Innholdsfortegnelse for 464 i Fortean Times

MOOOOVED North Yorkshire police have appealed for information about the disappearance of a life-size sculpture of a cow from a field at Kirby Overblow near Harrogate. The cow vanished sometime between 14 and 28 January, but no one saw it being stolen, which has left the police baffled. The animal was made of solid, dense, plastic and had required the use of a heavy duty forklift to install it, making it exceptionally difficult to spirit away without someone noticing. The Gazette (Yorkshire), 15 Feb 2025.. FLORIDA WOMAN Police in St Petersburg, Florida, were called to a convenience store after reports of a drunk, naked woman running amok there. Celia Barrett, 35, was found brandishing a potato peeler aggressively at staff after knocking over a Red Bull display, having also destroyed…

THE NEXT NEW THING There is something different about the way the Charlie Kirk affair (see p.4) is playing out. At first, it followed the standard trajectory of political conspiracy theories, drawing input from both grand narrative theorists and the more immediate, automatic dissent crowd (see FT330:5 for a discussion of this division within conspiracy theory). This was what we saw in the immediate aftermath of the shooting; the usual suspects saying the expected things and linking the incident to their ongoing concerns. But the shooting, and the conspiracy theories that grew so quickly around it, has gained traction among a demographic that is not naturally attracted to such matters. Online, and especially on social media, the more questionable details of the incident – the magic bullet (again), the behaviour…

You can spot an engaged audience these days, when few, if any, are fiddling with their smart phones. This proved so with the 60 people gathering for the Fourth International Colin Wilson Conference on 7 July, a day of lectures and discussion dedicated to the life and ideas of the iconic writer Colin Wilson (1931-2013; obit FT310:24-25). Included were a number of topics fascinating to forteans. The conference convened in the cavernous basement of Scarlett Green Restaurant in Noel Street, Soho; the venue was selected partly in homage to Wilson’s early years as a struggling writer in 1950s Soho before his first book The Outsider (1956) launched him as a literary phenomenon. I felt it also served as a metaphor for many of the topics under discussion. The great theme…

As All Souls Day, Sunday 2 November, rolls around again, the great Christian commemoration for the departed, I recall Sir Simon Jenkins remarking in his doorstop sized guidebook England’s Thousand Best Churches (2002): “Three ghosts inhabit all English churches. They linger in every arcade, peep from every gallery and flit across every monument. They are those of John Betjeman, Alec Clifton-Taylor and Nikolaus Pevsner. No visitor is without their companionship.” Naturally, he was using ‘ghosts’ as a metaphor for his distinguished forebears in the guidebook business, one he also employs in describing the architectural and artistic glories of English churches. Altogether, Sir Simon avoids discussing spiritual aspects and I don’t think he believes in ghosts at all (he mentions only one, Lady Boby at Bisham Abbey, Berkshire). For me, thoughts…

FLAT PACK ALIENS The concept of inhabitants in a two-dimensional world is famously explored in schoolmaster Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Their world is on a flat plane where they have no concept of height, so they can only perceive lines, squares and triangles. It is only when a spherical visitor from a three-dimensional world arrives that their perceptions are severely challenged. Abbott’s intention was not only to satirise the hierarchical social structure of Victorian society but to make us look at mathematical concepts beyond normal reality. In the 2014 Doctor Who episode “Flatline,” (Series 8, Episode 9), transparent alien entities called ‘the Boneless’ come from a two-dimensional world, and on visiting Earth they reduce people and objects to two dimensional forms. This enables them…

The “Emperor of the Night”, as he has been grandly called,1 the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys was the great pioneer of “lucid dreaming”: to be aware, while you are fully asleep, that you are dreaming, with the possibility of deliberately directing the dream for recreational, psychological or spiritual exploration. Today it is an area of great interest, but it was unknown as a coherent subject in the West before the arrival of Hervey’s classic work Dreams and How to Guide Them (Les reves et les moyens de les diriger), published anonymously in 1867. For many years it was a rare and legendary book: Freud knew of it, but failed to find a copy, while the great Surrealist André Breton was fascinated by it, although he never seems to have achieved…

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The Rise of the English Poltergeist Andrew Pickering Hobnob Press 2025 Pb, 250pp, £20, ISBN 9781914407932 For decades forteans have asserted that poltergeist phenomena should be taken seriously. Now professional historians are coming to agree with them as demonstrated in this welcome and insightful book by Andrew Pickering, an authority on the supernatural in early modern England. Rather than attempt a millennia-spanning review such as those of Claude Lecouteux or P Maxwell Stewart, he focuses on 27 separate accounts between 1590 and 1718. Encouragingly, Pickering is clearly familiar with the ideas and theories of forteans and psychical researchers, but what most interests him is just what the Tudors, the Stuarts and their successors made of poltergeists and how their explanations shifted over time. The first half of the book…

