Innholdsfortegnelse for 440 i Fortean Times

NEWS OF THE WEIRD Welcome to our first issue of 2024, and a varied programme of strangeness to greet the new year. Our cover story (p.28) is the first instalment in Alan Murdie’s two-part survey of how British newspapers treated reports of ghosts and related phenomena in the 1970s. The decade has become known in recent years as that of ‘the haunted generation’, but as Alan argues, the preponderance of spooky stories making headlines has nothing to do with hauntology and everything to do with actual hauntings: “Ghosts were national and local news throughout the 1970s, with an abundance of actual sightings that markedly contrast with the diminishing returns received from so many ghost hunting groups today.” And one of the reasons we can look back in some detail at…

GENITAL KARMA The Dhamma Chot Hirun religious shrine in the Pak Chong district of Thailand found itself under investigation by the police, the National Office of Buddhism and the local village chief because it was encouraging followers in search of good fortune to apply gold leaf to large vagina and penis statues. The shrine is operated by a nun named Naowaratkotchaporn Simethawong, also known as Mother Brahmin, who says that the rituals are based on ancient astrological texts known as “Mahanarm” in which the body parts symbolise the origin and abundance of life. Naowaratkotchaporn explained that the practice of paying respect to giant statues of genitals dates back 5,000 years to the Indus Valley Civilisation of India and that the rituals are accompanied by traditional teachings emphasising the need for…

292: LEXICAL LEVITIES “I should say that what we call knowledge is ignorance surrounded by laughter” – Fort, Books, p19 Humour can turn up in the most unexpected places. Your Starter For Ten. Which famous treatise on economics dismisses a rival’s work as ‘Shit’ and details an aristocratic lady’s skill at fellatio? Answer – Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, not many people’s idea of a beach-book. In his Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1892, p236), William Shepard Walsh opined: “A joke might appear to be the last thing one would seek in a dictionary.” He made an exception of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, cataloguing some choice examples, albeit dismissing the entire work as “Valueless, except as a literary landmark in English Literature,” instancing its “absurd etymology” and “erroneous definitions”. However, Shepard Walsh did…

A WHITE ABC A rare example (are there even any others?) of a large, snowy white, alien big cat was reported early this year in the vicinity of Los Barrios, Cádiz, Spain. A resident was near the Finca Los Peces at Benharás when he saw and filmed a pure white cat “of large dimensions”. The mayor of Los Barrios, Miguel Alcochel, informed the press that “the video that has gone viral, and in which you see a species of white feline, is not a hoax, it is real. These images have been taken at Los Barrios and the neighbour who witnessed the animal has already reported it to the Guardia Civil.” The Guardia Civil started a search for the animal, which the mayor suggested was an exotic escapee. “We are…

HOLY WAR IN UKRAINE With the war in Ukraine gaining a reputation as a meatgrinder for tens of thousands of inexperienced and undertrained conscripts, Russian soldiers are increasingly relying on mystic protection to keep them safe on the battlefield, and tales of miracles abound. It is now common for soldiers’ medical packs to include spiritual protection kits, distributed by the Tomsk branch of the All-Russian People’s Front. These contain a cloth ribbon, usually black, but sometimes blue or khaki, with words from the 90th psalm sewn onto it, reading “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High”; a consecrated cross (preferably brass; apparently aluminium ones break too easily) with a thread to hang it from; and a paper icon, often of Saint George the Victorious, with protective prayers…

“A long time ago, I started reading about this idea of sense and spirit of place. And I’m convinced part of that is included in a building’s acoustics. We all know this: if you go to somebody’s house, quite often people say there’s an atmosphere to it and it can be good or bad. And part of that, I’m sure, is the acoustics.” (Chris Watson, sound engineer) On 4 September 1913 the London County Council received a letter of intent from one David Philips. He had leased the site on the corner of Pentonville Road and New Road Bridge (now King’s Cross Bridge) and was planning to build a cinema. Architectural plans were approved the following year, but during the Great War the building was used as a munitions factory,…

