Innholdsfortegnelse for 458 i Fortean Times

SEASON OF THE WITCH The late Ken Russell made some rather fortean films in his long career – The Devils (1971), Altered States (1980) and Gothic (1986) spring particularly to mind – but his son Rupert Russell’s work as a writer and director up until now has been largely focused on exploring current geopolitical and economic issues in documentaries like Freedom for the Wolf (2017) and Price Wars (2021). His latest film, though, is something of a departure: The Last Sacrifice takes as its starting point the infamous ‘Witchcraft Murder’ of 1945, in which farm labourer Charles Walton was brutally done in with his own pitchfork and slash hook on the slopes of Meon Hill, Lower Quinton. From there, it explores Britain’s witchcraft revival, the work of Margaret Murray, Dennis…

HUMUNGOUS NEUTRINO In a paper published in the journal Nature on 12 February, researchers from the snappily named Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) reported the detection of an unprecedentedly energetic neutrino that took place in 2023. Neutrinos are a kind of subatomic particle that exist in vast numbers in cosmic rays. Every second, about 100 billion of them pass through each square centimetre of your body, but they rarely interact with other forms of matter. KM3NeT sits on the seabed, 2.2 miles (3.5km) beneath the Mediterranean, and has two components, one off the coast of France, and another 50 miles (80km) off Portopalo di Capo Passero, Sicily, where seawater helps shield its hundreds of detectors from other kinds of particle. In 2023 a single particle slammed into the Sicilian branch…

In March, a team of researchers led by Corrado Malanga from the University of Pisa in Italy, Filippo Biondi from the University of Strathclyde and independent Egyptologist Armando Mei held a press conference to announce what they believe is a stunning discovery beneath the Pyramid of Khafre, one of the three great pyramids at Giza. The researchers used radar pulses beamed from satellites to probe the ground beneath the pyramid, then converted these to soundwaves to create 3D images of what was within the rock of the Giza plateau. This created a process that was analogous to using sonar to detect objects underwater, but works through solid rock. Malanga and his colleagues interpreted the results of their image processing as showing eight massive wells beneath Khafre’s pyramid, each between 33…

PIGGY ART PRANK Modern art is sometimes hard to swallow – as in a recent case where an artist bought three piglets which he put into a cage made of old shopping trolleys to have them “painfully” die from hunger. Danish-Chilean artist Marco Evaristti caused the expected outcry from the public, but explained that every day, thousands of pigs die from hunger and lack of space in the farms where our meat is produced – so what he did, he argued, would have happened anyway, and he wished to raise awareness of the simple fact this happens! And he succeeded. Then, just as outrage about his plans reached a crescendo, the artist said the pigs had been stolen by an animal protection group. They confirmed they had the animals, but…

HAL LINDSEY Former tugboat captain turned preacher Hal Lindsey made an indelible mark on public consciousness in the US as an apocalypse populariser. His 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, cowritten with journalist Carole C Carlson, sold over 35 million copies and brought End Times theology into the modern world by linking biblical prophecy to current and forthcoming events in a creative and imaginative manner. Having had an initial success with apocalyptic prophecy, Lindsey doubled down and produced more, churning out additional fire-and-brimstone bestsellers with titles like Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth and Planet Earth Two Thousand AD: Will Mankind Survive? Lindsey’s success led to other writers such as Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, and Joel Rosenberg jumping on the lucrative End Times bandwagon, bringing the once-obscure…

California is a strange amalgam; named after a fantasy island, it has never seemed entirely comfortable with reality. Along with the pioneers and gold diggers, the wannabe stars, a peculiar, ineffable version of the future came and settled there too. The technological future may be embodied in Silicon Valley; but the state, since its inception, has been home to a vast swathe of visionary individuals, groups and communities, dedicated to charting a new pioneer trail, towards humanity’s future. There is a very dark side to this utopian dreamscape. This is the state where Jim Jones came to prominence; where the members of Heaven’s Gate castrated and killed themselves in order to board a comet for Heaven (FT99:4, 32, 100:4, 34-41, 103:45, 226:31, 227:40-45, 271:51-53). This is the state where Charles…

