Innholdsfortegnelse for 444 i Fortean Times

A family from Magwegwe North in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, has been under relentless assault from an energetic poltergeist since last November. The family, who have understandably preferred to remain anonymous, have three children aged 13, 12 and eight, and blame the attacks on “goblins”. Describing their experience, an adult family member said: “It started last November. One morning, our children woke up with their heads shaved. We thought it was a one-time thing.” However, this turned out to be just the beginning of a prolonged ordeal. “The next day, our youngest child woke up in the middle of the night, screaming. He had been stabbed in the leg with a knife! He also woke up with his head shaved again.” (It seems the shaving was partial.) “We were all terrified and…

ENIGMATIC TRACKS In an event reminiscent of the famous “Devil’s hoofprints” mystery of 1855 (see FT70:65), Janice Heidt-Dubray was visiting a friend’s house in Prince Albert, Canada, shortly after a light snow fall, when she noticed a set of bizarre tracks crossing the lawn. “When I first got out of the car I noticed them there,” she said. “I thought this is so unusual. They come from her driveway to a point at the sidewalk and then off toward the pathway.” Knowing a heavy snowfall was due, she photographed the strange patterns to show her husband. “We looked for similar images online, and we saw some that definitely resembled a bird, but they weren’t as intricate as these were.” Heidt-Dubray concluded that the tracks were probably made by a magpie…

While Bigfoot is commonly imagined to be a thoroughly North American phenomenon, there is a surprisingly strong tradition of ape men in Britain. They have been sighted near Newcastle at Bolam Lake, on Ben MacDhui in Scotland, where there is the legend of the Old Grey Man, and in Suffolk, where tales of feral Wodewose abound; one allegedly “terrified builders” in Sproughton, and mediæval fishermen are recorded as having caught a hairy wildman swimming in the sea off Orford (see p42). There have been many encounters across Britain, going back centuries, and while some claims may well be down to investigators with overactive imaginations, ape-men are firmly established British cryptids (see Stu Neville, “The Bigfeet of Britain, FT425:30-36). It seems, too, that they have no intention of fading into history.…

The myth Water conducts electricity. (That’s why you’re not allowed to use a corded power saw in a municipal swimming pool.) The “truth” Forgive the pedantry, but water doesn’t conduct electricity – i.e. allow electricity to pass through it easily. On the contrary, water is, in fact, a very effective insulator. All the same, everything we’ve been told about the dangers of mixing water and electric current is demonstrably true. The reason for this paradox is another quality of water: it’s the most versatile solvent known to science, meaning it can dissolve a great variety of substances. Pure water is indeed an insulator, a barrier to electricity – but the only way you’ll ever encounter the pure stuff is in a bottle of deionised or distilled water. In the quotidian…

Around the middle of the 19th century, a man admitted to a French mental hospital tried to convince doctors that he was a wolf. He pulled his lips apart revealing his “wolf’s teeth”. He claimed long hair covered his body and that he had cloven feet, and demanded meals of raw meat. Yet he refused the meat offered: it wasn’t sufficiently rotten. He wanted to be released and shot in the forest. He died severely malnourished and in agony in the asylum.1. Lycanthropy is the best known delusion of transformation into an animal. But zoanthropy encompasses a were-menagerie including dogs, cats, rhinoceroses, frogs, bees, horses, snakes, chickens, gerbils and buffalo.2 In India, family members brought a 25-year-old milkman to a psychiatric department, saying he washed his hands and genitals excessively,…

A Million Days Dir Mitch Jenkins, UK 2023 On digital platforms A Million Days is a British sci-fi drama that belies its limitations to produce an engrossing and complex chamber piece. The Earth is experiencing a catastrophic environmental disaster and a ‘Space Seeding’ project is in place to colonise other worlds. On the eve of mission launch, Commander Anderson Reigel (Simon Merrells) and his partner Sam (Kemi-Bo Jacobs), both members of the project, settle down for a romantic farewell evening before Reigel departs for a lunar colony. They are interrupted by colleague Charlie (Hermione Corfield) who brings some shocking data produced by Jay, the AI system underpinning the mission. Unrequested, Jay has run simulations far beyond the timescale of the project – 2,740 years into the future, in fact, the…

