Innholdsfortegnelse for 448 i Fortean Times

IN MY PANTS! Chinese customs officers arrested a man attempting to cross from Hong Kong into Shenzhen after discovering he had more than 100 live snakes in his trousers. A statement issued by Chinese authorities said, “Upon inspection, customs officers discovered that the pockets of the trousers the passenger was wearing were packed with six canvas drawstring bags and sealed with tape. Once opened, each bag was found to contain living snakes in all kinds of shapes, sizes and colours,” many of which were non-native species, including milk snakes and corn snakes. Meanwhile, in Columbus, Ohio, police arrested the wonderfully named Matthew Pancake, 31, after he broke into a restaurant, a shoe store and finally a pet shop, where he released several birds and some puppies. He was later found…

300: SOCRATEASING “The astronomer Schmidt, of the land of Socrates…” – Fort, Books, p427 (Primary Sources collected in John Ferguson’s Open University manual (1970), the older, lesser ones best explored in the multi-authored The Unknown Socrates (2002). Amplitudinous translations (print/online) of Aristophanes’s Clouds. As Ecclesiastes (12. 12) observed – no student ever disagreed – “Of the making of many books there is no end.” Latest here relevant is Armand D’Angour’s provocative Socrates in Love (2019). Socrates to football fans means Brazilian wizard Socrates Brassileiro Sampaio de SouzaVieira de Oliveira. Some linkages with our man – one of Fort’s ‘thrice-accursed Greeks’ – emerge. His main club was the Corinthians. Off the field, he was a qualified doctor and campaigner for democracy, also a celebrated drinker. Ancient Corinth was a byword for…

TOXIC TEXTS In Paris, staff at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France have been scouring their holdings of more than 16 million books for toxic volumes laced with arsenic. In the 19th century, British publishers frequently used arsenic compounds to create bright green pigments such as Paris Green, Emerald Green and Scheele’s Green that were used on book covers. Handling bindings dyed with these pigments can be dangerous due to the poisonous nature of the chemicals, although a library spokesperson said that handling the books briefly would only cause minor harm. The Bibliotheque have based their search on a list of potentially hazardous titles put together by the Poison Book Project, run by researchers from the University of Delaware and Delaware’s Winterthur Museum. Since 2019 they have tested hundreds of books…

MONOLITHOMANIA [FT444:6-7] After a pause of a few years, the wave of mysterious monoliths that started during lockdown in 2020 seems to have resumed. The shiny Toblerone-like structure that appeared on a bluff above Hay-on-Wye in Wales in March has now been followed by another in the Nevada desert. This was spotted in rugged terrain on Gass Peak by police carrying out a search and rescue mission north of the Las Vegas Valley. They posted an image on social media (pictured at right) saying, “We see a lot of weird things… but check this out!” adding “HOW did it get up there??” The structure was highly mirrored and stood six foot four inches (1.9m) tall and police swiftly removed it saying, “This poses a danger to you and the environment.”…

THE VANISHING DINER It is my favourite FT article. First published in far-off 1993 [FT69:34-35] it tells how the author, Tony Clark, had, in 1956, a bizarre experience while returning to Tehran from a project in Manjil. Clark and his Iranian colleague, both hungry, stumbled upon a small restaurant in a remote village, the settlement marked by a distinctive pile of rocks. The establishment, run by an Armenian man and his White Russian wife, offered an exquisite meal. Clark savoured a series of delectable dishes, including cold cucumber soup, dolmas, and chelo kebab, all very cheaply. The proprietor and his wife provided impeccable service, creating an almost dreamlike atmosphere. Impressed, Clark shared the story with friends in Tehran, who dismissed it as an impossibility. Three months later, Clark returned to…

Some time ago, Bob Rickard sent me a photograph he’d taken during a family trip to Hong Kong in January 2014. It shows a smoke-blackened and rather moth-eaten tiger skin hanging in the Tin Hau temple in Stanley Town on the southern part of Hong Kong island. Tin Hau – also known as ‘Mazu’, the Chinese guardian god of seafarers, fishermen and sailors – is an immensely popular deity throughout Southeast Asia. What the skin of a tiger is doing in a temple dedicated to things of the sea is a mystery, but it is not the only mystery surrounding this unfortunate animal. What few people remember is that the raid on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was only one of a series of co-ordinated attacks against US territories…

The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror ed. Robert Edgar & Wayne Johnson Routledge 2023 Hb 472pp, £215, ISBN 9781032042831 ebook £43.99 If the following have any meaning for you then you are probably part of this book’s target audience: The ‘Unholy Trinity’, Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, Folk Horror, Urban Wyrd, Andy Paciorek, Adam Scovell. But before you rush out and buy it, some warnings – the hard-back list price is £215 and it’s an academic text, written in an appropriate style, with footnotes and references. On the plus side, the Kindle version is a mere £43.99. And one final warning – there are plenty of spoilers for some of the works discussed. So what is it all about? Folk Horror deals with the…

