Innholdsfortegnelse for 441 i Fortean Times

GOD OF THE MAGPIES? Fed up with magpies stealing his cat’s kibble from his porch, Giulio Cuzzilla from Sydney, Australia, made a crude ‘owl’ to scare them away, explaining, “I was looking online to buy one of those owls on Bunnings Warehouse, but they cost a bit, so I thought I’d just make one. I made it out of paper mache and feathers that I got from the $2 store.” However, this backfired spectacularly. Instead of fleeing, magpies began flocking to his garden where they gathered in front of his creation, bowing and cawing at it, leading Cuzzilla to suspect that he had inadvertently created some kind of “magpie god” that the birds were “worshipping”. They continued the behaviour for a month, until a storm soaked the “owl” and its…

The argument over propellentless space drives has raged for decades. Advocates say the drives will transform the space industry and open up the Solar System, critics see them as a scam (see FT320:12). Now the debate has moved to a new level as the first such drive is tested in space. The debate is simple. Newton’s laws of motion say that you can only move forward in space by ejecting exhaust material backward. There are a few potential tricks to get around this, for example using light sails, which capture the momentum of light from the Sun, but these are theoretical rather than practical methods. In practice, all space propulsion – from the giant rocket boosters on a Space Shuttle to tiny thrusters which steer satellites – relies on ejecting…

The last few months have seen some significant displays of the aurora borealis visible from Great Britain and southerly locations where they are usually rarely glimpsed. Today physicists are certain we can explain them as massive coronal discharges of electrically charged particles from the Sun, and to some extent predict their appearance, often connected with sunspot activity. Psychologist Michael Persinger theorised that electromagnetic and geomagnetic forces and discharges are associated with certain altered states of consciousness (e.g. temporal lobe seizures), generating the sensation of psychic experiences and stimulating hallucinatory apparitional encounters (see FT42:50-54, 201:39, 205:4, 270:40-43, 373:26). Others have also proposed visual apparitions may arise from subjective effects stimulated by external electromagnetic energy acting upon sensitive brains (see Electric UFOs (1998) by Albert Budden). In the Arctic, diverse cultures embraced…

BEHIND THE CURTAIN 2023 was an interesting year for the Obama family. And perhaps, if the soothsayers in the C-sphere have it aright, 2024 may be even more so. In the seven years since the Obama presidential era officially ended, the family’s affairs have largely bubbled just under the conspiracist surface, but once in a while a new story emerges to trouble the waters and join the growing canon of Obama-related theory. That canon is, on the quiet, starting to make the Obamas resemble the Clintons as objects – or perhaps paragons – of conspiracist focus. The body count is less impressive (though it’s still there) but the rumours are mounting up. This last year saw some of the existing stories being consolidated and other, new chapters opened. The feature…

Prior to Argentina’s presidential election last November, the vote’s ultimate winner, Javier Milei, put out a list rebutting 26 items of gossip being spread about him online. Many were pretty standard accusations, like “Milei will remove pensions” or “With Milei, workers will earn less”. Others were more unusual, such as “[Milei will legalise] selling of children”, “Milei is a NAZI”, “Milei talks with dead dogs” and “Milei fucked his sister” (this is, verbatim, how it was actually phrased). Alarmingly, it would appear only some of these rumours were untrue. When a critic once described him as “a dishevelled [talk-show] panellist who screams on a stage and sleeps with eight dogs and his sister”, Milei’s only reply was: “I don’t have eight dogs.” 1 As for another ‘debunked’ slur – “Milei…

The Wicker Man The Official Story of the Film John Walsh Titan Books 2023 Hb, 192pp, £39.99, ISBN 9781803365084 The Sing-Along-a-Wicker-Man Scrapbook In Search of the Pagan Heart of Britain David Bramwell Nightfinch Books 2023 Pb, 92pp, £10, www.drbramwell.com It is, astonishingly, 50 years since The Wicker Man first graced the cinema screens – though few of us actually saw it then, for reasons that are now well-known. Here are two vastly different books on the phenomenon that is not just the film itself, but the culture that has grown around it. Filmmaker John Walsh’s Official Story of the Film is a large-format book (13x10in, 33x26cm) full of glossy photos – stills from the film, location shots, actors, posters and more. Walsh has gathered together a host of perceptive interviews…

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE UK: DD Subscription 6 issues £27.95, 1 year 13 issues £55.95; Europe/USA/CAN, 1 year 13 issues £66.95/ROW £70.95. 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…

