Innholdsfortegnelse for 453 i Fortean Times

KINGS OF THE STRANGE Welcome to our first issue of 2025. This January marks a fortean musical anniversary: Ninety years ago, on 8 January 1935, Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. Just 20 years later, as a shy and slightly strange young man living in Memphis, Tennessee, he was poised to take the world by storm, launching a career that would make him one of the major cultural icons of the 20th century. But it wasn’t just about the music, as Neil Nixon points out in this month’s cover feature: the rise of Elvis paralleled the rise of all kinds of extra-musical weirdness, from mass hysteria and faith healing to UFOs and new religious movements. Presley’s life, of course, came to a premature end in 1977 – but that’s…

JAMMIE DODGE Richard Freeman of the Centre for Fortean Zoology made the headlines when he discovered that some of the biscuits in a packet of Jammie Dodgers he had bought contained no jam. “I’ve been attacked by a cobra, stalked by a tiger in Sumatra and caught in a tornado in the Gobi desert. But when a man can’t have a whole Jammie Dodger with his cup of tea, then something is wrong.” he said. thesun.co.uk, 3 Jul 2024. SEALING THEIR FATE Two drug smugglers realised they were in serious trouble when their boat ran aground on the remote Burton Island in Australia with £588,000 worth of cocaine, ecstasy and methamphetamine on board and was spotted by police. They fled the beached yacht and tried to hide their haul under…

For many years a general store in Nagahama City, Japan, advertised itself with a sign showing a cute baby with a speech bubble-saying “We have lots of good, cheap things”. However, a particularly hot summer in 2023 affected the ink on the bill-board, destroying the baby’s eyes and turning it into a facsimile of one of the sinister, mythical “black eyed children”. Once the decay had started, further heat damage this year turned the baby into a charred, screaming monstrosity. While store owner Masanao Itaya initially intended to replace the damaged sign, he noticed that people from all over Japan were visiting his store to photograph the “possessed baby” and decided that removing it would be bad for business. odditycentral.com, 7 Oct 2024.…

305: GETTING THEIR GREENS From Spitting Image: Mrs Thatcher: I’ll have the steak. Waiter: Vegetables? Mrs T: Oh, they’ll have the same. Bibliography is ever-expanding, print and online. Try: H Williams, The Ethics of Diet (1883); C Spenser, The Heretics’ Feast (1993, considered the first-ever history of Vegetarianism); E Binch-Dann, Vegetables: A Biography (2012); L Ballerini, A Feast of Weeds (2012); T Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India (2006). Although fishing is mentioned in a simile, Homer’s heroes were unabashed carnivores. In everyday life, many were reluctant vegetarians, being unable to afford meat, their one chance to get it being at pagan sacrifices, a reason for early Christianity’s unpopularity in Rome. Describing Roman campaigns in the East (AD 60), Tacitus (Annals, bk14 ch24) makes a…

RING WAVE Videos of three large black smoke rings hovering in the sky over Berlin in Germany went viral on social media in early July. They appeared to the north of the city, triggering widespread speculation as to their origin, ranging from circular bird flocks to Government weather manipulation and, inevitably, aliens, with one social media poster saying, “So either aliens now want to go to Berghain [Berlin’s famed Techno nightclub] or God is smoking shisha.” No source was pinpointed, but another social media user pointed out that they were most likely “caused by industrial processes or explosions that release soot and exhaust gases into the air” and suggested that Berlinbased rock band Rammstein, who favour pyrotechnic-heavy shows, might have been rehearsing. A few days later, a similar ring was…

Imminent Inside the Pentagon’s hunt for UFOs Luis Elizondo Bonnier/John Blake Publishing 2024 Hb, 275pp, £22, ISBN 9781789466041 Early in this book Luis (“Lue”) Elizondo describes his initiation into the Pentagon’s cabal of UFO enthusiasts: “Like Neo in the movie The Matrix, I inhaled that red pill. ‘Tell me more!’” Sadly, the antidote to that red pill – a dose of healthy scepticism – completely eludes the author for the remainder of this much-hyped addition to the library of disclosure literature. Elizondo goes to great pains to persuade us he is a straightforward military man, with a background in science (see Nigel Watson’s summary in FT448: 26-27 for more biographical info). But scratch the surface and some seriously weird stuff emerges. An entire chapter is devoted to mysterious glowing orbs…

Anticucho and Other Peruvian Cyberpunk Stories Gustaffo Vargas Tacu-Tinta Press (www.gustaffovargas.com/store) Pb, 88pp, £15, ISBN 9781738547715 Cyberpunk has a very special place in my heart. After so many years it is an incredibly hard genre to do something fresh with, and with Anticucho, Gustaffo Vargas has absolutely, 100 per cent, succeeded. Rather than just lifting cyberpunk from its usual pan-US/Japanese setting and adding a touch of Peruvian flavouring, the Lima setting is integral to these stories: they could only take place in Peru, and bring together the country’s street culture, architecture, mythology and natural history – for example, in the form of gallinazos, the black vultures common in Lima and repurposed here as cyborg drones. The stories themselves are heartfelt, based around the friendships of the Pirañas and their struggles…

