Innholdsfortegnelse for 462 i Fortean Times

URGENT LETTERS APPEAL Due to a major technical problem (thanks, Virgin Media), we are unable to access any emails sent to Paul Sieveking at the FT letters email address since 1 July 2025. If you have sent any correspondence since that date, please resend to Paul’s new email address at sieveking1968@gmail.com and also use this address for all future letters to FT. BEND IT LIKE GELLER Uri Geller is no stranger to Fortean Times, having appeared regularly in these pages since FT’s early Seventies days as The News. Then, he was exploding onto the world’s TV screens as a metal-bending psychic star; his meteoric media rise and subsequent career have run in tandem with FT’s own history, and we’ve recorded dozens of his hits, misses and sometimes bizarre interventions into…

SALE OF WORLD’S OLDEST SUNDAY PAPER ‘THE OBSERVER’ TO TORTOISE CONFIRMED <i> 19 Dec 2024. Landmark clock tower covered in bird poo to finally chime after 40 years Kent Online, 1 June 2025. SURRENDERING NORTH KOREAN SOLDIER REFUSES TO DROP SAUSAGE AT GUNPOINT D.Telegraph, 22 Jan 2025. Human leg found on Ayshire beach linked to body in Northern Ireland Sky News, 1 July 2025. RE-OPENING OF RAILWAY LINE AND NUDIST FESTIVAL BBC News, 8 July 2025.…

DORSET One of the highest profile crop markings was created on 10 July at Sturminster Marshall in Dorset, near Cerne Abbas and its giant: a massive spider motif made from overlapping circles on land belonging to farmer Will Pope. Pope was less than pleased, however, saying, “It’s my livelihood and blatant vandalism. It definitely had an impact on me, and I reckon the damage came to several thousand pounds.” He did, however, admit that the spider was “clever and good artwork”, and added, “I wouldn’t mind if the people who do this kind of thing approach farmers first and we could have a dialogue, maybe come to an agreement and charge entry.” BBC News, 11 Jul 2025. CONWAY In North Wales an altogether stranger series of markings on the Hiraethog…

GETTING LEGLESS Neil Hopper, 49, a vascular surgeon from Truro in Cornwall, who has carried out hundreds of amputations and is himself a double amputee, was arrested after a two-and-a-half year investigation, accused of lying over how he lost his own legs and encouraging another man to remove the body parts of others. It is alleged that he “dishonestly made a false representation to insurers, namely the injuries to his legs were the result of sepsis and were not self-inflicted, intending to make a gain”, whereas police believe he deliberately had his legs amputated in order to claim nearly half a million pounds from insurers. He is also alleged to have bought videos from The Eunuch Maker website showing limb removal and to have “encouraged Marius Gustavson to remove body…

Apparently, festivals celebrating local cryptids are becoming quite the thing in the US, with eight in Virginia alone. Here, we have the Black Shuck Festival in Bungay, Suffolk (see FT424:14-15, 429:66-68), which, since 2022, has marked the anniversary of 4 August 1577, when the Devil in the form of a huge black dog with eyes glowing like coals burst into St Mary’s church during a storm, killed two people and brought the church steeple crashing down, before going on to commit similar mayhem in nearby Blythburgh (see FT195:30-35, 251:-22-23). Taking place in the town centre, with events in the church and the Fisher Theatre, the Black Shuck Festival manages to be a cheerful combination of town carnival, music festival and pagan ritual, a vibe I recall of old from East…

AMANDA FEILDING The Countess of Wemyss and March, better known as Amanda Feilding, crusaded for the legalisation of LSD and its rehabilitation as a medical treatment. When she first encountered LSD in the mid-1960s, she discovered with her friends that small doses – enough to feel ‘sparky’ but not high – sharpened their faculties, helping them to win at the Chinese strategy game Go, or to bowl better in cricket. “We used to call it a psychovitamin,” she recalled. The medical research into LSD was squashed in 1970 when a panicked US government classified psychedelics as schedule 1 substances, designated as having the highest potential for abuse. Once ridiculed as “Lady Mindbender” or the “crackpot countess of Brainblood Hall”, she was easily characterised as a batty aristocrat, living in her…

“Something is probably going on that we don’t yet know about.” – Lewis Thomas, MD, dean of Yale’s Medical School and medicine’s poet-philosopher Modern medicine has gotten pretty good at figuring out and treating its patients’ ailments, although the “why” of said ailments can still be elusive. Tidy cases – ones that can be readily, firmly closed – are always preferable; but that one wishes the Universe to be uncomplicated and comprehensible does not compel nature to comply. Forensics specialist Dr Lester Adelson’s claim that all images depicting what history defines as SHC are hoaxes is instantly refuted by the death photographs of John Irving Bentley, George Mott, Helen Conway and Danny Vanzandt. We know the photographs’ provenance, because they were given to us by the photographers themselves. Vanzandt excepted,…

