Innholdsfortegnelse for 466 i Fortean Times

OLD AND NEW This issue marks two anniversaries, one involving the birth of a gamechanging modern technology, the other a resurgence of what might be seen as primitive superstition, but they are nonetheless linked by the notion that the seemingly rational everyday world is not necessarily the only one we inhabit; and that it is, anyway, subject to sudden irruptions of weirdness. One hundred years ago, in January 1926, the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of his latest discovery: a method of transmitting “radio with pictures” that would become known as “television”. As Brian Robb points out in our cover feature, this revolutionary technological breakthrough must have looked a lot like magic: and, indeed, the quest for such “seeing at a distance” emerged from a…

BALLOONACY While trying to land in Russell Park, Bedford, a hot air balloon lost momentum and started to come down over nearby residential streets. However, locals managed to grab guide ropes dangling from the basket and manœuvre it away from houses, over telephone wires and past parked cars, steering it safely to rest in the middle of narrow Bower Street without causing any damage to either property or the balloon itself. D.Mail, 25 Aug 2025. STRANGE SWARM On the way to her dentist in Iford, Sussex, on 13 May, Pauline Cherry was startled by something passing over her car. “It wasn’t birds or bees,” she said, “It made a noise like stones being thrown at the car, and looking up I saw white/cream coloured objects about the size of a…

Behind the imposing facades and glittering, gilded ballrooms of fin-de-siècle Vienna lay an altogether more shadowy world. While Sigmund Freud was developing psychoanalysis and Gustav Klimt draped ecstatic lovers in golden iconography, Vienna’s intelligentsia were blurring the boundaries between reason and mysticism, science and superstition, progress and reaction. Departed souls dictated poetry to empresses, scientists examined the supernatural claims of Indian mystics, and mediums held court in grand salons. Vienna’s peculiar susceptibility to occultist thinking arose at a particular historical moment. The city faced profound political and cultural crises that conventional institutions seemed powerless to address. Narrow ethnic nationalism fragmented the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire. Liberalism, which had promised enlightened progress, was visibly failing. The Catholic Church stifled intellectual inquiry with suffocating dogmatism. Yet scientific materialism offered no spiritual sustenance. Occultism…

DOUBLE JEOPARDY Fleeing from police who had come to arrest him for failing to turn up at a prison in Oldenburg, Germany, a 32-year-old fugitive leapt from a balcony… straight onto a wasps’ nest. Trying to dislodge the stinging insects and salve the pain, the man hurled himself into a nearby paddling pool, from which officers retrieved him, writhing in agony. Metro, 15 Aug 2024. WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS… Following a report of a “suspicious person” lying outside the Affordable Cremation & Burial Service funeral home, Las Vegas police found a corpse face down on rocks at the front of the property, its feet covered with plastic bags. Further investigation revealed a smashed window and an empty coffin outside on a trolley. CCTV evidence led them to Patricia Sierra, 47,…

ELDER THINGS? Researchers in Antarctica using a detector called the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) have discovered mysterious radio waves that seem to originate from beneath the ice. ANITA is designed to detect radio waves generated by cosmic rays from space hitting the atmosphere, and is flown on balloons over Antarctica, a location chosen because it is supposed to be free from radio interference from other sources. However, while searching for neutrinos in cosmic rays, ANITA discovered radio waves coming from below the balloon, rather than from above. “The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,” said Stephanie Wissel, one of the ANITA team. While the radio waves still had the characteristics expected of those generated by neutrinos,…

MATERIALISATIONS Consider a 1929 description of a ghost from Cheshire: the “spirit was… like a kind of illuminated mist, which gradually grew into the shape of the head and shoulders of a woman”. This is how I would imagine a ghost appearing: an uncertain form taking on a recognisable form. But the phantom trick described above – let’s call it ‘materialisation’ – is surprisingly recent. In fact, there are almost no accounts from before c. 1850. In the same way that fairies with wings or (alien) greys are developments in how we imagine supernatural beings, materialising ghosts are relatively new. Now here we must acknowledge that there has long been the idea that the spirits of the dead (unless, zombie-like, they reanimate the body) are insubstantial. Way back in Homer,…