It is clear that folklore has been having something of a revival over the last few years. Folk horror as a genre has become a thing, small press magazines like Weird Walks and Hellebore have been going from strength to strength, and organisations like Stone Club have been looking at our heritage through a modern lens. A whole new generation of musicians like Laura Cannell and Stick in the Wheel have reinvented folk music for the 21st century, and even morris dancing has been getting a rethink by innovative groups like the experimental all-female side Boss Morris. The BBC have got onboard too, with Charlie Cooper’s series Myth Country (see p.61) taking an irreverent tour of folklore inspired by that fortean classic Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain (see FT427:28-35).…

A COLOSSAL CORAL In October 2024, a research vessel filming for an ongoing National Geographic Society expedition (part of the latter’s Pristine Seas project) off the island of Malaulalo in the Solomon Islands sighted what initially seemed like just another very large coral reef, albeit a hitherto-unrecorded one, in the South Pacific. Closer studies of it, however, revealed its astonishing secret. This was no ordinary reef, i.e. one composed of many different coral individuals and species living together colonially and symbiotically. Instead, it was a clone – its countless tiny polyps were all genetically identical. In other words, despite measuring 34m (112ft) wide, 32m (105ft) long, and 4.9m (16ft tall) – so huge, in fact, that it is actually visible from Outer Space – this colossus of the coral world…

If folklore as a discipline enjoys a fringe festival, then the Folklore Society’s annual Legendary Weekend is it. Taking place over the weekend of 31 August to 1 September, the theme this year was ‘Water in Legend and Tradition’. Convened in the nave of the former St Peter’s by the Waterfront Church in Ipswich, Suffolk (a town needful of some re-enchantment), the floor was “open to anyone – folklorists, healers, hydrologists, bargees, dowsers and storytellers”. A 20-minute slot was available for each participant to lecture, tell a story or perform a song, “whether… into holy wells or woe waters, hauntings or hydromancy”, with contributions welcome “on eerie ponds, inland mermaids, canal culture, early spas, baptismal customs, lake monsters, and the lore of fords, falls, fountains, floods and fish pools”. Accordingly,…

When giving talks on UFOs I’m sometimes asked which single event offers the best evidence for intelligent alien life. Until the recent preprint report from the Planetary Habitability Laboratory concluding that the Wow! signal was an explicable, if rare, event in astrophysics (see FT421:6), I tended to trot out that example, and then segue into a question. The Wow! signal was detected at 10.16pm on 15 August 1977: I would ask audiences what Earth-shattering event dominated the following day’s news.1 The answer, of course, is the death of Elvis Presley, which prompted me to point out that Elvis’s death probably occurred around 12 hours from the Wow! signal’s appearance; and in the absence of any definitive answer to what the signal was, the notion that it was the space brothers…

The case of Gef the talking mongoose is typically considered sui generis in the annals of forteana, with elements suggestive of a poltergeist infestation, folie à deux, or simply the presence of a self-described “extra clever” animal; and yet, taken in total, the facts resist any such neat categorisation. In Christopher Josiffe’s excellent and exhaustive Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose, the author surveys a selection of happenings with similarities to the ‘Dalby Spook’, considering parallels with particular polts, tulpas and creatures from folklore. Yet left unmentioned is one little-known case that arguably has more in common with that Isle of Man mystery than any other, and even occurred contemporaneously with it: I refer to the largely forgotten case of the ‘Tarves Beastie’. ACCOUNT OF THE CASE…

Ever since Albert K Bender first described his own and other ufologists’ encounters with “Men In Black” (MIBs) from 1952 onwards (first documented in Gray Barker’s 1956 They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers) the MIBs have reportedly driven around in shiny, new black cars – often Cadillacs – in their efforts to intimidate and silence UFO witnesses. The cars the Men In Black arrive in are even said to smell new. Investigators report their attempts to trace such vehicles from their licence plates reveal no such registration exists. These strange black vehicles were there in MIB mythology from the beginning. Much has been written about how sci-fi imagery prefigures tropes within ufology, while Jenny Randles (FT447:29) has noted that secret experimental military tech and Cold War anxieties affected the…

Occult Decoding the Visual Culture of Mysticism, Magic & Divination Peter Forshaw Thames & Hudson 2024 Hb, 256pp, £25, ISBN 9780500027134 This book does pretty much what it says on the tin – and coming from Thames & Hudson, it’s a visual delight, with colour illustrations on nearly every page. Author Peter Forshaw is a Professor of Western esotericism at the University of Amsterdam. The story of the occult, he says: “is a story of mankind’s fascination with wonders and marvels, initiations into secrets and the seeking-out of hidden things”. The term “occult philosophy” was first used by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in 1510; practitioners over the centuries included philosophers, physicians, theologians, mathematicians and other learned men. The Age of Reason and Enlightenment is often thought “to have sounded the death…