CONTACT US BY POST: PO BOX 1200, WHITSTABLE CT1 9RH, OR E-MAIL SIEVEKING@FORTEANTIMES.COM PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS Veteran subscriber Let me add my congratulations to Fortean Times for hitting (now surpassing) its half-century milestone. After I addressed McMaster University’s “Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar System” symposium in 1974, Canadian Mr X approached and asked if I knew about Charles Fort. Told “No,” he urged that I get The Book of the Damned. I did and was immediately captivated. I learned about a publication being devoted to Fort’s research and musings, and subscribed to The News [as the first 16 issues of FT were called]. Correspondence with editor Bob Rickard ensued. One highlight of my first trip to the UK in late 1975 was meeting…

140. Overtoun House and Bridge After reading about the mysterious “dog suicide bridge” in Scotland (see FT196:4, 331:22), I decided to visit the place myself. Overtoun Bridge became infamous when the media reported that hundreds of dogs had leapt from the bridge for no apparent reason, injuring or killing themselves on the rocks below. Some people place the blame for their deaths on a ghost. I travelled first to Glasgow on a rainy February day, and from there went by train and local bus to Dumbarton the next day. The weather had turned rather sunny and spring was in the air. From the bus stop, helped by Google Maps, I hiked up a hill in the direction of Overtoun House. The landscape was hilly and dotted with cows and horses,…

SCIENCE AND SNAKE OIL While perhaps not as determinedly – some might say wilfully – sceptical of mainstream science (and most other modes of human enquiry) as was Charles Fort, FT readers would probably err on the side of caution when confronted with supposedly definitive scientific answers to complex problems: the mantra of “FollowThe Science” repeatedly trotted out during the Covid pandemic to justify a host of major public health interventions must have set a few fortean eyes rolling (see Ian J Kidd’s reevaluation of Fort’s New Lands on pp.48-49 for some relevant discussion). Still, while one might charitably put such attempts to justify policy made on the hoof with an appeal to an outmoded idea of a definitive scientific ‘truth’ down to the genuine difficulties of addressing a novel…

Following the mysterious appearance of a 10ft (3m) tall shining steel obelisk in a remote location in a Utah canyon in 2020, found by ranchers carrying out an aerial count of the region’s bighorn sheep, the world seemed briefly seized by monolithomania. First another appeared in California, and then others started turning up internationally, in Romania, Ukraine and the UK (FT401:4+14, 402:24, 406:26). This sparked fevered speculation about their potential alien origin, inspired by memories of the black alien structures in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. One, on Glastonbury Tor, had “not Banksy” etched on it, giving a nod to another equally mysterious artist. Others in the UK popped up on Dartmoor, in the centre of the Merry Maidens stone circle in Cornwall and on the beach…

296: PRINCESSES OF WAILS Although a devout republican, I feel sorry for Kate. Not only, of course, for her illness but for the ridiculous hysteria that greeted her family photograph. Photographers amateur and professional regularly edit their snaps. Why the devil not? All this nonsense about conspiracies, based on a child’s misaligned hands, puts me in mind of this epigram by Thomas Babington Macaulay: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” And editing photos evokes Jane Austen remarking that she “lop’t and crop’t” Pride and Prejudice. The ancients, of course, had no photos to edit. Their version was in Roman terms known as Damnatio Memoriiæ, meaning the chiselling out of a predecessor’s name from inscriptions, thus appropriating his/her achievements,…