About three minutes into Lost Souls (Prime), we’re instructed to “forget about all the paranormalTV crap of haunted castles and murdered maids” and are invited instead to watch some new paranormal TV crap about a haunted shopping centre. True to this promise, there is a stark divergence from the usual formulaic hosting by a blonde woman and a man with an improbable beard: this time it’s a man with an improbable beard and a blonde woman (Jason Coupland and Liv Edkins respectively). That aside, it does maintain the consistency of the genre with migraine-inducing graphics, self-consciously edgy camera angles and a veritable tsunami of earnestness. Despite being British, this is clearly aimed squarely at the American market – the captions (themselves frequently mis-spelled or weirdly punctuated) describe the locations as…

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‘DRONE-CHORS’ The state of Uttar Pradesh in India is currently in the grip of a “Drone-chors” (drone thieves) panic, in which villagers believe that they are being targeted by gangs of thieves who are either invisible, or are dressed in underwear and smeared in oil (as in Malaysia’s ‘Greasy Men’ panics; see FT287:12-15), and who use drones to identify and mark houses to rob. In addition, there are also rumours that there is a “nude gang” operating in the state – naked men who use drones to spot women working in the fields at dawn, so that they can chase them. The popular newspaper Jagran claimed that in Bulandshahr, a woman had her plait cut off during a drone-chors sighting. In many villages, people are staying up all night, with…

PAUL SIEVEKING unearths some ancient psychoactive plants and finds a carved head in Orkney HARMAL New research published in Communications Biology has uncovered the earliest known use of the medicinal and psychoactive plant Peganum harmala, commonly known as Syrian rue or harmal, in fumigation practices and inhalation as smoke in Iron Age Arabia. The findings offer unprecedented insight into early Arabian therapeutic and sensorial practices, revealing that native plants were already being deliberately used for their bioactive and psychoactive properties nearly 2,700 years ago. The study applied advanced metabolic profiling techniques to analyse organic residues preserved inside Iron Age fumigation devices. The devices were excavated at the oasis settlement of Qurayyah in northwestern Saudi Arabia, a locale known in antiquity for its decorated ceramic vessels, today called Qurayyah Painted Ware.…

The will o’ the wisp, manifesting as strange transient lights appearing over marshy ground, has long been a puzzle to scientists (see FT370:14). Their best guess was always that it is marsh gas which somehow gets ignited. Richard Zare and colleagues at Stanford University in California believe they have the answer: sparks of ‘microlightning’ generated by contact between bubbles of methane are igniting the gas. Their laboratory demonstration looks plausible and is based on a well-known but mysterious phenomenon. Welcome to the weird world or triboelectricity, better known as contact or static electricity. The ancient Greeks knew that rubbing two objects together could create a mysterious force and even cause sparks to fly. ‘Electron’ is the Greek word for amber, used after the sixth-century BC philoso pherscientist Thales of Miletus…

LABUBU BOOBOO? Using the social media network Telegram, a Russian marketeer naming himself only as “Dmitri” posted an ad offering 100,000 roubles (£927) to anyone who would sign a contract in blood selling him their soul. He was not expecting anyone to take him up on the offer, he says, but a 26-year-old woman did. “A young woman named Karina responded, accepted the deal, signed the document, and sealed it with blood,” Dmitri wrote. “I just bought my first soul. I definitely feel like Davy Jones right now!” To prove it, he posted an image of Karina holding the signed contract on social media, along with a receipt for the money. For her part, Karina told the Telegram channel Mash that she cared little for her soul or what its…

EXTREME FART HORROR For seven years, Christine Connell from Australia was dogged by persistent facial pain until a nose swab revealed that the cause was an E.coli infection in her sinuses. Doctors were surprised to find the bacterium in Connell’s sinus as it normally lives in the gut. Connell, though, thinks she has the answer; an incident that took place years ago when she was bedridden after ankle surgery. Then, she had been lying in bed when her boyfriend accidentally farted extremely close to her face. “He was just getting into bed and my face happened to be in the path of the fart that was released,” she said, adding, “[It was] the worst fart I have ever smelled in my life. I couldn’t breathe. I’ve never, ever, ever smelled…

This year, 2025, marks the centenary of the still-unsolved disappearance amid Brazil’s jungle wilderness of Lieutenant-Colonel Percy H Fawcett (1867-1925). He is the famous British explorer who conducted several expeditions in search of lost cities and traces of ancient civilisations hidden within the dense Amazonian jungles of South America’s vast green continent. Indeed, it was during his search for the hypothesised ‘Lost City of Z’ when Fawcett (then aged 57) and his two companions vanished; his last communication received by the outside world was a letter to his wife dated 29 May 2025. What is less well known, however, is that he also documented a wide range of scientifically-unknown or unrecognised animals during those expeditions, some of which were allegedly encountered by him at first-hand, others made known to him…

