Innholdsfortegnelse for 446 i Fortean Times

FRANKENSHEEP Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 80, a Montana rancher, fell afoul of US wildlife laws with his plan to let paying customers hunt “massive hybrid sheep” on his property. He created the creatures by importing tissue from the giant Marco Polo sheep of Kyrgyzstan, getting a lab to create cloned embryos from it, then implanting them into ewes on his ranch. This resulted in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo sheep. Next, Schubarth used this animal’s semen to impregnate local sheep to produce the hybrids he turned loose to be shot by trophy hunters, who appreciated their giant horns. yahoo.com/tech, 13 Mar 2024. TOSS UP To test whether both sides of a coin really do have equal chance of coming up when tossed, researchers at the University of Amsterdam got…

298: BORIS’S CLASSICAL PEDIGREE? I have a soft spot for Boris. Wearing my classical hat, I must pay tribute to his Etonian prize-winning Greek verses, his sparkling book on the Romans, and his (albeit losing the audience vote) stalwart performance in that great Greece v. Rome debate (on YouTube) against the redoubtable Mary Beard. Of course, having reached his apogee with the electoral crushing of Corbyn, Boris’ star has dimmed to a nadir. He has been repeatedly flayed in the Guardian by Simon Jenkins (also on YouTube). A typical headline reads ‘More Demagogue than Demi-God’. Mary Beard in her ‘A Don’s Life’ columns likens him to the infamous Publius Clodius Pulcher, who will conclude this survey. ‘Demagogue’ is an anglicised version of the Greek noun ‘Demagogos’ (literally ‘leader of the…

THE BIG SMOKER Mount Etna on Sicily is one of the most active volcanos of Europe. The last eruption catalogued on Wikipedia was on the morning of 14 August 2023. In February 2024, Etna started to blow smoke rings into the air in massive numbers. The phenomenon was observed and photographed not only by locals, but by many tourists as well. Boris Behncke, a volcanologist of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology of Catania, stressed that “no volcano on Earth produces so many vapour rings as Etna – we have known this for some time. In 2000, and again from July 2023, the crater Bocca Nuova has released thousands such rings, and continues to do so. In the late afternoon of 2 April, a small vent opened on the…

DAVID BERGLAS David Berglas was one of the first conjurors to have his own television show, Meet David Berglas, first broadcast on the BBC in 1954. He went on to appear in many programmes internationally, to have residencies in LasVegas and to act as technical consultant on films such as Octopussy, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Tim Burton’s Batman. Berglas was Jewish and born in Berlin, fleeing to England when he was 11 and making his home here for the rest of his life. He spent a period at the end of the war working with the US Army on the denazification of Germany, then initially returned to Bradford to study textiles with the intention of joining the locally based family textile business. However, a chance meeting with noted magician…

Round the Longstone I was staying on the Isle of Wight recently, and decided to visit the island’s only standing stone, the Longstone, near the village of Mottistone. It was on 4 June, a hot, sunny day with not a cloud in the sky. I left my fiancée Sarah and son Oscar in the car while I walked along a path up the side of a field, over a gate and then along another path to the stone, a journey of about 10 minutes. As soon as I clapped eyes on it, I texted her to say I wouldn’t be long. I took lots of photos and some video of the impressive 13ft (4m) high megalith. While I was there, a young hiker walked past. He didn’t acknowledge me, which…

Mary Norris was born in the village of Aldingbourne, West Sussex, in 1835. Her family were poor country people. She married the 23-year-old George Wheatland in 1857 and they moved to Bognor Regis, where Mary taught herself to swim, becoming assistant at the swimming academy run by Mrs Martha Mills. Mary was soon the mother of six children, but her parental responsibilities did nothing to slow her down. She became responsible for the bathing machines in front of the Beach Hotel on the eastern side of the pier. These primitive contraptions consisted of a hut on wheels, pulled down the beach by a horse. The horse was then unchained and led away as the bather changed into a swimming costume and emerged from the machine into the water. Once the…

LOVE AND MONSTERS We were surprised when chatting recently to cryptozoologist, author and head keeper of FT’s Alien Zoo, Dr Karl Shuker, when he informed us that he had never, in all his years of writing for Fortean Times, been granted the honour of a cover story. Could this really be true? Well, we’re still not 100 per cent certain, but it appeared that this was at least one glaring omission we could finally put right: so, not only does Karl get this month’s prized cover slot, but he also gets to be the cover star, going full Indiana Jones in the process. Dr Shuker here shares his experience of the UK’s Covid lockdowns. As he points out, there were very few upsides to dwell on, but at least he…

