Innholdsfortegnelse for 455 i Fortean Times

TOP DOG While taking part in the flight of a lifetime over the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, American paraglider Marshall Mosher was not expecting the view he got of the second tallest of them, the 448ft (136m) Pyramid of Khafre. “We noticed something running back and forth on top of the pyramid,” said Mosher. “One person thought it was a mountain lion.” It was not a mountain lion, which are not native to Egypt, but was a stray dog, chasing birds. Moser was initially concerned for the animal, saying that he thought “he was stuck up there”, but then realised “If he got himself up, he can get himself down unless he found some secret portal that helped him teleport to the top of the pyramids.” And indeed a…

PAUL DEVEREUX brings news of a potent Egyptian brew, solar symbols and a 3D Palæolithic map A CUP OF KINDNESS We have met Bes in previous columns – he was a rather kindly Egyptian god, associated with protection, healing, fertility and reproduction in general. Bes is depicted as a dwarfish part human, part feline being (“Bes” means “cat” in Nubian). His cult was very popular and though widespread throughout and beyond Egypt, and over a long time-span from New Kingdom Egypt (6th-11th centuries BC) up to the Roman Imperial period (30 BC-AD 486), is very poorly understood. The only firmly identified Bes cult centre in Egypt are the so-called “Bes Chambers” at Sakkara. Important to the cult were “Bes-Vases” – ceramic drinking vessels and cups, but they are enigmatic regarding…

PHANTOM STREISAND EFFECT Pop chanteuse Adele has inadvertently ended up at the centre of a ghost-related planning battle. Following the success of her album 21 in 2012, the singer rented the sprawling former convent of Lock House in Partridge Green, West Sussex, and while there told CNN interviewer Anderson Cooper that she found the place “quite scary”, adding “I’m not rattling around here on my own. It gives me the creeps.” She moved out again a few months later. Now, the owner is attempting to get planning permission to convert it into several smaller units, saying that despite repeated efforts over 14 years, they have been unable to sell the property, explaining, “The first tenant, Adele, stayed for six months and blighted the property by saying it is haunted,” which,…

CRINOLINE INFERNO [FT452:46-50] The date of the last known crinoline fire death was given as 1933, but Fortean Times founder Bob Rickard has flagged up a likely later death, from 1938. This is the case of Phyllis Newcombe, 22, who died after bursting into flames at a dance in Chelmsford, Essex. This is usually considered a case of spontaneous human combustion (SHC) and features in almost all the major books on the subject. However, at the dance in question, Newcombe was described as wearing a “dance dress in the old crinoline style” and reports of her becoming suddenly “enveloped in flames” recall those of known crinoline fires. During her inquest there was some consideration of how Newcombe’s dress could have ignited. Witnesses said no one was near her when she…

FADING AWAY I want to introduce what I call the ‘Fade Encounter’, a modern vanishing trick. An example: a young man is walking through the morning fog in California in the 1980s. Suddenly, through the murk, he sees a woman step out onto the path. She smiles and says “Hello”, followed by his name. He stands awestruck – he has never seen her before (and will never see her again). Then she walks past and after five steps she simply isn’t there anymore. THE LOOKS The fade encounter depends on: i) a humanlooking supernatural being; and ii) their sudden disappearance, which confirms supernatural status. The pattern repeats with remarkable consistency in the Fairy Census (where I’ve taken my examples from). In the 2020s, a man investigating ‘Bigfoot structures’ in a…

In my letter ‘Alien Abductions’ (FT447:61) I wrote about one of the most convincing cases of alleged abduction and missing time involving four people and including two young children, as featured in the documentary The Real 4400. (The family were re-interviewed years later for the documentary Shaun Ryder on UFOs and all recounted the same details.) Rachel Devereaux was regressed by hypnotherapist Steve Burgess and an edited version appeared in The Real 4400. I contacted Mr Burgess requesting the full transcript, and he kindly supplied it. I told FT readers that it was on my blog ‘Spooky Vocation’, which it was at the time I wrote it, but by the time the letter was printed in FT, I had removed it, deciding to limit the blog to my personal experiences…

