Innholdsfortegnelse for 436 i Fortean Times

It’s been a busy time for fortean news, as reflected in our latest issue. The Congressional hearing on UFOs – or “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency”, to give it its full title – took up plenty of column inches in the press, but what, if anything, did we learn from this latest example of the US Government and military apparently taking seriously reports of strange things seen in American skies? Nigel Watson, in a UFO Files special report (p.28), takes a detailed look at the testimony of the three whistleblowers, given under oath to the House, and asks some awkward questions about the lack of compelling evidence to back up some of their more outlandish claims and the influence of the ‘UFO lobby’…

PAUL SIEVEKING catalogues the latest finds, including a stone phallus and a silver phalera RECORDING AN ASTEROID IMPACT An ancient clay tablet recovered by Sir Henry Layard in 1851 from the underground library of King Ashurbanipal in Kuyunjik (ancient Nineveh), Iraq, is known as “the Planisphere” and designated No K8538 in the British Museum collection. An ancient Sumerian astronomer etched on the surface details of a massive object, visible in space, as it smashed through Earth’s atmosphere. The tablet features intricate drawings of constellations and their names. Experts had been unable to understand exactly what the tablet conveyed; but that changed with the appearance of computer programs that could help simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago. The Sumerian astronomer recorded the events he observed on…

As I write this in July 2023, Coutts Bank is suffering a tide of uncomfortable publicity over the closure of a bank account for the Brexit politician Nigel Farage. Amid the furore – and I may be the only one to recall all this – mention of the prestigious Coutts brings back for me some entirely different associations, memories of another time when the bank was caught up in controversy, long before anyone had heard of Mr Farage or his bank account. This was back in 1993, when the news was not about Coutts barring an unwanted customer but its efforts in ridding itself of an unwelcome ghost (see FT69:16, 80:19). Generating breathless headlines such as ‘Haunted Coutts calls in the ghostbuster’ this was a story of alarmed bank staff,…

Christopher Nolan’s much-acclaimed summer blockbuster Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy and his hat, tells the complex story of the great atomic physicist J Robert Oppenheimer and his successful quest to build the US an atom-bomb in 1945. In subsequent decades, several other nations have succeeded in splitting the atom too – including Pakistan, which first went nuclear in 1998. Every domestic A-bomb programme had its own specific internal methods of constructing such an awesomely powerful doomsday device, but one proposed Pakistani plan was unique: to exploit captured genies. NO FIRE WITHOUT SMOKE? Not merely the stuff of fictional Arabian Nights fairytales, genies – known in Muslim lands as djinn/jinn (plural) or djinni/jinni (singular) – are a standard element of belief in Islam (see FT147:30-33, 324:20-21). In the Koran, they are described…

The Six Million Dollar Man / The Bionic Woman Dir various, US 1973-1978 Fabulous Films, £249.99/£149.99 A casual visit to schools of the mid-1970s may have prompted alarm. Kids had started running and jumping in fake slow motion while staring at each other, through one eye and making ‘dit-dit-dit’ sounds. Was it mass hysteria? In some ways, yes. They were playing The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman off the telly. This was an actual cultural phenomenon, spawning a spin-off series, three TV movies, tons of toys and merchandise and a generation of kids whose weedy playground athleticism turned instantly epic through a few funny noises and some weird crouching on low walls. Now Fabulous Films have unleashed it all in two heaving collections so exhaustive I half…

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,…

Geo-engineering, using slight tweaks to the environment to produce significant effects, is being considered as a counter to climate change. For example, small amounts of finely powdered salt might be sprayed into the upper atmosphere to reflect solar radiation. It will come as no surprise to FT readers that back in the dark days of the Cold War, Pentagon scientists explored the military potential of such techniques with unexpected results. During the Vietnam War, outside assistance was an enormous factor. American military planners believed that if they could stop supplies from other countries reaching the Viet Cong, victory would follow. Massed bombing of the network of paths known as the Ho Chi Minh trail failed to stop the flow of battered Soviet and Chinese trucks. Something smarter was needed. Project…

POLISH MIRACLE TREE In Parczew in eastern Poland people venerate an image of the Blessed Virgin (or, some say, Jesus Christ) they discovered in an oak tree. Despite both scientists and Church officials declaring the image to be explicable, the stream of pilgrims steadily increases. Parczew, a small town of 10,000 souls, was previously famous for its vinegar and mustard, but since early summer 2023, when believers started to see the face in the cracks and colours of the bark of an oak, it has also become a holy place for some. The faithful now assemble at the tree, light candles and say prayers. Some touch the tree, others kneel before it. On park banks nearby, the pious sit and play hymns on their smart phones. “I really believe this…

There were high hopes and much excitement in some quarters that the floodgates of UFO disclosure would be opened at a Congressional hearing titled ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency’ convened by the House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs held on 26 July 2023. Was this going to prove a landmark moment in UFO history? Chairperson Rep. Glenn Grothman started proceedings by saying that this was a bipartisan meeting that sought transparency and accountability and would be driven by the data. The three witnesses putting forward the ‘data’ were David Grusch, former National Reconnaissance Office Representative on the UAP Task Force, Department of Defense, David Fravor, Retired Commander, Black Aces Squadron, US Navy, and Ryan Graves, former…

