Innholdsfortegnelse for 445 i Fortean Times

WHAT THE PILOT SAW Welcome to our June issue, in which, among other things, we revisit some of Paul Sieveking’s favourite stories from the Noughties, browse Jan Bondeson’s collection of unusual cartes de visite, visit Blythburgh Church with Tom Hibbert and share Merrily Harpur’s recollections of her grandmother’s mediumistic abilities. Our cover story, though, sees the return of Dr David Clarke to these pages as he presents some truly astounding testimony gathered from RAF pilots of the 1950s flying the first generation of British jet fighters. One of them was the late Wing Commander Stanley Hubbard (pictured above), who tells in his own words the story of his two close encounters at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, Hampshire, and – equally intriguing – the reception of his reports by…

ON THE TRAIL OF THE LEAN-SOME PINE Cook’s pine (Araucaria columnaris) is a conifer native to New Caledonia in the Pacific islands but has been planted across the world as an ornamental species. Wherever it is found, though, it never seems to grow vertically. Matt Ritter, director at Cal Poly Plant Conservatory in California says, “When grown outside of its native range, this species has a pronounced lean so ubiquitous that it is often used as the identifying characteristic for the species.” Researching the pines, Ritter found that all the specimens he was studying seemed to lean in the same direction, towards the south, so he and his team of researchers investigated further. Measuring 256 trees across five continents on a range of latitudes, they found that wherever they were,…

The famed London Beer Flood of 1814 (FT312:67) and the legendary Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (FT359:8-9) have now been joined by the São Laurenco do Barrio wine flood of 2023. After two tanks at the Levira Distillery in São Laurenco do Barrio in Portugal unexpectedly gave way last September, 2.2 million litres of red wine, enough to fill almost three million bottles, surged through the town streets. Fortunately, the fire department was able to avoid it contaminating the local river by diverting the flow into a nearby field, and, unlike in the other two floods, there were no casualties. D.Mail, 12 Sept 2023.…

297: TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE EARTH (Apologies to Bonnie Tyler for titular mangling) Fort has countless references to solar and other eclipses; see especially pages 822-5 for a semi-serious discussion of ecliptic predictions. Alas, no sign of the 2024 celestial wonder in these parts [Alberta]. Had to make do with witnessing it on the box, wincing at the absurd tag ‘Path of Totality’ applied to viewing spots across North America. I wrote up the 1999 one for the Morning Star (Thursday, 19 August), hence some self-plagiarism here. Shan’t be around for the next big one. As Lucy once observed to Linus in ‘Peanuts’, “You wouldn’t think it would be that hard to get a booking for an eclipse.” They’ve been making the headlines for a very long time, if Homer’s…

MOLE MAN EVICTED Since the early 1960s, William Lyttle, 75, had been pursuing his idea of home improvements by tunnelling under his derelict Victorian house, 121 Mortimer Road, Hackney, northeast London. Originally from Northern Ireland, the eccentric retired electrical engineer known as the Mole Man inherited the four-storey, 20-room house – which in good condition would have been worth at least £1 million – from his parents. No one knew how far the tunnel network stretched; but according to Hackney Council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley had hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m (26ft) deep, spreading up to 20m (66ft) in every direction from his house. Surveyors…

Comedian Katt Williams, known for his comedy specials, appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience #2111. The episode aired on 29 February 2024, and in one week garnered over 13 million views onYouTube alone. The 52-year-old comedian, who was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, drew on his religious upbringing and his knowledge of “great religious books” to expound on the Garden of Eden. Throughout the interview he touted the importance of literacy (“Reading books moves civilisation”) and claimed to have read 3,000 books and to have checked out up to 60 books a week in his pre-Internet youth, reading eight hours a day, 108 pages an hour. Clearly, Katt views his exposure to occult books as the basis of his esoteric understanding; he made numerous claims to learning, such as: “As…

Miracles and Machines A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and its Legend Elizabeth King & H David Todd Getty Publications 2023 Hb, 246pp, £40, ISBN 9781606068397 This is a fascinating and beautifully illustrated book about an astounding little piece of machinery, just 16 inches (41cm) high, from the mid-16th century. It’s a wooden monk, which “walks and turns along a non-repeating path, striking his chest with one hand [in a mea culpa sign], raising and flourishing a small wooden cross with the other. As he walks, his head and his eyes pivot to gaze at the cross, then the onlookers, then the cross. His mouth opens and closes as in speech. From time to time he brings the cross to his lips and kisses it.” The monk, now housed at the Smithsonian, is…