Sinners Dir Ryan Coogler, US 2025  In cinemas After his box office successes with Marvel’s Black Panther films and the Rocky spin-off Creed and its sequels, writer/director Ryan Coogler was given a blank cheque for his next project, and the filmmaker decided to go in an entirely different direction from his previous productions with the Jim Crow era vampire thriller Sinners. Getting the story from the perspective of newcomer Miles Caton’s aspiring bluesman Sammie, we are introduced to Michael B Jordan doing double duty as the Smokestack Twins, a pair of gangsters who return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, with their pockets full of money and a truck full of booze. Entrepreneurial and with no time to waste, the twins quickly seek out friends and family to get the…

Ticket story As someone that loves live music, the Covid pandemic proved a right pain. Throughout 2020 and early 2021, concert venues closed their doors as government lockdowns made it impossible for bands to tour. However, by the fourth quarter of 2021, life began to slowly return to normal and some venues reopened. Being now in my 60s, although I personally have no problem mixing with lots of younger people at rock concerts, it’s almost impossible to find anyone of my own age to accompany me to gigs. Fortunately, my youngest daughter, Louise, shares a similar taste in music, so can occasionally be persuaded to come out with me. In late 2021, I also started going to gigs with my wife’s cousin, Sarah, who being in her 50s finds it…

While Catholic Popes no longer hold the temporal power that their mediæval predecessors did, the Catholic church has never been larger, and it has a major influence over the lives of huge numbers of people. As a result, whenever a Pope passes it is a time of signs and portents as well as time-honoured ritual, and so it has proved with the death of Pope Francis II, who died at the age of 88 on Easter Monday. Francis’s death immediately after celebrating Easter suggests this might be an example of the “Passover Effect”. This idea is derived from a 1988 paper in The Lancet medical journal where sociologists David Phillips and Elliot King analysed mortality patterns for Jewish men in the period surrounding Passover, finding a sharp decline immediately before…

The colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) is the world’s largest cephalopod species. Growing up to 7m (23ft) in length, they can weigh 500kg (1,100lb), making them the heaviest invertebrate known to science. Giant squid can grow to twice the length, but as much of that is tentacle, they only weigh half as much. Until now, the colossal squid has only been known through fragmentary remains in whale and seabird stomachs; no live ones have been seen, and very few intact specimens, although the occasional colossal squid has washed up on beaches, and these have sometimes been witnessed in their death throes. In 2022, the lack of sightings of live specimens led the Natural History Museum to say that “even to this day, the enormous invertebrates still straddle the line between legend…

310: PAPA DON’T PREACH Bit of a change here. Never done a Paschal piece before. But the coincidence of Easter and Pope Francis’s death was an irresistible lure. Perhaps also egged-on by this year’s Easter Bunny offerings. “They were accomplished girls in our kitchen, they spoke Latin fluently, which awed us a good deal. But then we picked up a little Latin ourself, learning that some Latin words are much like some English words.” Fort, Many Parts, autobiographical fragments edited by ‘X’, online, ch1 para16. I have wondered before in these columns just where these classicallyfluent scullions came from? Given Fort’s quite correct remark about Latin-English verbal coordinations, this does not seem to be a joke. Nothing about this puzzle in Steinmeyer’s biography. Francis Latinised his name to ‘Franciscus’ for…

HEBRIDEAN HUM The latest place to suffer from “The Hum” is the island of Lewis in the Hebrides, off western Scotland. About 200 people have reported hearing it, with Lauren-Grace Kirtley saying it had ruined her sleep, adding, “It’s impossible to ignore – it is like somebody shouting in your face constantly for attention.” The local council, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, is, as is common in these cases, investigating with little success, but Marcus-Hazel McGowan has been utilising amateur radio techniques to try and pin the source down. “It’s just trying to narrow it down and hoping nobody loses their mind completely over it.” he says. Kirtley says that while the hum was audible right across Lewis, it was less noticeable in the centre of the island and strongest on…