A number of US Presidents have expressed an interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials but only one has ever reported a sighting: Jimmy Carter. The 39th President held office from 1977 until 1981 during a period of intense public interest in UFOs. Soon after Carter took office Sir Eric Gairy, President of the small Caribbean island republic of Grenada, called upon the United Nations General Assembly to make 1978 “the year of the UFO” (see FT428:50-53). His attempts failed to gain any traction, but the release of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind – with its plot based around a government conspiracy to hide direct contact with friendly ETs – raised the political stakes. During the election campaign in 1976 Carter said: “One thing’s for sure. I’ll…

It’s over three years since the UK went into Covid-induced lockdown, and while we all sat at home and tried to remember the last time we’d gone so long without setting foot in a pub, we also marvelled at how quickly people adapted to the new normal. We wondered if things would ever truly return to how they were, or if they even should. The pandemic changed not only our perceptions of the world and how it functioned, but also how we experienced things. One unexpected side effect of lockdown was that it invigorated self-curated event television, with actors and programme-makers getting involved in watch-alongs of James Bond films or episodes of Doctor Who. Television became what it hadn’t been in years – a shared experience. The context in which…

Danny Robins has, in a very short time become the poster-boy for media investigations of weirdness. Though he has had a long career in comedy writing, he first broke the paranormal ice with his Battersea Poltergeist podcast for Radio 4 two years ago, and has since then become a fixture, producing 40 episodes of his series Uncanny for the station. Robins’s approach is extremely consistent: tell the story, speak with the witnesses, ask them disarmingly probing questions and then let listeners judge for themselves. All of this is of course familiar territory, but it’s Robins himself who makes the difference – his attitude is one of genuine, empathic enquiry, his manner like that of a paranormally inclined Louis Theroux. The podcast caught on in quite a big way. Soon Robins…

Jennifer Maedge, from Troy, Illinois, reported her husband Richard missing in April 2022. He had phoned her to say he was leaving work early, but when Jennifer returned home Richard was nowhere to be found, although his car was in their driveway, and he had left his wallet, keys and cards in the house. Police searched the family home, which they described as a “hoarder home” and “sewer-like”, twice, but found no sign of him. Eight months later, though, on 11 December, Jennifer finally found Richard’s body when looking for Christmas decorations. His mummified remains were wedged in a closet in a storage area in the house, along with tonnes of rubbish. “I decided to put the Christmas tree up, and I was looking for a tote of Christmas ornaments,…

KARL SHUKER welcomes back a golden mole and sets a crytozoological puzzle to ponder A GOLDEN RESULT! Despite their name and their deceptively similar morphological appearance, not to mention their subterranean lifestyle, the golden moles of southern Africa are nowadays known to be only very distantly related zoologically to true moles, their similarities with the latter being due to evolutionary convergence. Instead, they belong to an exclusively African/Madagascan mammalian order, Afrosoricida, which also includes the otter shrews of Equatorial Africa and the Madagascar tenrecs. Although golden moles are found in a wide range of habitats, the most famous examples are the desert-dwelling species. Unable to create lasting burrows beneath this arid realm’s fine, ever-shifting sands, they have evolved to ‘swim’ through the sands instead, aided by the lubricating gland-produced oil…

ATTACK THE BLOCK? At around 8am on 20 November, emergency services in the Stockfeld area of Strasbourg in France were called to the Rue de la Lisiere following reports of “smoke coming from a car”. What they found was a small red Renault Clio with a massive hole, 50cm (20 in) wide, in its roof. On further investigation, it became clear that whatever had slammed through the roof had also punched a hole in the vehicle’s floor and petrol tank and come out the other side, so must have hit the car at considerable speed. Bafflingly, though, the offending object was nowhere to be found. “Either it’s so small that we can’t find it, or the impact was so strong that the object disintegrated and turned to dust,” said Matthieu…