MIRACULOUS, MYSTERIOUS AND DOWNRIGHT WEIRD It’s astonishing to realise that it’s now nearly 30 years since Fortean TV made its debut on Britain’s Channel 4. Riding high on a wave of interest in all things paranormal – The X-Files, by now in its fourth season, had become one of television’s ‘must-watch’ shows and Fortean Times had gone monthly the previous year – Fortean TV took a new approach to the suddenly hot topic of weird stuff, using quirky visuals and an irreverent approach to create a televisual equivalent of FT, often drawing on stories first covered in these pages; the icing on the cake was that the new show was presented by the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, soon to be a fortean household name, legendary UnCon speaker and frequent FT contributor.…

In February, the Royal Mail delivery office in Tavistock, Devon, spotted a postcard in the incoming mail that was postmarked August 1910 and carried a green Edward VII halfpenny stamp. As the postcard was part of a numbered series produced by Francis Frith, it was possible to confirm that it did indeed come from 1910. It was addressed to a Sergeant Harry Gollop who was taking part in an Army training camp at Brigade Camp on Whitchurch Down at the time, with the sender saying: “Just a note to let you know we are down again. Hoping to see you Friday or Saturday. I remain yours Walter.” It seems that it had gone astray because the camp was temporary and the card had been mistakenly sent to Ireland first before…

282: NO IT SNOT The myth The colour of your catarrh is a diagnostic tool. If the contents of your tissue are green, you need antibiotics. Clear means you’re suffering from an allergy, but at least you haven’t got a cold or flu, while either green or yellow show that you are still infectious and should stay at home. The “truth” Medical authorities are pretty clear on this: the colour of mucus is not particularly informative. For one thing, nasal discharge triggered by allergies, where no infection at all is involved, can be of any colour or consistency. If you don’t clear your nose all night, the morning discharge is likely to be a deeper colour simply because it is older – nothing to do with whether it’s caused by…

Luis Elizondo has been the most prominent promoter of UFO disclosure since 2017 and he promises big things for 2024. The publicity for his new book states: “The stakes could not be higher. Imminent is a first-hand, revelatory account inside the Pentagon’s most closely guarded secret and a call to action to confront humanity’s greatest existential questions.” Avi Loeb, Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University and Head of the Galileo Project, gives some background to Elizondo’s emergence as a UFO pundit: “After resigning from his service as director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the secretive Pentagon unit that studied Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), Luis ‘Lue’ Elizondo disclosed the existence of this programme. Prior to that, he was a senior counterintelligence officer for…

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” William J Casey, CIA director, 1981 Reality is a strictly local phenomenon: that, or blandly universal. Move between those points and you’ll soon discover it doesn’t scale well; at times it seems to disappear under the weight of some more urgent vision of the world. At times of high tension or tragedy, the mundane and high strangeness meld in uncanny ways. Reality – visceral and, for some, sadly fatal – certainly came to the little town of Butler, Pennsylvania, on a Saturday in mid-July; but it had company. Donald Trump (our protagonist, in a peculiar, passive sense) was its prime companion. The Donald, even from this distance, often appears rather more than real. The former…

A a regular reader of Fortean Times since the mid-1990s, I have noted recent articles and letters describing the hostile conditions for forteana at present. I want to argue that the opposite is the case: that there has never been a better time to be a fortean; nor a time when the world needed its forteans more. The conditions are complex, of course. Factors include the accumulated working of mass media and Spectacle (in the Situationist sense) for over a century, eroding the stability of things and steadily replacing the production of solid commodities with their representations. The emergence of digital technologies accelerated this ‘spectacularisation’, removing the textual authority or ‘media of record’ once preserved and protected by monks, scribes, journalists and not a few blinkered bigots. More recently (I…

The Deorhord An Old English Bestiary Hana Videen Profile Books 2023 Hb, 342pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781800815797 Do you have foxes in your street? Are they welcome or a pest? Are raccoons disease-ridden dustbin raiders or cute trash pandas? Before taking us back to the Middle Ages Hana Videen invites us to consider what associations humans have ascribed to animals commonly seen in the modern urban environment, the fox and the raccoon. The stories we construct around them, the way we perceive them, while not what they actually are, can tell us a lot about our own view of the natural world. So it was with people living in the early Middle Ages who saw symbolism in their native fauna, especially animals as Christian metaphors, while being fascinated by strange animals…

In a Violent Nature Dir Chris Nash, Canada 2024 In cinemas and on digital platforms Streaming services releasing original content are often met with scepticism, and while the horror platform Shudder certainly has some stinkers on its résumé, it has nonetheless managed to impress with some excellent offerings in recent years, Late Night with Devil being the latest to receive much acclaim from critics and audiences alike. Now, we have another Shudder original with the Canadian production In A Violent Nature. Largely foregoing the usual exposition dumping, the film pushes the concept of “show, don’t tell” to its fullest, as we follow a silent, hulking killer as he slowly but surely makes his way through a lush woodland, dispatching anyone trespassing on his territory in increasingly gory ways. The plot…