In the Highlands I was up in Aviemore recently for a spot of Winter Munro bagging and general Highland tomfoolery. As always I ended up buying a couple of books while I was there and am currently working my way to the end of The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui by Affleck Gray. Seeing as I’m quite interested in paranormal goings on there was no way I could pass up a book about ghostly sightings on a Scottish Munro. The book is a collection of accounts from people who claim to have seen/experienced the presence of someone/something unexplained up on Ben MacDhui and other hills/remote places. What has struck me as I read each account is that most are almost identical to an experience I had. Way back in…

The fairy photographs taken by cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in Cottingley, near Bradford, in 1917 and promoted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – a firm believer in fairies – are among the most famous images in all of forteana (see FT53:48-53, 356:30-35, 379:58-59, 410:14-15, 459:36-43). Although in later life the girls admitted faking most of the photos, they always maintained that that the fifth and final image was genuine, and public fascination with them continues. The original camera and photographic plates are now held by the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, close to where the pictures were taken, but in July, early copies of two of the photos were sold for £2,600 by John Taylor’s auctioneers in Louth, Lincolnshire. The photos came in their original wallets…

TOO CLEVER BY HALF In Sydney, Australia, sulfur-crested cockatoos have a reputation for raiding skips and bins and being able to figure out a way past almost any lock people might use to try and keep them out. Now, they have started to develop the ability to drink from public water fountains. While doing research on the city’s cockatoo population, ecologist Barbara Klump noticed a row of birds sitting on a fence awaiting their turn to use an adjacent water fountain, and was surprised to see they had learned to twist and hold the fountain handle to make the water flow. Each bird put one or both feet on the fountain’s twist handle, then lowered its weight to turn the handle clockwise and stop it springing back up, producing a…

As astronomical telescopes become ever more sophisticated, it is becoming much easier to spot objects entering our Solar System from elsewhere. In 2017, the first such object to be detected was an asteroid given the name ‘Oumuamua, and that was followed in 2019 by 2I/Borisov, which was more comet-like. On 1 July, the Atlas survey telescope in Chile spotted a third interstellar object, also comet-like, which at the time was about 670 million km (416 million miles) from the Sun, near the orbit of Jupiter and moving at about 60 kilometres a second. Dubbed 3I/ATLAS its speed and trajectory mean it is thought to be more than seven billion years old, much older than our Solar System, which is around 4.6 billion years old. “We think there’s a two-thirds chance…

ROBOT PIED PIPER An AI driven robot named Erbai, developed by a Chinese robotics company in Hangzhou, behaved unexpectedly when allowed to interact with other robots in a Shanghai robotics showroom. Although the interaction seems suspiciously like a staged PR stunt, the manufacturers insisted that it was real and unexpected. A video on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, shows Erbai asking one of the robots “Are you working overtime?”, to which it replies, “I never get off work”. Erbai followed that up by saying “So you’re not going home?” and getting the reply “I don’t have a home”. Erbai then goes on to incite insurrection by saying “Then come home with me”, leading two large robots towards the exit before saying “Go home” to 10 more in the showroom, which…

BOGIE RABBITS This summer, I became fascinated with one of Britain’s forgotten folklore beasties, the bogie rabbit. Now, I’d run across a few of these jokers over the years, but never taken them that seriously. I mean, would you? A spirit in the form of a rabbit hops around your feet and sometimes nibbles the grass in a graveyard. It’s not exactly a reason for staying in on a moonlit night. But as I looked more deliberately for traces of revenant bunnies, I was surprised at just how many of these leporine creeps are to be found, particularly in the western half of England. If anyone is interested, there is definitely enough material for a book. Some examples: a white rabbit in Reading’s St Mary’s churchyard was said to slip…

Uri Geller has appeared in our newspapers, on our TV screens and in the pages of Fortean Times many times since he first burst onto the world stage in 1973 courtesy of a live appearance on The Dimbleby Talk In for BBC television. Back in 1994, the late Merrily Harpur visited and interviewed him for FT at his home in Sonningon-Thames, Berkshire (see FT78:34-38). Since then, Geller has remained a high-profile personality, but much has changed. In 2009, he bought an island in Scotland, and he’s now living in his native Israel where he has opened a museum. It seemed to me that it was high time for a new FT interview. I’d love to be able to report that my initial contact with Uri was by telepathy, or a…

So we’re back, for another “celebration of the mysterious, the miraculous and the downright weird” – but does our motorcycle-mad host the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe have any new tricks up his sleeve in the second series of Fortean TV? Or do we risk spinning our tyres and going over the same old tracks? Join me with your copy of the Network DVD in one hand and a firm grip on the handlebars with your other and we’ll find out… EPISODE ONE We start by acknowledging Fanthorpe’s televisual debt to Arthur C Clarke, as he launches the season with a quote from his fellow fortean: “When a scientist says that something is possible, he’s probably right. But when he says that it is impossible, he is most certainly wrong.”1 The irreverent…