Thomas Pynchon is America’s most reclusive great writer since JD ‘Don’t Look At My Face!’ Salinger, a man about whom so little is known that it is, paradoxically, possible to say just about anything about him without fear of being authoritatively contradicted. It is in this generously loose spirit that I propose the following speculative literary theory: that Thomas Pynchon is a hitherto unacknowledged disciple of Charles Fort. Pynchon has a new book out, Shadow Ticket, which is implied to be his last, as the man is now 88. His best known novel remains his 1973 masterwork Gravity’s Rainbow, a sprawling picaresque patchwork of WWII which features amongst its many protagonists the staff of something called ‘The White Visitation’, a quasi-paranormal branch of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), devoted towards…

Treasures of the Occult A Guide to History’s Unorthodox Money Dominic Chorney Stanley Gibbons Baldwin’s 2025 Hb, 230pp, £34.95, ISBN 9781836884774. Available from baldwin.co.uk or at 399 Strand, London WC2R 0LX I have been a keen numismatist since 1958, but this is the first publication about the fortean side of the subject as far as I am aware. The chapters cover Myths and Monsters, Magic, Unidentified Objects, Conspiracies, Hoaxes and Secret Societies, and Death. Since the advent of coinage about 26 centuries ago, coins and treasure have been associated with unusual events like comets, frightening creatures and magic. Coins have long been thrown into wells and springs as offerings to the gods and ghost stories have emerged around these sacred waters. Water monsters have featured on coins since the time…

Alpha Dir Julia Ducournao, France/Belgium, 2025 On digital platforms As the daughter of a gynæcologist and a dermatologist, it was perhaps inevitable that French screenwriter/director Julia Ducournao would align herself to what is loosely termed body horror. Her first feature film, the 2016 cannibal flick Raw, was so horrific it reportedly had audience members at the Toronto Film Festival fainting in the aisles. That was followed in 2021 by Titane, about a girl with a titanium plate in her head who becomes a murderous model with a car fetish, which is, and will probably remain, one of the very few movies where the main protagonist has sex with a fire engine. All this led up to Alpha, Ducournao’s third feature film. It is neither as grisly as Raw, nor as…

When the legendarily large, wily and dangerous “Ninja Bear” was finally killed in 2023 (see FT426:7, 448:22), the Japanese could have been forgiven for thinking that the worst was over. However, this was not to be; 2025 has been an unprecedented year for bear/human clashes, with the situation becoming so bad in the Akita Prefecture that the Japan Self-Defence Forces (SDF) have been deployed to tackle the problem. In late November, a 69-year-old security guard was pounced on by a bear as he used a public toilet in Gunma prefecture, north of Tokyo, after spotting the animal nonchalantly peering in the window. He fell backwards and managed to kick the bear repeatedly until it fled, leaving him with only minor injuries. He was one of the lucky ones. Thirteen people…

NUCLEAR TRANSIENTS The Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project searches for fleeting astronomical events appearing in archival photographic images taken by the Palomar Observatory in California in the early 1950s (FT442:24-25). These are particularly useful for this purpose as they were taken before any satellites or space debris from Earth were in orbit. Researchers are looking for star-like objects that appear in one photo, but are gone by the time the same region of sky is photographed again. Initially, the primary aim of the project was to seek out failed supernovas in the far distant Universe, but increasingly VASCO has been concentrating on transients appearing closer to Earth. These could be small fragments of asteroids, or maybe just damage to the photographic plates, or, more…

Over the decades I’ve received a great many reports concerning alleged giant spiders: but spiders are not the only arachnids with possible cryptozoological connections. Also on record, yet far fewer in number, are sightings of what have been described as giant scorpions, and as the following example is not only hitherto unpublished but also the most detailed that I’ve ever encountered, I am devoting this entire column to it. GIANT SCORPIONS IN FLORIDA? North America’s largest known native species of scorpion is the desert hairy scorpion Hadrurus arizonensis, indigenous to the deserts of the southwestern USA as well as Utah and Nevada, which can attain a total length of up to 5.5in (14cm). Imagine my surprise, therefore, when on 9 November 2025 I received a fascinating email from Richard ‘Rick’…