Grave Error How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools) eds. CP Champion & Tom Flanagan True North/Dorchester Books 2023 Pb, 343pp, £12.60, ISBN 9798867599317 On the Whitsun holiday weekend of 1964, riots broke out along the seafronts of British holiday resorts from Bournemouth to Margate. The combatants were several thousand Mods and Rockers, members of rival youth subcultures with differing tastes in music, fashion and personal transport – though they struck many of their elders as equally alien and frightening. In retrospect, the events weren’t that alarming; though there were dozens of arrests, noone was killed. But that was not the way the papers saw it. Leading with screaming headlines, one assured its readers that the younger generation was transforming into “mutated locusts”. Before long, the…

“Gwowing up in East London,” Jonathan Ross tells us, “we knew there were places where bad things ‘ad ‘appened, ‘aunted ‘ahses and Jack-the-Wippa.” Following on from his 2023 solo series Jonathan Ross: Myths & Legends, Wossy delves back into the paranormal with Haunted Homecoming (Discovery), accompanied by Help! My House Is Haunted alumnus and heavily tattooed medium Ian Lawman and writer, researcher and FT contributor Dr Kate Cherrell, whose main function appears to be frightening herself to death in front of mirrors. Ross returns to his childhood home, the London Borough of Leytonstone; we’re told the Ross clan relocated there in 1961, which Jonathan usefully informs us was 16 years after the war, helpfully reinforced with black and white footage of busy buses, women in headscarves, Wonderloaf delivery-vans and kids…

T Sandy Gunn and the mermaid I once met a man who claimed he saw a huge black panther (circa 1990) near his farmhouse in Scotland. It had a pheasant in its mouth. He ran to get his shotgun but the creature had vanished. I knew the man and I judged him trustworthy, without guile or motive. Even if I didn’t believe him, I would suppose that he was mistaken rather than lying. However, black leopards and jaguars do exist and there is a stuffed puma in an Inverness museum that was captured many years ago in Glen Affric in the Scottish Highlands. Another story is told on pages 105-107 of Wade the River, Drift the Loch by R Macdonald Robertson, (Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh and London, 1948.) A shepherd,…

Five people fell ill and three of them died after eating Christmas cake at a family gathering in Torres, Brazil. Some of the family members complained that the cake had a “peppery” taste, then began to suffer vomiting and diarrhoea, resulting in them seeking medical help at the Nossa Senhora dos Navegantes Hospital. Shortly after admission, sisters Maida Berenice Flores da Silva, 58, and Tatiana Denize Silva dos Santos, 43, died from cardiac arrest, while 65-year-old Neuza Denize Silva dos Anjos died later from “shock after food poisoning”. Blood tests revealed the presence of arsenic in the bodies of everyone who had eaten the cake, with the unnamed woman who made it having the highest concentration. She was the only member of the group to have had two slices, but…

• The funeral of Belgian TikToker David Baerten, 45, was thrown into disarray when Baerten himself arrived in a helicopter with a film crew in tow. Baerten had faked his own death, with his wife being the only family member aware of the subterfuge, because, he said, he wanted to teach his family a lesson and make a point about keeping in touch. Baerten said he felt “unappreciated” by his relatives because he never got invited to family barbecues and other gatherings and wanted to show them that “you shouldn’t wait until someone is dead to meet up”. He had even kept his own children in the dark for the first couple of days, resulting in his daughter posting a message on Facebook, saying: “Rest in peace, Daddy. I will…

GIVING THE PISS? Residents in Pasadena, California, have been plagued by someone leaving full bottles of urine on an electrical junction box near the intersection of Colorado Boulevard and San Rafael Avenue in the city. “For the past two years an electrical box in my neighbourhood had been overrun with bottles of piss,” said local Derek Milton. “Different size bottles, different colours and sometimes complemented with a hand-drawn note.” His friend Grant Yansura added, “Stacks of them, you know, nine, 10, 11 bottles, all different colours, shades – from like an amber hue to more of a healthy, golden, lighter yellow. But some are really dark and concerning.” Every time the bottles are removed, they are replaced. Modifications to the box to deter the “Pee Bandit”, including mounting steel pyramids…