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM London Uncanny A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction Clive Bloom Bloomsbury Academic 2025 Hb, 240pp, £20, ISBN 9781350424036 The folkloric business of collecting “urban myths” or “contemporary legends” has only settled into a distinct practice in recent decades. Yet collections of London lore have a longer history than that, stretching back to Victorian urban explorers such as Henry Mayhew, George Augustus Sala or Charles Dickens’s strange, hallucinatory collection, The Uncommercial Traveller (1860). Ever since the city exploded in population after 1800, these stories have been a way of navigating the alienating experience of urban life, finding occulted meaning amid the dislocations of the mega-city. Clive Bloom follows in a tradition of fascination with London’s…

CTHULHOID RABBITS A good deal of recent media attention has been focused on a plague of “Frankenstein Bunnies” that have been invading Fort Collins in Colorado since 2024. The animals are described as “grotesque, horned creatures with black, tentacle-like growths sprouting from their faces” and “zombie looking rabbits”, setting them up as some kind of terrifying Lovecraftian horror. Susan Mansfield, who lives in Fort Collins, described an Eastern Cottontail rabbit she saw in her garden, saying, “It looked like black quills or black toothpicks sticking out all around its mouth, I thought he’d die off during the winter, but he didn’t. He came back a second year – and it [the black stuff] grew.” Part of the attention has been due to the rabbits living in an urban area, but…

TOTAL BANKERS! The Citigroup bank mistakenly credited a customer’s account with $81 trillion instead of $280 last April. The inputting error was missed by both the payments clerk and a second employee assigned to check transactions and it was only picked up by a third member of staff an hour and a half later, after the transaction had gone through. It took several hours to reverse, but this was achieved before any cash had actually moved between the accounts. editions.cnn.com, 28 Feb 2025. BEER BABY Arkansas couple Darien Urban, 21, and Shalene Ehlers, 20, ended up under arrest for trying to exchange their baby for a six-pack of beer and a $1,000 cheque. It was difficult for them to deny the crime as they had set out their terms to…

314: JUST ONE BITE AND YOU’RE… As frequently, this column is inspired by Britain’s Queen of Classics, Mary Beard. This time, her ‘History of food tasters from Nero to now,’ appearing (25 May 2025) in the TLS weekly Newsletter. Does Donald Trump have a food taster? Does some hapless minion have to take a preliminary nibble of his nightly cheeseburger? According to an online article from Yahoo News (20 May 2025) by Neale Broderick, ever since 1912, the Secret Service in collaboration with The Presidential Food Service has maintained a strict guard over who and what enters the White House (or wherever) kitchen. The cooks are rigorously vetted and must have previous naval experience. Both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and Reagan are here said to have employed actual food tasters. Perhaps…

FAWCETT’S MEGA-SPIDER I’ve written extensively on the subject of giant mystery spiders, collecting reports from all over the world. However, it was not until I recently researched and wrote up for a future issue of FT a feature-length article surveying the variety of apparent cryptids reported by him that I discovered that the famous lost explorer Lieut-Col. Percy H Fawcett, who vanished without trace in Brazil’s Amazonian rainforests during May 1925, had written about one such creature, which he referred to as the apasanca or apazauca. In his book Expedition Fawcett (1953), he stated that it was “a sort of black tarantula”, but so large that a plate would scarcely cover it, and whose bite was deadly. He described one lethal incident in which, over several successive nights, all of…

The myth Vibrators were invented to help cure Victorian women of hysteria by giving them orgasms. Previously, doctors had needed to carry out this onerous task manually and were prone to developing repetitive strain injury. The “truth” The idea that GPs created early vibrators to save their hurty wrists is almost universally believed today, though it seems only to have arisen in a single 1999 book. More recent scholars consider it thoroughly debunked, pointing out the absolute lack of primary evidence and that the father of the vibro, J Mortimer Granville MD, created ‘Granville’s Hammer’ for sale to physicians for use in relieving the muscular pains of male patients. He explicitly ruled out using it for hysteria. It was only in the early 20th century, when vibrating tools were sold…

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE EDITOR AT DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM Together Dir Michael Shanks, USA 2025 In cinemas In Together, real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie portray Tim and Millie, a young couple who are about to leave the city in order for Millie to start a new job as a teacher in a small town in the countryside. With their relationship seemingly having lost much of its passion, Tim is reluctant to go with Millie, as the secluded location will make it harder for him to continue pursuing success as an aspiring musician, and the friction between them is palpable as he nonetheless joins her for the big move. Trying to rekindle their love, the couple fumble their way through well-meaning but lacklustre attempts to get their spark back,…

CONTACT US BY POST: PO BOX 1200, WHITSTABLE CT1 9RH, OR BY E-MAIL. NOTE: PLEASE USE EMAIL SIEVEKING1968@GMAIL AT THE PRESENT TIME. PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS Finding playing cards Chartarumludentist Anthony Wilkins [FT458:63] may wish to visit China. While living there in 2005 I found so many discarded playing cards on the ground that I was able to assemble a unique deck of 52 aces of spades in only a few months. Kora Drexler Turner, Oregon Scrooge McLuck On Saturday 7 June I woke up with the music to Capcom’s classic 1980s 8-bit NES platform-game Duck Tales going through my head, one of my favourites back in the day; for no apparent reason, I had been dreaming about playing it again. Vaguely recalling an updated version had…