Low: David Bowie’s Berlin Years Reinhard Kleist, Thomas Self Made Hero HB, 176pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781914224287 The mystery of creativity is a fortean subject in its own right, and it lies at the heart of Rheinhard Kleist’s new comic, Low: Bowie’s Berlin Years. Dealing with a significant cocaine habit and a worsening psychological state, both of which he blamed on Los Angeles, Bowie moved to Berlin. With Iggy Pop as his flatmate, he set about creating what came to be known as ‘The Berlin Trilogy’, consisting of the albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger. At the time, he was influenced by Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, German bands such as Neu! and Kraftwerk, and his relationship with Romy Haag. But more than this he was influenced by the city itself. Kleist perfectly…

56. THE ARMLESS CARPENTER George EdwardThomas was born in June 1850, the second of six sons of the London tea merchant RichardThomas and his wife Anne. While all his brothers had the normal complement of extremities, George Edward was born without arms. On each side, the glenoid cavity and the acromion could be plainly felt, but there was not even the most rudimentary trace of a humerus. His mother could remember that in the sixth week of her pregnancy, she had seen a child with no arms walking down the Minories, being horrified at the sight. A gullible medical practitioner, Dr R Davies MCRS, of Brunswick Place, City Road, was very much impressed by this singular instance of a ‘maternal impression’: he wrote to the Lancet to report the case,…

After Adrienne Jones-McAllister had completed the MRI scan she was having for a knee problem, she called her husband, Keith, 61, into the MRI room to help her get off the table. Usually, anyone entering the scanner room is required to remove all metal from their person due to the danger from the massively powerful magnets, but as he had not initially intended to go into the room, Keith had not taken off the 20lb weight training chain he was wearing round his neck. As he entered, the powerful magnetic field grabbed the chain and slammed Keith violently into the side of the machine, trapping him there. “I said: ‘Could you turn off the machine, call 911, do something, Turn this damn thing off!’” Adrienne recalled. With the technician’s help…

Reliably, every September, just before the Swedish Academy announces the Nobel Prizes, The Annals of Improbable Research awards its Ig Nobel Prizes, for “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think”, with winners getting their prizes from real Nobel laureates at a ceremony in Boston where they are pelted with paper planes and told to “be quiet” by a loud eight-year-old girl if their speeches overrun. As ever, the list contained some truly eye-popping research. Most media attention has been focused on the winners of the Chemistry Prize, Rotem and David Naftalovich, who hit upon a wheeze to solve the obesity crisis – adding Teflon to dieters’ food. They worked out that food could contain up to 25 per cent of the non-stick substance before it affected…

Sunnyfields Farm Shop near Totton, Southampton, has been holding its annual ‘Pumpkin Time’ festival. Standing out as a highlight of the numerous pumpkin-related activities and artworks this year was a gigantic pumpkin mosaic of Ozzy Osbourne, honouring the rock star who died in July (see FT463:38-43). The impressive artwork was created using more than 10,000 pumpkins and squashes and even prompted a surprise visit by Ozzy’s family, Sharon, Jack and Kelly Osbourne. Farmer’s Weekly, 13 Oct 2025.…

JOHN NEAL John Neal, or “Nosher” as many of us knew him, was born on 20 February 1941, and died on 9 August 2025, aged 84, an extraordinary age really, all things considered. But Nosh was an extraordinary man. For a start he had an extraordinary memory. He could remember everything he ever read. He could complete a killer sudoku without making a single note. He once said he even remembered being conceived! He had an extraordinary career. He is the only person I ever met who lost a million pounds. At least four times. In four different ways. Karma payments for his misdeeds, Nosh would say. I could go on, but I want to focus on his work. So, sadly, I can’t tell you about the time he taught…

The Witches House Cecil Williamson & his museums Rupert White Antenna Publications 2025 Pb, 284pp, £12, ISBN 9798313403335 Rupert White weaves a fascinating account in The Witches House. Cecil Williamson (1909-1999) is probably best known as the founder of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. In his eclectic biography of Williamson’s life in 20th-century Britain, White first tracks his family and boarding school days in Mayfair and rural Devon, an apprenticeship on a colonial plantation, a flourishing career in the film industry and a curious role in MI6 during WWII. The final chapters are dedicated to the museums and exhibitions Williamson set up from the late 1940s. His collections concerned witchcraft, superstition, torture, spells, smuggling and shells, and were set up between the Isle of Man, the Cotswolds, and the…

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 Eyeworth Pond ghost I was surprised in seeing a multi-page report about the alleged ghost at Eyeworth Pond [FT461:36-39]. I was 25 or 26 when I first saw the picture, probably in the Sunday Mirror (I may even still have the cutting somewhere) and I thought at the time that it was quite clearly an older woman in a loose-fitting coat, in the act of raising one of the (then common) 110 size instamatic cameras to her eye, in order to get a picture of the hunt. I wondered at the time how anyone could ever have thought it was anything…