The myth Almond milk is a recent invention. The “truth” Never tasted the stuff myself, but no doubt it’s delicious. Or disgusting. Either way, it is bizarrely controversial. To triggered reactionaries it epitomises all that’s awful in the world today: woke, trendy, vegan, worthy, new-fangled. The EU, with its unfailingly perfect grasp of world priorities, has banned almond milk from being marketed as a milk, although that word has always been used for both plant and animal juice. To those of us who are neither top-knotted hipsters nor pucefaced whiners, this anger seems rather odd. Perhaps if we can put almond milk in its historical context, that might help to defuse tempers a bit. Or, failing that, at least make them worse. For hundreds of years almond milk was one…

Readers of Fortean Times will know that I have written regularly about real-life experiences of road ghosts, phantom hitchhikers and other apparitions. However, I also come across people who have had a series of varying encounters with strange phenomena; see for example, The Hauntings of David Barton (FT371:40-44). None of them claim to be psychic and they all seem to be genuinely puzzled and intrigued by what happened to them. I would be tempted to call them ‘Haunted People’, but the incidents are often so diverse and widely spaced in time that there are no apparent patterns. I came across one such person when he contacted me by letter following my interview with Neil Oliver on GB News on 23 April 2022 about Scunthorpe’s Scotter Road Spectre (FT411:48-52).1 I…

An uncanny stain has been identified on the Shroud of Turin – one that bears an uncanny resemblance to the most iconic image of US President George Washington (see “A Striking Likeness”, FT65:64). The immediate question arises: What is Washington doing on the Shroud of Christ? Some assert that this image serves as a prophetic symbol of the founding of God’s Holy Nation – America. Among the pieces of supporting evidence is the striking similarity between the profile found on the Shroud and the portrait of Washington on the US. quarter. Even more compelling, the phrase “In God We Trust” appears alongside that image on the coin – perhaps an echo of divine sanction. Sinologists (scholars of the Shroud) concede that, beyond the haunting imprint of the crucified Christ, numerous…

Elder Charles Beck It was good to see the review of the biography of Gray Barker, The Saucerian, [FT462:60]. I bought a copy as a result. I’ve long had an interest in UFOs, but even longer in African-American music. Sometime in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, a magazine called Sailor’s Delight – part of its remit was to sell vintage blues and gospel records uncovered by its editor Paul ‘Sailor’ Vernon – listed a record called “Rock And Roll Sermon” by Elder Charles Beck, noting that it was a sermon against the evils of rock and roll dating from the mid-1950s, but contained “the most blistering electric guitar”, and asking “is this a spoof?” I didn’t get the record, but was intrigued enough to occasionally buy other (cheaper)…

147. Quinta da Regaleira, Sintra, Portugal The palace of Quinta da Regaleira is one of the most remarkable esoteric sites in Europe, claimed to overshadow Rennesle-Château and Rosslyn chapel.1 To enter it is to step into the set for a strange and fantastic movie, like something out of Dan Brown, but with style and panache. With its underground tunnels, grottos, fountains, decorative structures, secret passages and wealth of symbolism, this is a place of mysteries. Appropriately enough, though, its real meaning and purpose are veiled, the motivations behind it unknown. There are many interpretations, which the guides will be happy to share with you. What is obvious is that the whole site, and in particular the famed Well of Initiation, is designed to fire the imagination and send it into…

PIGEON HACKING Moscow neurotechnology startup Neiry, which has close links to the Putin regime, has revealed a flock of “pigeon biodrones”. Codenamed PJN-1, these are living pigeons with neural chips implanted in their brains, connecting to miniature solarpowered backpacks that house electronics, a GPS tracker and radio receivers, enabling humans to remotely control their behaviour. Neiry say their innovations make it possible for operators to steer entire flocks of pigeons across the sky with precision via remote signals. They claim their birds can fly 310 miles (499km) a day, and can be operated successfully as soon as their implants are installed as “no training is required”. The birds, however, are easily identified as having been modified because their electronics package and its connection to the brain implants are clearly visible.…