After postwoman Olga Leontyeva, 32, did not return from work in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on 24 July 2023, her worried relatives reported her missing, triggering an intensive search. However, she was not found for another three days, when her body was discovered in a lift stuck at the top of a nine-storey tower block. CCTV footage shows Leontyeva entering the lift and going to the top floor with the mail, shortly before a power cut caused the lift to fail. The alarm did not work, and no one heard her cries for help. The Tashkent General Prosecutor’s Office found that the lift had been suffering regular technical problems and that breakdowns were “common” and has launched a criminal investigation into Leontyeva’s death. thesun.co.uk, 31 Jul 2023. A Chinese social media influencer…

CHRISTMAS BONUS In 1920, eight-year-old Dorothy Grant was given a modest artificial Christmas tree, with just 25 rather sparse branches. Grant kept the tree until her death at the age of 101 in 2014, when it passed to her daughter Shirley Hall. Just before Christmas 2023, Hall, now 84, put the 31in (79cm) tree, which she described as a “humble reminder of 1920s life”, up for sale through Hansons Auctioneers in Banbury, Oxfordshire, where it surprised everyone by selling for £2,600, against a presale estimate of just £60 to £80. Hansons described the result as an “astonishing” price for “the humblest Christmas tree in the world”. Auctioneer Charles Hanson said that the tree probably came from a London department store, where it would have been sold for just a few…

LOST LANDS NORTH AND SOUTH Over countless ages, with climate changes, flooding, seismic and volcanic events, and other natural catastrophes, land masses change or disappear, usually by being submerged. Here, we look at research into two current such cases, one in each hemisphere, both with evidence of lost prehistoric populations. First, the submerged Continental Shelf area off present-day north-west Australia. This has recently been coming under closer multi-disciplinary scrutiny, one of the latest examples being a paper in Quaternary Science Reviews (2024) by researchers from Griffith, Queensland, Flinders, and Sydney Universities drawing on a range of findings and ecological modelling. The shelf is part of what was a vast but now submerged landmass (referred to as Sahul) that extended northwards linking Australia with Timor (in Indonesia) and New Guinea and…

MEXICAN CONGRESS ALIENS [FT437:17] In September, Mexican UFO YouTuber Jaime Maussan persuaded parliamentary deputy Sergio Gutiérrez Luna to sponsor his presentation of what he claimed were two “alien corpses” to the Mexican Congress. His dramatic presentation of the “remains” in coffin-like boxes met with a mixed response, with UAP witness Ryan Graves, who was present at the unveiling, describing it as “a huge step backwards” and an “unsubstantiated stunt”. Since then, the story has swiftly unravelled, with journalist Aja Romano in particular uncovering many aspects of the dubious history of these “aliens”, which goes back several years before their Mexican “reveal”. His investigations suggest the alien mummies derive from the crowdfunded “Alien Project” initiated by self-described, but unqualified, “archæologist” Thierry Jamin. This project promised “to determine, through extensive scientific analysis…

SATAN PLACE The Satanic Temple, which specialises in provocative actions to challenge the erosion of the separation between church and state in the US, rather than actual demon worship, caused an outcry by putting up a display in the Iowa State Capitol building in Des Moines. The Temple had taken advantage of a system that allows organisations to stage displays in the Capitol through an open application process that does not discriminate on “the basis of religion or ideology”. Their structure involved an altar containing the “seven fundamental tenets” of the Satanic Temple and the group’s seal, surrounded by electric candles. Behind this stood a life size goat-headed idol of Baphomet wearing a red cloak and holding a black and red ribbon wreath with a pentacle in the centre, topped…

For anyone with a sense of adventure, an enquiring mind and a love of the weird and wonderful… 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 SUBSCRIBE SAVE ON THE COVER PRICE! •13 Issues delivered to your door (postage included)* •13 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 SUBSCRIBE NOW! ORDER ONLINE AT SHOP.FORTEANTIMES.COM/FT441P EMAIL US AT HELLO@METROPOLIS.CO.UK OR CALL 020 8752 8195 QUOTING FT441P *Print and bundle subscribers ** Digital and bundle subscribers…

Twilight of the Godlings The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings Francis Young Cambridge University Press 2023 Hb, 365pp, £30, ISBN 9781009330367 “Didn’t the Faun tell you I was coming?” asks the centurion in Puck of Pook’s Hill. Two centuries earlier, John Aubrey, like Rudyard Kipling, had identified Robin Goodfellow as a faun; and long before that, cultists in fourth-century Thetford gathered to honour Faunus, spirit of the wood and wild. So maybe Puck, the oldest Old Thing in England, really does have a genealogy stretching back to Roman times. Francis Young thinks so. A meticulous researcher, he knows that claims for folklore’s longue durée were often made on little or no evidence, but feels we could usefully return to the old question of British fairy origins. Put simply, Shakespeare…