VISIONS AT T’MILL In the spring of 1875, a nine-year-old boy walked alone before dawn to his shift at aYorkshire flax mill. Arthur Kirkbright, still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, was about to have one of the most extraordinary experiences of his life. On a track in a wood, he saw, in front of him, a small woman in white dancing in silence, spinning, as she did, in circles. Fascinated but uneasy, Arthur held back. However, a girl he knew, heading off to her shift at t’mill, saw nothing and walked straight through the dancer. It was not the last time Arthur would see diminutive figures in the wood. A few months later, he glimpsed, with four other children, a pair dancing on the same path. There was…

How many detectives are faced with the entire population of an island putting on a play for them?” This was the question director Robin Hardy posited as the central mystery to his 1973 masterpiece, The Wicker Man (see FT381:40-41, 435:38-43). In the screenplay devised by Anthony Shaffer,1 Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Neil Howie is despatched by seaplane to the remote Hebridean outpost of Summerisle to find missing schoolgirl Rowan Morrison. Here, he is led a merry dance by the locals, choreographed by their charismatic laird – embodied by Hammer’s quintessential demonic toff, Christopher Lee. Swapping places with Morrison, Howie becomes the victim of his own inquiry, murdered in a horrific ritual sacrifice to the Old Gods inside the gigantic flaming effigy of the film’s title. Hardy’s question had a precedent in…

Observers of the modern cryptozoological scene cannot fail to notice the trend towards the inclusion of more fantastical, folkloric, unnatural and supernatural beings labelled as “cryptids”. There is no shortage of stories (and AI depictions) of nightcrawlers, pale crawlers, dogmen, goatmen and shapeshifters. What happened to cryptozoology as a scientific-minded search for “hidden” animals? The 21st century happened. That’s what. There has been a definable slide away from “cryptozoology” of the Bernard Heuvelmans type and a huge rise in the popularisation of “cryptids”. Fewer professional scientific voices now advocate for the zoological reality of cryptids compared to an uncountable number of media creators promoting them as mysterious monsters. The modern popular use of “cryptid” has expanded to signify any weird sentient thing that people claim to see or experience. The…

Imaginary air raid Reviewing Spielberg – A Retrospective, Nigel Watson [FT455:54-55] states that Spielberg’s flop, 1941, “is loosely based on the panic caused by the fear of Japanese air attacks in 1942, that produced the Zoot Suit riots” (Eh!? Did it? I really think that that was more a class/race issue, and I am fairly certain that most social historians would agree with me!) “and the so-called ‘Battle of Los Angeles’ where anti-aircraft guns fired at… what transpired to be an imaginary air raid.” Well, the ‘jury’ is still most firmly ‘out’ on that! Quite a lot of more recent research (including in these hallowed pages!) has turned up the volume, as it were, towards the idea – re that particular photograph, that searchlights were actually focused on, at least,…

CRIMINALS AGAINST CRIME For generations, organised crime in Japan has been overseen by the yakuza, who have had a finger in almost every criminal activity that could turn a profit. Now, though, a new kind of crime has arisen that the yakuza families have denounced. This is known as yamibaito, which translates as “dark part-time jobs”, and is essentially the gig economy for crime. An anonymous employer posts a job offer on social media promising unusually high pay for a one-off job, but when applicants respond, they find out that the “job” is carrying out robbery, fraud or violence. This can range from smash-and-grab raids on shops to Pokémon card heists and even violent home invasions, and once people have signed up, the criminals intimidate them to prevent them pulling…