Given the febrile atmosphere around the US presidential election and the propensity of Americans to see signs, portents and conspiracies around any historic event, the recent attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was inevitably going to generate all of these, and they started within moments of the gunshot. Almost immediately “Staged” trended on X/Twitter, rapidly outstripping all other terms, although analysis found that 45 per cent of accounts spreading allegations that Trump had staged the assassination attempt were bots and fake accounts. The focus of many of these claims was a photo taken of Trump seconds after the bullet allegedly clipped his ear – some commentators suggested that Trump’s injury was, in fact, caused by a shard of glass from a shattered teleprompter – which…

At an auction of the 1000 dolls amassed by Austin Smith and his late partner Margaret Harkins the highest price, £27,500, was fetched by an 18th century doll wearing a newspaper petticoat under a smart yellow gown with a blue trim. For reasons unknown, the petticoat was made out of clippings from a broadsheet dating to 1740 and telling the tale of mother-and-daughter murderesses Elizabeth and Mary Branch of Taunton, who were convicted of beating to death a servant-girl, Jane Buttersworth. Metro, 27 Feb 2024. SIDELINES… FLAMINGONE Berlin zoo is mourning the death of its oldest resident, a 75-year-old flamingo named Ingo, also the world’s oldest known flamingo. Where he came from is unknown, but he had been at the zoo since the mid-1950s and had a leg ring reading…

DEADLY SKIES At about 5pm on 20 May 2024, many people were enjoying the sunny weather on the banks of the River Elbe in Dresden, Germany, when a thunderstorm arrived, along with a lightning flash that injured 10 people, four of them severely. The spokesman for the Dresden fire department, Michael Klahre, told localTV that a 27-year-old man and a 30-year-old man had to be resuscitated after cardiac arrest. Three women and seven men between the ages of 26 and 41 were injured. When the firefighters arrived on the scene, as Klahre explained, “the situation was that four people were lying on the ground and two people no longer had any blood circulation.” The department declared a “mass casualty incident” and 50 emergency services personnel were soon on site to…

In recent years, as “UFO” has morphed into “UAP”, the subject of ufology has gathered a tenuous degree of Establishment acceptance, with Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb searching for alien technosignatures (FT404:14, 425:6, 444:24) and the US Congress holding high-profile hearings on strange things seen in the skies (FT434:28-29, 436:28-31). Now, in a further step, Tim Lomas, Brendan Case and Michael P Masters, from Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program, which researches the factors that contribute to human well-being, have gone full fortean on the subject. They have put out a paper titled The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis: A Case for Scientific Openness to a Concealed Earthly Explanation for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, saying that their idea “deserves genuine consideration in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness”, something Charles Fort would have welcomed. This…

Perhaps it was my fault for evoking his name at Weird Weekend North 2023 (FT432:14-15), or projecting his leather-clad image on to the wall behind me during the musical conclusion to my talk on Arthur C Clarke. The science fiction author’s two classic television series, Mysterious World (FT410:32-39, 411:42-47, 412:44-49) and Strange Powers (FT432:32-39, 433:42-49, 434:42-49), may have captured the imagination of the young forteans of the 1980s, but I had also wanted to pay homage to a later, very different hero. “And as luck would have it”, the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe’s Fortean TV was duly reissued on Network DVD.1 Beneath the outlandish titles – a lizard-headed businessman, a young woman devouring a tarantula – the jaunty musical theme2 signified a certain lightness of touch, a departure from the air…

Rupert Sheldrake’s name is probably familiar to readers of Fortean Times. The now 81-year-old academic studied biology and biochemistry at Cambridge and philosophy of science at Harvard and has worked as a researcher for the Royal Society and as a plant physiologist in India. It sounds like an impressive academic resumé; but when you add his work on morphic resonance, the ‘sense of being stared at’ and dogs who know when their owners are coming home (to name just some of his research interests) we see a rather less traditional career pathway. Throw in an attempt on his life and a banned, and much discussed, TED talk (FT302:14-16) and this is clearly someone with an extraordinary set of life experiences. I recently met up with him for a chat. A…

Pyramid Power I read with interest David Hambling’s article on the Great Pyramid [FT445:16] and it got me thinking back to the Seventies, when indeed the pyramids were very much in vogue. One strange ‘phenomenon’ that I recall was the widely advertised ‘eternally sharp razor’(or something similar as a descriptor). This was a polystyrene pyramid, typically advertised in the Exchange and Mart (wasn’t that brilliant? The marketplace of the day, where you could buy anything from a smallholding in Wales, military surplus, cars, boats… eBay in paper) or the daily newspapers… adverts were everywhere, claiming to harness the power of the pyramid, making ridiculous claims to “aid the re-growth of the crystalline form of steel” and keep a razor sharp for ever more – just store it in the pyramid…