“It felt dark back then,” remembers David A Jaycock. “Dark, cold and detached – closer to Victorian England than to the future. Laundrettes were beacons of warmth and light. Derelict mill roofs could still be walked. Hillards was our local supermarket, and my mum swears she saw a flying saucer hovering above it in the 1960s…” Those of you already missing the hurly-burly of festive retail might care to check out David’s new album Music For Space Age Shopping. A touching synth homage to the Brutalist shopping arcades of the mid-20th century, it celebrates the utopian ambition of these concrete monuments while also commemorating the transitory weirdness of architecture that – in many British town centres – swiftly disappeared within a couple of decades. For a prime example, take St…

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER GIANT MISSING BLOB OF WATER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ATLANTIC indy100.com, 28 Oct 2024. Ten years to end zombie apocalypse Metro, 25 Sept 2024. TORTOISE STARTS FIRE The [York] Press, 29 Oct 2024. Cavan dog breeder bitten by taxman Irish Times, 15 June 2024. GOOD NUTRITION ‘FUELS BRAIN’, HEAD DECLARES Hull Daily Mail, 8 Nov 2024. Postal worker bitten whilst delivering leaflets on dog awareness manxradio.com, 14 July 2023.…

BIG ONE The Piazza Municipio in Naples, Italy, recently became home to a sculpture by Gaetano Pesce, who died earlier this year aged 83. Named “Tu si ‘na cosa grande” (“You’re a big thing”), it is an 11.8m (38.7ft) phallus, streaked with multicoloured veins. Pesce saw it as an interpretation of Pulcinella, the iconic Commedia dell’arte character who has been an integral part of traditional Neapolitan puppet shows since at least the 17th century and is now an emblem of the city. Before his passing, Pesce issued a statement which explained that the sculpture, which lights up from within, was intended to “express his gratitude towards these surroundings that bring great energy both to his creative work and the people that he loves”. Mayor of Naples Gaetano Manfredi said that…

BEAR ESSENTIALS “This is a new phenomenon,” said Aleks Giragosian, city attorney for Sierra Madre, California. “In the past two years, like Jurassic Park, the bears have learned how to open doors. I don’t know how they learned it. I don’t know how they’re teaching each other, but they’re opening car doors, too.” Bears are increasing in number around Sierra Madre, with about 100 sightings in 2020, but 380 in 2023; and while in 2020 bears breaking into houses were unheard of, in 2023 there were 50 reports of burgling bears. One bear has proven particularly brazen. Neighbours of an uninhabited house on Alta Vista Drive in Sierra Madre complained to authorities about an awful stench emanating from the property, sending photos of a bear leaning complacently on a wooden…

“The first I heard of the Hexham Heads was a couple of years ago, just through online chatter,” says Greg McKevitt, content producer for BBC Archive. “I saw mention of the footage existing in the archive and obviously my ears pricked up. Nationwide was such an unusual programme, and it’s been fertile ground for our social media team. We’ve been posting clips from it for many years now.” The Hexham Heads themselves? The central figures in a story that continues to baffle and fascinate in equal measure. In 1971, brothers Colin and Leslie Robson unearthed two small, carved stone heads in their Northumberland garden, and the discovery sparked a torrent of outlandish supernatural claims. There were reports that the Robson family had experienced a flurry of poltergeist-like activity in their…

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE EDITOR AT DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM TELEVISION FT’s resident couch potatoes, STU NEVILLE & RUTH MORRIS eye up the small screen’s fortean offerings All programmes dealing with British mythology assert that they will travel the length and breadth of Britain searching out mystery and legend. This offering from This Country star Charlie Cooper is no different; in practice he manages to travel only the breadth, from West Wales to Norfolk, but his heart is clearly intherightplace. In the opening lines of his new three-part series, Charlie Cooper’s Myth Country (BBC), he promises to show us that folklore is very much alive, which is surely music to the ears of the discerning fortean connoisseur (unlike the recorder music, which will come later). Cue Charlie in an uncannily orange…

Enigmatic Bristolians I suppose we’d better add Sun Ra and George Clinton to Neil Nixon’s roster in Forum [FT449:54]. On a more frivolous note, early Glastonians Stackridge have a bonus track on their 1972 album Friendliness called “Purple Spaceships Over Yatton”. As the same LP contains a reference to Annie Besant “Dusting Her Mausoleum”, I think we can consider these enigmatic Bristolians a little au fait. (I’m assuming, by the way, that “dusting your mausoleum” isn’t a sexual innuendo.) Richard George St Albans, Hertfordshire Oysters Barry Baldwin may know a lot about the Classics but not very much about nutrition. In FT450:11 he states about oysters: “Inevitably, they were prized as aphrodisiacs, a long-lasting delusion.” Oysters contain the most zinc, weight for weight, of any other food. Zinc is required…

Spectral typing It started around the year 2000 (I was 10). I would be lying in bed during the early hours of the morning, and suddenly hear touch typing coming from the desktop computer downstairs. I didn’t think much of it at first. My parents worked from home and it wasn’t uncommon to wake up and hear Mum typing away at the computer. One morning, I heard the touch typing again. I got up and called out to Mum, assuming she was down there working. No answer. No one was down there, though I was convinced I heard typing. This began to happen regularly. I figured that I was so used to hearing typing downstairs that I was starting to hear things that weren’t there. Because of this, I didn’t…