RADIOACTIVE CANCER WOLVES Since 2014 Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist from Princeton University, has been carrying out research on the wolf population living in the 1,000 square mile (2,600 km2) exclusion zone around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. Using radio collars to track the animals, she was able to make “real-time measurements of where [the wolves] are and how much [radiation] they are exposed to”. She discovered that they were receiving over 11.28 millirems of radiation every day, more than six times the safe limit for humans. She also found that the wolves had evolved altered immune systems and that their DNA had changed significantly, developing areas resistant to increased cancer risk, enabling them to survive and thrive in the extreme environment of the exclusion zone.…

Weird Weekend North returned to the Rixton-with-Glazebrook Community Hall at the end of April 2024 rather than for its traditional first weekend: someone else had got in first! But as with all previous years, organiser Glen Vaudrey had curated a wide range of presentations about the weird and wonderful. Speakers were a mix of the new and the old, with Steve Jones, Richard Freeman, Glen and this author celebrating having presented at all seven events. As ever, Richard adopted his fez-tooned ‘Barry Tadcaster’ persona to introduce speakers with bizarre biographies. Steve opened Saturday’s proceedings by highlighting the quirky, fortean side of human nature: death and dissension in the Leeds Dripping Riot of 1865. Eliza Stafford was cook to Henry Chorley, who lived in Park Square, Leeds. He accused her of…

KARL SHUKER peers through his stereoscopic glasses to find a new quagga photo (or two) A QUAGGA ON EBAY! Until very recently, only five photographs were known to exist depicting a living specimen of South Africa’s famously partially-striped plains zebra subspecies known as the quagga, which became extinct in 1883 due to over-hunting. In late April 2024, however, news that some additional photos of a live quagga had been rediscovered was published by Branden Holmes on his Recently Extinct Plants and Animals Database website. Moreover, unlike all of the previous five photos, these were not of the same quagga mare at London Zoo from 1851 to 1872. Instead, they were of a specimen living at the South African farm of Andrew Hudson Bain, ‘Quaggafontein’, which had been snapped on 8…

COTTINGLEY CHALLENGE I have a challenge for any readers with a little time on their hands and a love of old newspapers. At the moment I’m preparing a volume of essays on the Cottingley fairy photographs. This is the episode where a couple ofYorkshire girls confected fairy photographs, which were subsequently published for the first time in The Strand Magazine by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1920-1921. The five photographs changed fortean history: they changed the way we see fairies; they changed the way we understand fairies; and they changed the way we view photographic proof of the ‘impossible’ (see FT53:48-53, 356:30-35). Six months ago, I would have signed off on everything I’ve written above. But I’m now convinced that there is an error there. It is untrue to say that…

THE DARK (1993) One long-anticipated cryptozoology-themed movie that I finally caught up with during lockdown was The Dark (aka The Relic aka The God Rat), originally released in Italy in 1993. Directed by Craig Pryce, it stars Stephen McHattie as a leather-jacketed, motorbike-riding cryptozoologist (remind you of anyone?) named Gary ‘Hunter’ Henderson. He is seeking a mysterious subterranean beast akin to a giant carnivorous rodent that excavates huge tunnels underneath a graveyard, feeds on recently interred corpses and secretes a slimy substance that has miraculous, swift-acting healing properties. Filmed in Canada, this unusual movie also stars Neve Campbell, making her big-screen debut, as Hunter’s girlfriend Jesse Donovan. The monster is only seen in brief glimpses, and then just its toothy, long-jawed head and long-clawed forepaws for the most part. The…

There’s a church in a remote part of mid-Wales surrounded by a circular graveyard bounded by a wall containing several huge upright standing stones. The whole site suggests an ancient and possibly pre-Christian sacred history. Ysbyty Cynfyn, as its Welsh name attests, was once an over-night resting place for pilgrims on their way to the Cistercian monastery at Strata Florida, about 12 miles (19km) away. Today it stands beside a lonely road two miles north of the village of Devil’s Bridge. The church building, dedicated to St John the Baptist, is only 200 years old. However, it is the graveyard that is of special interest. It was once used for holding fairs and for long-outlawed rustic sports such as cock fighting. There’s an interesting grave recording the birth and death…

Mind Dust and White Crows The Psychical Research of William James ed. Gregory Shushan White Crow Books 2024 Pb, 354pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781786772046 William James, MD Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician Emma K Sutton University of Chicago Press 2023 Pb, 261pp, £24, ISBN 9780223858985 Throughout his career, the psychologist and philosopher William James demonstrated a fortean-like distrust of scientific fundamentalism. He was frustrated by scientists’ claims of irrefutable objectivity, which, doctrinally speaking, requires its own ironic surrender of scientific rigour. James was also outspoken in his criticism of Social Darwinism and medical materialism, favouring a more holistic and totalistic view of human psychology, open to anomalous phenomena. James’s interest in paranormal phenomena dates to 1885, when, soon after his infant son’s death, he learned of the medium Leonara Piper’s alleged ability to…