FT readers help KARL SHUKER solve a tongue-twisting crypto-conundrum at long last… TWO-TONGUES IDENTIFIED? A year ago, in this column (FT440:20), I introduced readers to a cryptozoological conundrum that had been puzzling me since the 1990s and which dated back a further six decades to a news report in the periodical Modern Wonder. The report, dated 27 May 1939, claimed that some mysterious beasts had been captured by a photographer in the jungles of Malaya (now Malaysia) and had been shown to officials in Manila, capital of the Philippines, but that no-one had been able to identify them. They were each said to be quadrupedal and to weigh approximately 200lb (90kg), to possess a raccoon-like head (masked?), a furry mole-like pelage (dense and dark?), a pair of owl-like eyes (very…

UFO REVIEWS 2024 was a busy year for UFO reports and investigations. Both the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and blogger Jason Colavito have published month-by-month reviews of the main UFO events of the year. Colavito calls it a “dull slog” and concentrates on US activities and alien-related documentaries, while the CUFOS review by George M Eberhart is a more detailed look at worldwide cases and initiatives. The latter references a proposal for EU-level action to study UAPs submitted by representatives of European civilian UAP organisations. As they think “UAP represent a complex and multi- and transdisciplinary phenomenon that demands our immediate attention and action.” It urges Members of the European Parliament to: 1. Establish an EU process for collection of UAP data, access, analysis and publication. 2. Include UAP…

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy Felicity Henderson Reaktion Books 2024 Hb, 224pp, £17.95, ISBN 9781789149548 The structure of frozen urine, observing the lunar eclipse, strange remains discovered in a dead aristocrat’s body and a onewheeled Chinese vehicle. Not newspaper cuttings sent to this issue of FT, but a range of the topics under discussion at early meetings of the Royal Society. These examples give a sense of how everything appeared to be of interest to the members of England’s first scientific society, founded in 1660 to “promote the study of the natural world through experiments and observation”. The Society’s self-styled “experimental philosophers” adopted the motto of the new institution as Nullius in Verba (roughly, “Take no-one’s word for it”) to…

Any Full Moon can trigger a ravenous lycanthrope – so by that logic, a Supermoon should have half the planet sprouting fur and fangs. Well, that’s the delightfully ludicrous premise of Werewolves (on demand). Sensible citizens are advised to lock their doors and stock up on silver as the night descends into a Purge-style bloodbath. But grizzled hero Frank Grillo has a plan – his team is developing a spray-on ‘Moon Screen’, a high-tech sunblock for the lycanthropically challenged. It’s designed to protect humans from those transformative lunar rays. This, of course, raises all sorts of questions about werewolf physics, but let’s not dwell on the science. The film constantly teeters on the edge of outright parody, playing its concept with just enough sincerity to keep things engaging. Budget constraints…

Thank you for printing my account of the unusual ‘transmission through time’ which I witnessed when I was a kid [FT452:67]. I do agree with your analysis that there is too much approximation, extrapolation and speculation; the event could well have been an imaginative yet quite mundane pirate broadcast that left an impression on my younger self that has been re-edited by 36 years of memory into something more fantastical. I admit that the only exact transcription recalled in the account is the impressive phrase: “This has been the first attempt to broadcast through time”. The voiceover did continue after that, but the bizarre sense of time dilation made it difficult to follow. Another strongly recalled detail is the representation of a time as a landscape scrolling past with peaks…

BAR-BARIANS Archæologists in Bulgaria were initially baffled by a splendid Romanera sarcophagus which turned up on a Black Sea beach. Made of local limestone, it was dated to the 2nd or 3rd century AD by its elaborate relief decorations, but experts were confused as to how it came to be on the beach. The lid gave some clues, being modern and having several niches cut into it; further investigation revealed that the relic had not been washed up from a shipwreck or emerged from a tomb, but had come from a local bar, where it had been used as a table for many years. euronews.com, 12 Aug 2024. EGGY POP While having a drink in a pub, Ed Pownall, from Lambourn, Berkshire, spotted a perfectly spherical chicken egg for sale…