KARL SHUKER asks if a jaguar can change its spots and dredges up a Loch Ness discovery AN UNEXPECTED JAGUAR In a recent study reported online by the website The Cool Down (TCD), researchers from Brazil’s Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve were very surprised to discover that jaguars inhabiting the Brazilian Amazon have developed a most unusual behavioural adaptation for surviving this region’s annual flooding, which raises water levels by up to 16m (52ft). Namely, instead of moving to dry land during that wet period, these big cats move upwards, remaining high up in the rainforest trees for as long as four entire months at a time, living and hunting prey there until the floods recede and they can then descend to ground level once more. Whereas this is certainly a…

In mid-June 1892, several hundred Orcadians tried and happily failed to kill a mermaid. The story behind this extraordinary episode (see FT368:54-55) is quickly told. A strange marine creature had, for a number of years, been seen off Deerness on Orkney and a naturalist from Glasgow had offered £200 for the creature alive, or £100 for its dead body.1 This was a huge amount in Orkney at the end of the 19th century. So it was that on the weekend of the 18-19 June, “a great number of people proceeded to Deerness from Kirkwall… Some were armed with guns and rifles”. After a series of misses, a Mr Reid was taken out in a boat on Tuesday 21 June. “In a short time Mr Reid fired, and wounded [the creature],…

I’m often asked what inspired me to become a working cryptozoologist. I had two main influences back in the 1970s. The first was the thrilling and scary (pre-woke) Doctor Who with Jon Pertwee andTom Baker at the helm. The second was the work of David Attenborough. The World About Us (1967-1987) awakened the wanderlust that still burns in my blood. Life on Earth (1979) kindled a fascination for animals both living and extinct. But there was one series that became as mysterious and strange as the cryptids I hunt today. Fabulous Animals (1975) was shown once and once only, never to be repeated. It was David Attenborough’s only foray into cryptozoology, despite his self-confessed interest in the subject. Nearly half a century on, I recalled it as vividly as any…

Ghost of an Idea Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia William Burns Headpress 2025 Pb, 286pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781915316318 Albion’s Eco-Eerie TV and Movies of the Haunted Generations Phil Smith Temporal Boundary Press 2024 Pb, 133pp £9.99, temporalboundary.bigcartel.com/ As the number of books about folk horror and hauntology is considerably increasing, focus falls now upon a quest for a unique selling point – the tone and angle of scrutiny as well as which particular examples are concentrated upon. With Ghost of an Idea the aspect of nostalgia is the point of interest, whereas Albion’s Eco-Eerie looks at the political and ecological aspects of “othering” in its selection. Both books follow in the footsteps of the late author and theorist Mark Fisher, particularly his 2017 posthumous release The Weird…

Troll: A Love Story Johanna Sinisalo Pushkin Press 2024 Pb, 285pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781805331346 Translated from the awardwinning Finnish original, Troll: A Love Story has something for just about every FT reader: cryptozoologists, naturalists, folklorists… A young photographer, Angel, comes across some kids tormenting something; he chases them away, and finds a young troll, which he takes back to his flat. Trolls have only been accepted as real creatures rather than folk-tales for a few years, and almost nothing is known about them. Over the weeks, Angel gradually learns how to care for the troll, building up a relationship with it, while at the same time negotiating both his working life, doing photo shoots for an ad agency, and his somewhat chaotic gay sex life; all three strands become entangled…

Finding playing cards I have been following one of the threads on recent FT letter pages with more than usual interest, namely the discussion around the collecting of found playing cards. My own interest in this was sparked by a brief paragraph in the ‘Omnibus Believe it or Not!,’ first UK edition published 1934, although I would have been reading this in the early to mid 1970s. The paragraph in Ripley concerns a resident of Chicago called Frank Damek who, we are informed in breathless prose: ‘…compiled a complete pack of cards by picking them up from time to time in the street!’ (p.188) It appears that Ripley himself picked up this story from a piece in The Chicago Tribune (15 February 1890), although there is subsequently a little doubt…