At a live-streamed press conference early in September, NASA’s leadership described what the US Congress now defines as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena as “one of our planet’s greatest mysteries”.1 Alongside this extraordinary admission, the space agency declared itself ready and willing to become embroiled in a controversy they have avoided for six decades. NASA was created in 1958 at the dawn of the Space Age following the launch by the Soviet Union of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik 1. The trigger for the Space Race eventually led to the Apollo programme that took astronauts to the Moon and coincided with a series of UFO waves. Ever since the first astronauts left Earth orbit claims have been made about cover-ups of sightings of unexplained objects both en route to the Moon…

IN THE FIRST OF A SERIES OF INTERVIEWS WITH PROMINENT FORTEAN FIGURES, GORDON RUTTER TALKS TO CRYPTOZOOLOGIST AT LARGE RICHARD FREEMAN Richard Freeman will be familiar to most readers of Fortean Times. Over the years, many of us will have enjoyed his reports of expeditions or we may have been lucky enough to witness one of his enthusiastic presentations. One thing to know about Richard is he is not an armchair cryptozoologist. He visits the countries, he interviews the witnesses and he searches for the beasts. In this interview we get an insight into what drives a working cryptozoologist and how Richard’s cryptozoological career developed. FROM DOCTOR WHO TO CFZ But what first got him started on this path? For this question, which he admits he is often asked, he…

They Flew A History of the Impossible Carlos Eire Yale University Pres 2023 Hb, 512pp, £30, ISBN 9780300259803 Just when 2016’s uproar among militant rationalist “skeptics” – caused by Michael Grosso’s two-book endorsement of the levitations of St Joseph of Copertino – had subsided, the quiet appearance of this professorial study of the aerial exploits of Catholic saints is likely to rekindle the anger of those chronic complainers. Eire – an award-wining professor of religious history at Yale – begins by anticipating the question of why anyone would bother spending so much time and effort on an obscure subject that would “baffle, bore, offend or annoy the hell out of everyone else” – or worse, that would result in his condemnation as “eccentric” and “dangerous” and in his book being…

Famous Occultists and Witches Their Biographies and Birth Charts Andrea J Miles Greenmagicpublishing.com 2022 Pb, 347pp, £15.28. ISBN 9780307986498 This quiet, studious study is an unexpected discovery, consisting of well-researched biographies of famous and notorious witches and occultists with ‘birth-charts’ thrown in. Of astrologers, ‘Cheiro’, Linda Goodman and the witch Sybil Leek are numbered. Among the Wiccans are Gerald Gardner, Stewart Farrar, Doreen Valiente, Scott Cunningham and Alex Sanders. Representing the occultists is Dion Fortune, with Margaret Murray, Eric Maple and Cecil Williamson (founder of the Museum of Witchcraft) as folklorists of occult and witch lore. Helen Duncan (the last person to be imprisoned in Britain’s under the Witchcraft Act of 1735) joins them too; but the star of this strange constellation has to be the relatively little known George…

Carry On hauntings Recently I have been reading the biographies of both Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey, the famous comic actors from the Carry On films. In both biographies I have found intriguing paranormal epilogues relating to their deaths. In the first book, Born Brilliant by Christopher Stevens, the author notes how during the night of Williams’s death, his friend and neighbour who lived in the flat above, Paul Richardson, had a vision of Kenneth in his bedroom during the night and said of it the following: “I thought I actually saw him in my bedroom, in the early hours of the morning, but all I could see was his face, grinning. This is absolutely true. I said ‘Go away, go away’, and I didn’t think anything else of it.”…

SD TUCKER dons his suit of armour and visits a dragon-haunted church, where, in days of old, knights were quite literally Bold – as that was their surname. On the evening of 27 November 2023, at about 8.40pm, a speeding silver saloon car chose just about the worst place to crash in the historic Cheshire village of Farnworth: straight into the oldest object in the area, a 10-foot-tall, ninth-century Anglo-Saxon preaching cross beside which a whole church was later constructed. At least the car didn’t plough into a crowd of people. Nor, indeed, did it crash into St Luke’s Church itself. In fact, by careering around a bend at top speed and smashing straight through a 15th-century sandstone wall and bang into the heavy cross beyond, the driver – who…

