondite and bizarre, which demonstrated the continuities between the treasures of art and the wonders of nature. Actually, the term “cabinet of curiosity” is misleading; the Kunstkammer could be a chamber or sequence of rooms, which might well contain actual cabinets containing categories of exhibits. It represented a crucial stage in the history of taste before the advent of modern museums in the Age of Enlightenment, when collections were separated out into natural history, fine art, mechanical wonders, anomalies, and so forth. In theory,…

Film curses James Wright’s letter [FT431:62- 63] rightly points out that the film Poltergeist was allegedly ‘cursed’. However, he gave me a laugh when he mentions actress “JoBeth Williams, who won the part for showing precocious reading ability at her audition”. While I’m sure Ms Williams’s reading ability was excellent, I wouldn’t call it ‘precocious’, given that she was 33 years old at the time. Mr Wright was referring to Heather O’Rourke, who – at the age of just five –was cast as Carol Anne Freeling (the family’s youngest child). She did indeed die of a congenital intestinal condition at the age of 12 (JoBeth Williams played the mother, Diane Freeling – just a slip on Mr Wright’s part, for sure). He also references two actors who have played Superman. However,…

Police in Banjarnegara in central Java, Indonesia, arrested self-proclaimed shaman Slamet Tohari, 45, after the son of a man who had visited him for a financial multiplication ritual told them his father had not been seen since visiting Tohari’s house. On investigation, authorities found 12 bodies buried on Tohari’s property, all aged between 25 and 50 and buried in the last six months, none showing any signs of violence. Two or three victims were buried together in a single grave, along with a mineral water bottle. Tohari, who had been imprisoned in 2019 for forgery, had set himself up as a shaman after leaving prison, modelling himself on the famous money multiplication shaman Mbah Slamet (Grandpa Slamet), who claims to be able to multiply 70m rupiah (£3,755) into 5b rupiah…