All You Need is Death Dir Paul Duane, Ireland 2024 On general release Searching for rare traditional songs is an art, but there is money to be made too. Rich collectors will pay for previously unheard variations, but will cough up a lot more for lost songs, so the trade attracts some mercenary characters. A young couple, Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher), travel around bars, houses and towns in Ireland, looking for old folk songs. They’ll even stage mock fights in an attempt to draw out more information, with Anna playing the damsel in distress. They hear a garbled account of a folk singer who has unknown songs, but the trail peters out. They attend a seminar of likeminded song hunters, run by Agnes (Catherine Siggins), who, impressed…

On 8 April a major solar eclipse crossed North America, with a path of totality, where the Moon completely blocks out the Sun, 123 miles (198km) wide. This made landfall at Mazatlán, Mexico, then swept along a 4,000-mile (6,500km) arc to Newfoundland in Canada with the length of totality at its longest point being four minutes and 28 seconds; coincidentally almost exactly the same length as Bonnie Tyler’s classic song Total Eclipse of the Heart. A partial eclipse could be seen across most of North America and as far away as western Scotland. While eclipses are regular and entirely predictable occurrences across the planet, taking place somewhere roughly every 18 months, UScentric commentators got more than usually exercised by this one. In the weeks running up to the event, social…

GARY THE GORILLA [FT439:10] A year after an 8ft (2.4m) fiberglass gorilla was stolen from Reynard Nursery in Carluke, Scotland, in the middle of the night, he has been found; or at least, half of him has. Andy Moir, a superintendent from road maintenance contractor BEAR Scotland, explained how his team made the discovery on the A92 between Dundee and Arbroath: “We were out on our usual morning route inspection when we spotted something lurking in the bushes at the back of a layby. When we pulled in to check it out, we were pretty shocked to see a gorilla’s bum staring us in the face.” After some research they realised they had found Gary, but only his back half. He had been sawn in half and the rear portion…

The body of Lauris Zaube, 23, a student in Latvia who went missing during a NewYear’s Eve party, was finally recovered from the River Lielupe in early April after extensive searches of the area. However, a funeral had already been held for him in London on 4 March. Father Rupert McHardy, 49, arrived at the London Oratory Roman Catholic church in South Kensington to conduct what he believed was Zaube’s funeral, apparently organised by Clyde Zaube, Lauris’s brother. Pictures of Lauris had been placed around the church, a choir had been booked and a film director was in place to record the ceremony for family in Latvia. Outside there was a horse-drawn hearse, two vintage cars and undertakers in top hats. As he prepared to start the ceremony, the concerned…

Mediums very often get a bad rap (sorry), but I would like to turn the tables (sorry) on one popular view of them as either deluded or fraudsters. The fact is that for every dishonest or opportunistic (or simply untalented, over-optimistic) medium, there must be many who keep their heads well down, revealing their gift (for such it is) only in private to family and close friends. One such was my grandmother. She took her gift most seriously, but occasionally consented to amuse us children by telling us the history of antique items we came across, by means of ‘psychometry’. She would hold the item, or if it was small, press it to her forehead, and describe the scene she could see associated with it. “It’s just like looking at…

Over the years, I have become convinced that there’s an unwritten set of guidelines concerning how to make documentary series about British oddness. The opening has to announce that the British Isles are ancient, have legends, and are collectively odd. Then, the central protagonist has to announce that they’re travelling “the length and breadth” of “our enigmatic island” looking for the legends and the oddness, before introducing themselves as the person doing the above, preferably with suitable gravitas and a portentous voice. In Weird Britain (Blaze) this falls to the prolific Andy McGrath, a man able to tell a good story, who informs us that Britain is an ancient isle full of mystery and wonder and that he is going to explore the “fables, folklore unusual phenomena, myth and legends…

Gloves returned Reading Steve Watt’s tale of his wife’s missing passport [FT443:66] reminded me of a similar experience. In 2016 I was made aware that my local woods (Adel Woods in north Leeds) contained an ancient rock carving of some significance, thought to be over 2,000 years old. I was astonished to think that the woods where I had walked for over 40 years contained a secret such as this, and with the help of location coordinates, I set out one November Saturday in 2016 to track the carving down. I had set out in the middle of the afternoon, but by the time I was in the area it was getting towards 4pm and the Sun was beginning to set. After almost giving up for the day, having scrutinised…