The idea that the Earth’s magnetic poles can and do switch places has gone the full cycle from being ‘damned’ as impossible, to scientific acceptance, to rebirth as controversy. Social media is abuzz with talk of how pole reversal is the real explanation for climate change, and how it is about to bring about the apocalypse. How worried should we be? The Earth’s core is liquid metal, mainly iron with some nickel, as hot as 6,000˚C and consequently in a constant state of motion like a pot of boiling water. The movement of this conducting material gives rise to electric currents and creates a dynamo action, producing the world spanning magnetic field which makes compasses point North. A century ago scientists had worked out that the geomagnetic field had left…

“The forest seemed to tighten its hold on my senses, pulling me deeper into its heart and stirring feelings of claustrophobia. If there was ever a place for spectral beings to reside, this would be it – with countless hiding places amongst the shadows and trees.” So writes journalist Jamie Brassington, a reporter from Birmingham Live, about a woodland walk he took mid-morning in August 2024 at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire (Birmingham Live, 27 Aug 2024). Bizarre stories of a wide variety of apparitions and entities have become associated with this 50 square mile (130km 2) tree-covered area and were recently given fresh impetus by a wave of repetition in local and national media in 2023 and 2024. Cannock Chase is alleged to be “one of the most haunted places…

DAVID LYNCH Last October, David Lynch admitted that he was unlikely to make another film because years of smoking had given him emphysema. This meant he could not leave the house and needed supplementary oxygen even to walk across the room. He described it as “like you’re walking around with a plastic bag around your head”; unconsciously, perhaps, echoing the iconic image of the corpse of Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic from his best-known work, the TV series Twin Peaks. Living in the Hollywood Hills meant that Lynch’s home was at risk from the recent LA wildfires, so he was evacuated to his daughter’s house, but the stress of the move and the poor air quality caused him to take a turn for the worse, and he died there five…

In November 1983 I flew to the USA for the first time, with fellow researcher and coauthor Dot Street; it was a trip we were able to take thanks to the advance on a book about the Rendlesham incident that Dot, Brenda Butler and I had signed a contract to write (it would be published as Sky Crash in 1984). It was also our first opportunity for a glimpse of ufology outside Britain, and my diaries of the four weeks we spent in the US record the contrast between the US and UK UFO scenes of the time. Disturbingly, the in-flight movie turned out to be War Games, which got us thinking how the events in Rendlesham – an airbase that was home to secret nuclear weapons – had left…

They were green. There were other strange things about the two children, a boy and a girl, found by harvesters in the fields of the Suffolk village of Woolpit on a summer’s day in the 12 th century. But it was their green skin that people first noticed. There was much more to the story, but that’s how it began. 1 THE STORY Two mediæval chroniclers reported this mysterious event and its consequences: William of Newburgh, an Augustinian canon at Newburgh Priory in Yorkshire, and Ralph of Coggeshall, abbot of a small Cistercian house in north Essex (see FT377:40-45). Ralph’s chapter “Concerning a boy and a girl who emerged from the ground” appeared in his Chronicon Anglicanum (English Chronicle). Ralph did not finish writing his Chronicle until the 1220s, but…

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Spectral infestation I am 70 and moved back into our family home in Niagara Falls, New York State, in 2017 as sole owner and occupant, with my dogs and other assorted animals. This house was haunted when my parents bought it in 1964. Over the years the phenomena have waxed and waned, but before I came back into the house, I smudged it but good. Smudging is a Native American ceremony of burning (usually) white sage and walking through an area to cleanse it of negative spirits or feelings or attachments. I’ve had some scary things happen here including seeing a ‘shadow man’ with a hat in about 1966. Mostly the ghosts confine themselves to the second floor (what is called the first floor in the UK), which is now…

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