“Lands in the sky–That they are nearby–” So begins Charles Fort’s New Lands, thus laying the groundwork for every UFO book of the 1950s that suggested that we were being visited by aliens from Mars or Venus. Fort’s second major non-fiction work, New Lands, is a difficult book. It lacks the monumentality of The Book of the Damned, the wide and playful scope of Lo! or the immediacy of Wild Talents. And sometimes, when you read it, you can feel that Fort takes his ideas a bit too seriously – that he believes in alien visitors, nearby worlds in our planet’s atmosphere, and even a flat Earth. The aloofness from his own whimsical explanations that characterised The Book of the Damned is certainly less evident here. That is not to…

Conspiracies Decoded (Quest) has a clear brief: “expert analysis combined with 21st century forensic science uncovers groundbreaking new evidence to reveal the truth behind the world’s darkest conspiracies.” Its major drawback appears to be that it doesn’t know what a conspiracy is. Yellowstone Park sits on top of one of the world’s largest active volcanoes. For millions of years it has periodically blown a gasket and made the day of everything in a huge radius considerably worse. Apparently it erupts roughly every 650,000 years and the last eruption was 650,000 years ago, so it’s due another one (the “roughly” qualifier is very important here). Scientists set up a series of probes and sensors to get an idea of the size of the magma chamber, and indeed there’s a whole lot…

Tales of the Beast In his article on Wyndham Lewis’s novel The Childermass [FT430:51], Richard George said he was not sure if Lewis ever met Aleister Crowley. Perhaps a meeting would not have been to Lewis’s advantage. Here is ‘The Great Beast’ from a 1919 edition of The Equinox (text version available on-line): “Mr Wyndham Lewis was living some few years ago on the charity of a young lady, the admired and honoured friend of many artists. She had taken compassion on him, because he told her that he wrote poetry – an excusable falsehood. Perhaps he even believed it. She asked me if I would help him by publishing poems of his, and I wrote to him. He replied by complaining that the young lady aforesaid had tried to…

ASHES, ASHES The town of Lahaina, on the island of Maui, in Hawaii, is a smoking ruin. Fire devastated the seaside community of 13,000 people, most of them (unusually for prime real estate in Hawaii) native Hawaiians. It happened suddenly, and spread preternaturally quickly. With 100 fatalities confirmed, at the time of writing 1,300 people are unaccounted for, many of them children; the community has been literally decimated by the tragedy. It is quite likely that the Lahaina fire will be the biggest such disaster in recent US history. Surviving residents are angry at what they see as criminal negligence by the local authorities. The town had an emergency siren, usually used for tsunami warnings. It was not used, apparently, because the person in charge of it was worried that…

Throughout the 1930s, the world’s newspapers were full of incredible stories about Gef, a ‘talking mongoose’ or ‘man-weasel’ who had allegedly appeared in the home of a peculiar family living in a somewhat dilapidated Isle of Man farmhouse. Gef was said to speak several languages, sing, steal objects from nearby farms, and eavesdrop on local people, bearing local gossip back to his host family, James and Margaret Irving and their teenage daughter Voirrey. James and Margaret were not native Islanders, but had moved there from Liverpool in 1917, where, up until the Great War, they had enjoyed comparative prosperity. James, an educated and intellectually curious man, had been Britain’s sales representative for the Dominion Piano & Organ Company, a Canadian firm whose grand and upright pianos were renowned for their…

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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.…

Warming up Bravo to David Hambling for his precise response to Barry Baldwin on climate change causes [FT434:14]. Are there any places online where we can find the sources he mentions, especially the satellite tracking of how much energy reaches us from the Sun each year? It’s always good to have solid sources to provide to those contesting the current understanding. I often think that apart from any emotional reassurance people arguing against human caused climate change provide themselves, what they’re really looking for is to feel engagement with the subject. Actual data rather than secondor third-hand reports might help them feel as if they’re being given the chance to understand, rather than just accept on authority. Dean Teasdale By email David Hambling writes: I have provided TinyURL links for…

38. HAROLD PYOTT, THE ENGISH MIDGET Harold Pyott was born in Lord Street, Stockport, in late 1887. He had two elder sisters, both of whom died young. He is said to have been small at birth, albeit not abnormally so; the problem was that his growth was extremely slow, leading to severe proportional dwarfism. His diagnosis is likely to have been pituitary dwarfism, caused by underproduction of growth hormone. Harold’s parents both died when he was 12 years old, and he was taken in by his cousin Will Beeley, who worked as a postal clerk in Edinburgh. Beeley soon realised the commercial prospects of this extraordinary dwarf boy, and became his manager. As an adult, Harold stood 23in (58cm) tall and weighed 2lb (0.9kg). Doctors found him perfectly healthy and…

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Australian authorities are investigating the deaths of Natasha Lechner and Jarrad Antonovitch in New South Wales, which both occurred after they had taken kambo (also known as sapo), a waxy substance obtained by scraping the skin of a live giant monkey frog, originally found in the Amazon. There, indigenous peoples have used kambo for centuries to improve hunting skills and ward off bad luck, but in the West, New Age practitioners promote it as being able to “detoxify” the body, increase mental clarity and cure a variety of illnesses. There is no medical evidence to back up their claims and the substance is illegal in many countries, including Australia. In a kambo ritual, users drink large quantities of water, then make burns on their skin, after which the substance is…