On 2 April John Alfred Tinniswood was declared the world’s oldest man at 111 years 220 days of age by Guinness World Records. Tinniswood, who lives in a care home in Southport on Merseyside, has been Britain’s oldest man since 2020 and takes the world title after the death of 114-year-old JuanVicente Pérez from Venezuela. Initially, it was thought that the crown would pass to 112-year-old Gisaburo Sonobe from Japan, but then relatives announced that he had died on 31 March, two days before Pérez, so he missed out. Tinniswood is fairly sanguine about his longevity, saying that his new status “doesn’t make any difference, not at all. I accept it for what it is.” As is customary for such record holders, he was asked about his secret longevity formula,…

EEL-IAN INVASION On 20 March a man arrived at the Hai Ha District Medical Centre in Quang Ninh Province, Vietnam, with extreme abdominal pain. X-rays and ultrasound scans showed that there was an unidentified foreign body in his abdominal cavity and that he was suffering from intestinal perforation. Given the pain the man was in, medics decided to operate immediately and on opening the patient up were startled to find that the foreign body was a 30cm (1ft) eel, and that it was still alive. They extracted the wriggling creature, then removed the damaged portion of his intestine, creating a stoma, and stabilised the patient, leaving him with only mild abdominal discomfort. The doctors believed that the eel had crawled up the patient’s intestine from his anus and had got…

ICE QUAKES In January, the area around Chicago experienced widespread frost quakes, something that occurs after sudden freezing of the ground. Known as cryoseism, the phenomenon produces small earthquake-like tremors and loud booming and popping sounds. “It sort of sounds like somebody is either snapping a very large branch off a tree or maybe popping very large bubble wrap. It’s not quite gunfire, but it’s sort of like that, and it can be that loud,” said Illinois state climatologist Trent Ford. “The shaking is less common,” he added. “Those can be like small earthquakes, not nearly to the extent of where pictures fall off the wall,” but in the most extreme conditions frost quakes can damage roads and building foundations. The quakes need a precise set of conditions, usually occurring…

Saucers Tracing the Origins of Disc-Shaped UFOs Chris Aubeck Independently published 2023 Hb, 421pp, £28, ISBN 9798861290241 Many readers will never have known a time when the UFO phenomenon did not exist. The complex modern myth that includes government cover-ups, crash retrievals, abductions, crop circles and Men In Black feels as if it has been around forever. But, as Hilary Evans noted on the 50th anniversary of the mystery: “UFOs are a creation of our time, and when their time came, they were born.” The modern UFO myth was created in 1947, on the afternoon of 24 June, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold saw what he later described as “a chain of nine peculiar-looking aircraft” flying towards Mount Rainier in Washington State, USA at incredible speed. UFOs were born as…

Moorland mannequin I think I have got to the bottom of a mystery spook figure that I encountered on a trip to the Peak District in the spring of 2022. My wife and I had booked a holiday cottage near the village of Flash, close to Buxton in Derbyshire, and went out one morning, following the recommendation of a friend, to check out a beauty spot called Three Shires Head. This is situated where the borders of Derbyshire, Cheshire and Shropshire meet and features some picturesque bridges and pools on the River Dane and the area is popular with walkers and other visitors. However, when we visited, the weather was overcast with low cloud and mist obscuring much of the landscape. I had a pair of binoculars, being a keen…

141. Beyond Black Shuck A monstrous black hound with eyes like the very fires of hell themselves, whose awful gaze freezes the parishioners to the spot – else strikes them dead – as it bursts from the church to the mist-veiled marshes beyond… The giant hell-hound Black Shuck is something of a folkloric celebrity in coastal East Anglia, featuring in countless books and articles, including numerous appearances in Fortean Times.1 No location is more closely connected with Black Shuck than the Suffolk village of Blythburgh and, in particular, its church. However, during a trip there with my wife (FT contributor Lisa Gledhill), the church revealed plenty more strangeness waiting to be discovered. Quite when the settlement we now call Blythburgh began is itself something of a mystery. The first written…