GHOST SHIPS On 6 November 2023, a mysterious sailing boat beached on the Weststrand on the German East Frisian island of Norderney and caused quite a sensation. It looked like a prop from a Hollywood pirate movie – the self-built boat was certainly no normal affair. It was rumoured that no one was on board, as a mysterious ship without any lights had repeatedly been seen near the island of Juist over the past few weeks. The beached “phantom boat” attracted large crowds of sightseers who wondered where it had come from. However, this modern mystery was soon solved. The captain came forward, a 70-year-old man from Freiburg, Germany, who had been intermittently living alone on his ship, the Wibo, for 17 years while sailing the North Sea. The boat…

“My subject is New Lands – things, objects, beings that are, or may be, the data of coming expansions.”1 Charles Fort’s second book appeared in 1923 and was a product of his time in his own new land – Great Britain. He and Anna sailed on the RMS Olympic, sister of the Titanic, to spend eight years at 39A Marchmont Street near Russell Square. Ten minutes away was the British Museum Reading Room. Fort exulted in its periodicals and newspapers from across Britain and its colonies: the “accessibility and abundance of data”.2 Many of the phenomena carried on themes from Book of the Damned. Falls of fish, frogs and other creatures and materials; odd lights seen in the sky or on the Moon. But the years in London offered new…

I tend to steer clear of conspiracy-themed TV programmes. Even fictional ones (looking at you, X-Files) can easily end up digging colossal holes that can only be repaired by digging even bigger holes; so series purporting to be factual often entangle themselves in ever-tightening knots. The ones that buy into the idea wholesale invariably become so excited that they abandon all pretence of a balanced view, while those that attempt to take a dispassionate view frequently come up wanting. Also of note is the sheer number of times cephalopods are associated with high-level secret and malign organisations – think Hydra or the Spectre logo – and American Conspiracy – The Octopus Murders (Netflix) is another entry in the already burgeoning pile. Film-maker ZacharyTreitz follows his friend, photo-journalist Christian Hansen, as…

A bent fork On the evening of 10 October 2023, my son and daughter and I were eating dinner in a local Mexican restaurant in Tucson, Arizona. We were eating soft food with the usual restaurant utensils. I told my son the anecdote about how Uri Geller got a woman pregnant via TV without being sued for child support. You know, the IUD incident. I was very wrong to tell this story because my daughter’s attitude toward Geller is just like Amazing Randi’s, and I had promised not to mention Geller in her hearing, ever. “We agreed,” she reminded me sternly, “not to speak Uri Geller’s name.” She inserted the fork she had been using all evening into her squishy fried beans. The fork came out bent over a third…

43. THE TRIPLET GIANT AND OTHERS In February 2020, I was informed by a Scandinavian reader of The Lion Boy and other Medical Curiosities that a number of postcards featuring human curiosities were offered for sale on the Swedish internet auction site Tradera. Upon investigation, this turned out to be the truth: a swift dawn raid was carried out, and 14 cards secured for £32. As a teenager, Petrus started growing at an alarming rate The most interesting card depicted the Swedish ‘Triplet Giant’ Petrus Nordin, who was born on 13 April 1882 as one of three triplet boys. His father was a poor tailor, who received a municipal grant of 10 kronor (15 shillings) a month to feed his hungry sons. As a youngster, Petrus was of normal stature,…

DOUBLE BARREL (AGAIN!) Kelsey Hatcher, 32, of Birmingham, Alabama, gave birth to twins in December 2023, each of which had undergone gestation in separate wombs. Hatcher had known since she was a teenager that she had the rare condition uterus didelphys, giving her two separate uteruses. This is found in less than 0.3 per cent of women, and it is rare for someone to be simultaneously pregnant in both. Hatcher gave birth to her first child on 19 December, and the second on the 20th, so the twins, girls whom she has named Roxi and Rebel, have different birthdays as well as coming from separate wombs. The first was delivered vaginally, but the second by C-section. There are less than 20 cases of uterus didelphys twins on record (see FT296:23…