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The Catholic Church has always tried to keep a tight grasp on decisions regarding which visions, weeping statues, stigmata, levitations, incorrupt nuns and so on are approved as miracles and declared “de supernaturalitate” (of the supernatural) by the Pope, and which are not. However, the process of discernment by which this is decided typically takes years, and sometimes decades, with only six phenomena being declared officially supernatural since 1950. As a result, there is a major backlog of cases, and this has only got worse in the 21st century as social media has made it possible for news of alleged miracles to travel around the world in minutes. To deal with the problem, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), which investigates claims of the supernatural, has…

For most people, the hundreds of star-shaped bastions that are found worldwide are uncontroversial military installations mostly built between the 16th and 19th centuries. They are generally accepted as being defensive structures responding to the advent of the heavy artillery that had made the mediæval castle redundant. Their squat and bulky structures lack the romance of their predecessors, being brutally functional and usually consisting of stout brick revetments backed by solid packed earth to absorb cannon fire and containing tunnels to shelter the garrison. Their star shapes are a function of the need for firing lines that allow defenders to rake attacking troops with cannon without any blind spots. Or so we have been led to believe; according to advocates of a theory that derives from the wider Tartarian conspiracy,…

There seems to be a lot of overlap between supposedly different types of anomalous phenomena. For example, starting in the mid-1960s, and continuing until about 1977, the Warminster area of Wiltshire generated numerous reports of UFO sightings, although claims about strange phenomena thereabouts weren’t confined to aerial manifestations.1 There were, for instance, reports about people hearing mysterious footsteps, and of vehicles colliding with human-like figures, but with no casualties being found. However, the Warminster case is controversial, with some commentators suggesting that prosaic factors, such as the misinterpretation of ordinary aerial objects and sensationalist news reporting can explain what allegedly occurred (not to mention hoaxing; see FT331:40-47). But if a substantial number of the reports were true, the locality may have been, at least temporarily, a hot spot for weird…

Aleister Crowley The Beast in Britain Gary Lachman & Michelle Merlin Herb Lester Associates 2023 Folder & map, £12, ISBN 9781739897178 Aleister Crowley’s extravagantly nomadic life is a gift for map-maker and psychogeographer alike. Continuing in the tradition of Phil Baker’s outstanding City of the Beast, which investigates Crowley’s London haunts and is cited as a reference, Gary Lachman provides an attractively produced and packaged map of Crowley’s Britain. Featuring such beastly watering holes as the Café Royal and the Fitzroy Tavern, the London section reveals the Streatham address where Crowley discovered masturbation and the square in Mayfair where he celebrated his last erection. A separate timeline lists 1941 as the dread year of dysfunction. Surprisingly, this gives Crowley’s death as 2 December 1947 when all other sources record his…

Children’s Film Foundation Bumper Box Vol 5 Dir various, UK 1947-1980 BFI, £29.99 (DVD) “The Children’s Film Foundation had a Middle Earth level of complexity!” laughs British Film Institute stalwart Vic Pratt, curator of this latest collection of vintage kids’ flicks. “Everyone was working for minimum rates, so there was no real need to make a big profit. They could be a bit chancy and experimental, and that really paid off. You might come to these films in the hope of some nostalgia, but it’s possible to get into them on their own merits. You don’t even have to be a greying old fuddy-duddy like me…” For this fifth BFI box set, Vic and his team have assembled a decidedly grimy and gritty selection. While Volume 4 (See FT433:60) was…

CONTACT US BY POST: PO BOX 1200, WHITSTABLE CT1 9RH, OR E-MAIL SIEVEKING@FORTEANTIMES.COM PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS Helpful Synchronicity On 20 December 2023, as I left our house [in Tennessee] at 3am to catch a long flight to Alaska to visit family, I stood outside waiting for my husband and noticed Jupiter very bright at the zenith of the perfectly clear sky. The planet was so bright I wondered if a person with excellent vision outside of the city might be able to see the moons, or even the stripes; this in turn brought to mind an FT letter a few years back in which the author had described an old lady who claimed to be able to see astronomical details beyond the ordinary: “[As a child]…

Venice is an assault on the senses. As a tourist, you don’t have just 10 palaces to explore, but hundreds; not five or six major churches, but dozen upon dozen. This sensory overload creates a kind of dizziness: the eye can’t find a place to rest, and on top of that, everything you normally expect from a city is turned upside down. There are no cars, only pedestrians, and the public transport consists of boats. There are no streets (with a few exceptions), but only gaps between houses, dark, narrow and slit-like, which serve as channels for people on foot. You can’t go much more than 200 yards in a straight line without ending up at a canal; and if there is no bridge, as is often the case, you’re…