SHORT OF A PICNIC? People living along the B184 between Königsborn and Heyrothsberge in Germany are being plagued by a phantom sandwich-thrower who hurls foil-wrapped sarnies from a car before 6am on most weekdays. Fillings vary – they can be cheese, salami, or sausage – and most are untouched, although some have had a single bite taken out of them. Annoyed residents have found them in their gardens, as well as on the local football pitch, leading club chairman Holger Becker to say: “We do everything here on a voluntary basis and maintain our place ourselves. It’s very annoying for us.” euronews.com, 20 Sept 2023. SPEARED! Driving through San Antonio, Texas, Shavone Canales, 36, had a narrow escape when a five-foot spear slammed through her car windscreen and embedded itself…

VEGAN VAMPIRE An international team of chemists has carried out an analysis of the proteins and peptides on three letters written by legendary 15th century Wallachian ruler, CountVlad Dracula (1431-1476), also known asVlad the Impaler, to see if they could determine any medical conditions he may have suffered from. When writing a document by hand, fingers and parts of a person’s palm rest on the paper and can result in molecules being transferred from their skin. The team applied ethylene-vinyl acetate to the documents to absorb the residues, then removed it and tested it with mass spectrometry. They found more than 500 peptides on the letters, 100 of which were likely to be of human origin. Analysing these, they concluded that the count may have suffered ciliopathy, a genetic disorder…

Although short on detail the report from NASA’s independent study team is confident the agency can play a prominent role in the US Government’s efforts to shed light on the origin and nature of UAP. It is illustrated with colour images of natural phenomena, including the aurora borealis and ‘red sprites’, a spectacular type of lightning flash that occurs in clusters at 50-90km (31-56 miles) above the troposphere. Man-made objects frequently mistaken for UAP include balloons of all shapes and sizes, such as the reflective examples released from NASA’s weather station at Cape Canaveral. The report is organised as a series of responses to eight questions set out in the Terms of Reference that NASA supplied to their panel of experts. A key problem is the lack of good quality…

One of the largest UFO archives in the world had been hidden away in Arizona, USA, for decades, with many UFO researchers fearing that it might have been ‘lost’ forever. APRO (the Aerial Phenomena Research Organisation) was one of the early pioneering UFO groups, and thousands of files were contained in its long-unseen archive. Numerous UFO researchers had tried to gain access to these files, myself included, but all to no avail. APRO’s was considered one of the best UFO archives in the USA, alongside those assembled by NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) and CUFOS (Center for UFO Studies). APRO was founded in 1952 by husband-and-wife Jim and Coral Lorenzen, who also coauthored several books on UFOs. For years, the archive grew larger and larger and contained witness…

The Exorcist Untold Dir Pete Bextor, UK 2023 Available on DVD and digital platforms Being a(nother) documentary about the Friedkin/Blatty planet-devouring megahit from 1973, claimed to be the highestgrossing horror film of them all. Unfortunately, thereis almost nothing in The Exorcist Untold that has not been told before; most of the information presented here could have been gleaned from Wikipedia or through a little Google-fu. Perhaps worst of all though, the film presents this stuff as if it’s a massive revelation. For instance, the film begins with archive footage of crowds queuing round the block at cinemas, and exit interviews with the horrified and spooked patrons. Fair enough – one needs some context – but any documentary worth its salt would examine whether audience reactions have changed over the years.…

Burning witches I have always described the following as a vision, but I now believe it to be retrocognition. The experience lasted a good five to 10 minutes. In about 1984, my husband and I were on holiday in Ascain, a small Basque village on the French side of the Pyrenees, near St Jean de Luz. After dinner, we went for a walk. On passing the church I suddenly ‘saw’ crowds of people. Men and women in peasant attire were shaking their fists at a priest. An old woman with a hard-looking wrinkled face, wearing a thick beige headscarf, looked angry. Some people were gesticulating through grilled windows. The young priest had been beaten, stripped of clothing and placed on a two-wheeled farm cart. He had luminous white skin and…