HELLBOUND TRAIN Florida’s Brightline rail service is a cutting edge (for America) high speed train that runs between Orlando and Miami at up to 125mph (200km/h) several times a day. Opening in 2018, it is only the second service of its kind in the US, after the Acela service in the Pacific Northwest, and will serve champagne to its passengers as they relax in the comfort of its bespoke leather seats. However, the Brightline train is gaining a reputation as killer technology having been responsible for more than 185 deaths in the seven years it has been operating. In 2024 alone the train hit and killed 41 people, none of whom appeared to have been committing suicide, while in the same period the busiest US railway, the Long Island Rail…

Not sure how much Fort knew or cared about ancient Egypt. However, Steinmeyer’s biography (p29) says history, “of certain romantic eras”, was his favourite school subject, so the odds are that he will have had some acquaintance with it. He was predictably stirred by the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922. There are three references in his Books (678, 701, 884) to the supposed curse. I’d like to think he shared my puzzlement that only Lord Carnarvon was struck down, not archæologist Howard Carter, the actual ‘despoiler’ of the tomb. This event may have been on Fort’s mind when he penned the opening sentences of The Book of the Damned: “A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded… Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies,…

LIBRARY SNACK During renovations to Cambridge University Library, workers dismantling shelves discovered the wrapper from a Crunchie bar that had been hidden for more than 50 years, with some crumbs still inside. The bright orange wrapper dated from the days when Crunchie, a chocolate-covered honeycomb bar, was made by Fry’s, rather than Cadburys, and had the pre-decimalisation price of 6d printed on it. This means that it was manufactured before 1971, when Britain went over to the decimal currency. Lizzie Woodman, the library’s social media co-ordinator, said, “Sometimes we find fascinating reminders left behind by past members of the library,” and explained that “The wrapper had been stashed behind some books and then fallen down the back of the shelves so it was trapped under the bookshelf, and, as…

PATRICIA CROWTHER By the time of her death, aged 97, Patricia Crowther had become known as “Britain’s Oldest Witch”, with roots that went back to the early days of Wicca, the religion she was instrumental in popularising and shaping. Crowther was born in Sheffield, as Patricia Dawson, to a family steeped in clairvoyance and local folk traditions, and her psychic abilities were evident from an early age, when, she claimed, she would regularly communicate with fairies, who shared secrets not meant for most humans. Crowther went on to pursue a career as a professional entertainer and dancer working in theatre, including performing a puppet and magic show for children; it was this that led her to Wicca. After a prediction from a fortune teller that she would meet her husband…

Chasing the Dark Encounters with the Supernatural Ben Machell Abacus 2025 Hb, 304pp, £22, ISBN 9780349146829 Some ghost hunters acquire a little fame, or perhaps notoriety. Harry Price, for example, or any one of the many posting films of themselves screaming and running away on Tik Tok. Chasing the Dark takes us back to a time when investigating the paranormal wasn’t mainstream and was a serious occupation. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) had a network of members who actively looked into ghost cases; some were more sceptical than others. Tony Cornell was one of the sceptics, although this book gives one the sense that he’d have loved to have been proven wrong. He certainly experienced events he couldn’t account for, notably when meeting an Indian holy man during World…

“I spotted some marionettes in a dusty old window in the Cotswolds,” explains writer Simon Avery. “And they were arranged in a tableau that suggested the spectres of the 1970s and 1980s to me. Sepiatinted memories of Bagpuss and Fingerbobs, the decidedly less benign Hartley Hare of Pipkins, and Jan Švankmajer’s Alice.” Simon’s chance encounter became the starting point for his affecting novel PoppyHarp. Taking further inspiration from the autobiography of Oliver Postgate and the published diaries of Kenneth Williams, Simon tells the story of a reclusive children’s TV pioneer, Oliver Frayling, whose gradual retreat from the world has a profound affect on both his daughter Imogen and her on-off partner Noah. As does the realisation that Oliver’s most famous creation, a flea-bitten stop-motion rabbit called Florian, has manifested in…