There’s been a welcome foray into cryptozoology by wildlife camera-people in recent years: I’d recommend Justin Chernipeski’s Expedition Sasquatch (Prime) as a great example of a professional film-maker treating the search as a standard assignment, combining the almost Zenlevels of patience required to nab the perfect shot with a refreshing lack of hoo-hah. From this milieu emerges Paul Mungeam, adventurer and cameraman, with Expedition Mungo (Quest). Against a deserty backdrop he addresses the viewer: “My name’s Mungo,” he says, “and I’ve been a cameraman for over 20 years.” He has a camera on his shoulder to reinforce this credential. It turns out that he’s heard some incredible things, so he’s going to set out with his camera – the one on his shoulder presumably – to get them on film.…

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,…

POLAR PISSER Residents of Amersfoort in the Netherlands complained about being kept awake by a giant sculpture of a polar bear urinating in a local canal every three minutes, round the clock, after it was installed by the Flehite Museum as part of an exhibition in July. Sculptor Florentijn Hofman said: “It’s about the melting ice caps, the shrinking habitat of polar bears. This polar bear has chosen to show he is pissed off by peeing loudly into a canal.” After the complaints, though, the museum agreed to turn it off at night. dutchnews.nl, 4 Aug 2023. WRONG KIND OF SWAN London’s rail network has been besieged by swans. In September 2023, trains were delayed on two consecutive days by swans on the line, the first causing disruption between Kingston…

TITLE FIGHT WINNER While the IgNobel Prize rewards the eccentric and unusual in the field of science (see FT438:15 for the latest winners), the Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of the year does the same for the arts. Conceived in 1978 by Bruce Robinson and Trevor Bounford to stave off boredom while working at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, it is awarded every year by The Bookseller magazine. The competition is organised by the magazine’s diarist, Horace Bent, and is now awarded by public vote on their website; any titles that appear deliberately created to be funny are rejected. The first winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice and other winners have included Highlights in the History of Concrete, which won in 1994, and…

276: BEES The myth We’re running out of honeybees and we’re all doomed. The “truth” We are running out of bees, and we quite possibly are all doomed, but we can at least stop worrying about the honeybees – there’s probably more of them today than there’s ever been. It’s just all the other bees that are dying off. One theory concerning the origin of this misunderstanding is that publicity over honeybee hives suffering Colony Collapse Disorder in the 2000s became mixed up, in minds and in media, with the general decline in numbers of pollinating insects. Many people got the idea that “save the bees” referred to or at least included honeybees, and that amateur beekeeping was a way to help. Conservationists find this confusion concerning; while domesticated bees…

There is a whole science fiction/fantasy sub-genre where the central theme is a love affair with an alien – a kind of raunchy Mills & Boon with an extraterrestrial vibe. A good example is Submit: A Sci-Fi Alien Warrior Romance (The Sky Clan of the Taori Book 1) by Tana Stone, which has this synopsis: “I was bought to be a pretty pawn in my alien captors’ twisted entertainment. But the gorgeous, horned alien who saves me from death is no pawn – and he’s determined to beat the hunt. But is he rescuing me or claiming me as his prize?” Zenobia Renquist’s Pet’s Pleasure, rereleased in 2022, features a “purposeful abduction where the heroine is sold as a pet”. Renquist – who when not writing Alien Romance fiction is…

During the first half of the 1970s, Tom Perrott, as well as keeping his scrapbooks recording hauntings the length and breadth of Britain (see FT440:28-35), had also been keeping an eye on his own neighbourhood. Living at the same house in Muswell Hill that his father originally bought in 1943, he was well placed to see numerous stories unfold in the Hampstead & Highgate Express concerning the ghoulish antics and carry-ons over at Highgate Cemetery. This led him to start up a special scrapbook entitled ‘Vampirology’. He had also been monitoring developments in Dorset, the county of his birth, and became co-author with Rodney Legg and Mary Collier of The Ghosts of Dorset, Devon and Somerset. One Dorset haunting he rapidly came to question was that of Sandford Orcas Manor…

In 2017, The University of California studied 100 of the most successful movies from the previous three years. Their gender analysis revealed that women had only 36% of screen time, dropping to a mere 32% for Oscar-winning films. If you only counted speaking parts, it was a paltry 27%. One genre bucked the trend, however, with female characters speaking and driving the plot for 53% of the running time. Yes, horror movies are often dismissed as misogynistic, yet ironically they’re the most consistent at showcasing female characters – often strong ones. We have two of them this month, starting with an erotic shocker called The Frightened Woman (1969, Shameless Films). It’s a fabulously twisted two-hander featuring a handsome company director who traps Maria in his luxury villa. He spends the…