HEADLESS IN HAYBURN WYKE During mid-January 2024, the media carried a number of reports appertaining to a very large decomposed carcase discovered and photographed on a remote beach at Hayburn Wyke, near Scarborough in North Yorkshire, by rockpool explorer Caroline Pindar. Even though it was both headless and tailless, the carcase still measured some 16ft (4.8m) in length, and appeared to possess throat pleats like those characterising baleen whales. Also, among the bones visibly protruding through the dead creature’s white stringy skin (exposed connective tissue fibres), a pair of bones recognised by some cetacean experts as the radius and ulna of a whale flipper could be clearly perceived. The consensus, therefore, is that it was a common (northern) minke whale Balaenoptera acutorostrata. www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12968307/Mysterious-faceless-seabeast-leaves-locals-BAFFLED-washes-beach-Yorkshire. SNAPPER SNAPPED On 5 February 2024, parish…

INTERSTELLAR METEOR [FT425:6] Last year, Harvard Astronomer Avi Loeb led a controversial expedition to the waters off Papua New Guinea in search of what he believes to be a meteorite from outside the Solar System that could be the remains of technology from an alien civilisation. Even if it was not alien tech, it would still have been only the third interstellar visitor to the Solar System ever detected, and the only one to actually hit Earth, so was still worth investigating. Loeb used a recording from a seismometer on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea to conclude that the meteor hit the Earth with a speed consistent with an interstellar object, and to deduce the location in the nearby ocean where its remains might be found. His team then…

On 24 November 1971, a man boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle, carrying what he later told flight attendants was a suitcase bomb. Once airborne, he threatened to detonate it if they did not follow his instructions. He allowed the plane to continue to Seattle, where he freed the passengers in exchange for $200,000 (£163,000) – equivalent to about $1.5m in 2024 – and two parachutes. He then had the plane take off for Mexico City, but over southwest Washington State he donned the parachutes and jumped from the rear door of the aircraft into the night, never to be seen again, although the remains of some of the money were found buried on the banks of the Columbia River in 1980. The hijacker had bought a…

To some he was a miraculous healer, to others a quack and a charlatan. He was an accidental pioneer in the early days of American radio broadcasting, but to most he’s remembered as the notorious ‘goat glands’ doctor. Dr John Romulus Brinkley was all these things and more, and his story throws light on the concept of xenotransplantation – the mixing of living cells, organs, or tissues between species – and how a conman can cash in on new – sometimes real, sometimes fake – medical developments to his own great advantage. Brinkley was a master of persuasion, in that he was able to make the population at large believe in his near-magic cure-all, using the power of developing mass media to reach a bigger audience than any tent show…

A Critical Introduction to Tarot Examining the Nature of a Belief in Tarot Simon Kenny Iff Books 2023 Pb, 248pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781803413921 The Tarot of AE Waite and P Colman Smith Johannes Fiebig (ed) Taschen 2023 Hb, 444pp, £100, ISBN 9783836586429 Necronomicon Tarot Titan Books 2023 78 cards plus guide, £24.99, ISBN 9781803367217 The most sceptical fortean may take an interest in esoterica, if only in why people believe in it. Here are three very different tarot-related offerings. Simon Kenny’s book isn’t the “how to” guide that the title suggests. Rather than the various meanings of the suits and cards he poses more fundamental questions. Does tarot work? If it does, how? What are its uses? The book is illustrated throughout with the Rider Waite Smith (RWS) tarot deck,…

Him Geoff Ryman Angry Robot/Watkins 2023 Pb, 366pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781915202673 A young woman, Maryam, becomes pregnant in an unusual way: “I didn’t do anything.” She’s hurriedly married off to a troublesome preacher, Yosef, who is exiled from Yerusalam to the obscure northern village of Nazareth to live in dusty poverty. Maryam names her daughter Avigayil – but four or five years later the child insists: “My name now is Yehushua… I’m a boy.” Over the years, Yehush hangs out with boys in the village and becomes an apprentice to the tekton, the local builder. At 12, already showing significant spiritual awareness, Yehush confounds the priests and scholars at the temple in Yerusalam in a beautifully-written scene. Life goes on, Maryam has six more children, and Yehush grows into a…