Innholdsfortegnelse for 467 i Fortean Times

GNOME TOWN Accrington in Lancashire has been inundated with a tide of tiny plastic gnomes, with hundreds of them being found squirrelled away in nooks and crannies across the town. There’s no mystery about their origin though; they have been produced by 3D printing shop owner, Michael, for his daughter Amara, 7, to hide because she likes “to make other people smile”. Michael says there are “so many people wanting to find them, saying they’re gonna go out just to look for gnomes” and he encourages people to take photos of the them and post them online. “It could be a little happy thing for Accrington town I think.” BBC News, 12 Jul 2025. CRUMBS! In Ireland, the Green Party re-presentative at a circular economy event organised to promote an…

Chimerism – in which someone has two genetically distinct groups of cells – is a well-established phenomenon (see FT254: 18). It attracted attention in 2002 when tests found a woman was apparently not the mother of two of her sons. Such cases are extremely rare, but researchers have also discovered microchimerism, where small groups of cells from someone else colonise the body. It turns out that most of us retain the ghostly presence of other people. The chimera is a monstrous fire-breathing creature from Greek mythology combining the features of lion, serpent and goat, a sibling of Cerberus and the Lernæan Hydra. The term chimerism was given to the condition when twins exchange cells in the womb, resulting in individuals who each have two distinct genetic inheritances in different parts…

FOGGY NOTIONS The Great Drone Flap of 2024 clearly did not suffer from the well-documented battery problems of other electric vehicles; it trundled on merrily into 2025 and eventually went global. By summer, drone flaps had been reported in a number of European and South American countries (it was the Russians, apparently) and national security apparatus (and gleeful industries) were gearing up to fight the ghostly invaders (see FT454:14-15, 26; 464:9). By that stage, I had consigned the whole thing to the category of phenomena that start as conspiracy theories and end up as perennial fortean events; like fairy lanterns and sudden mass illnesses in schools, they would turn up regularly to remind us that the world is not entirely as we planned it. But as I trawled through a…

Since they were written almost a century ago, John Cowper Powys’s novels have lost none of their ability to amaze, inspire, horrify, perplex, and at times, disappoint. Although he liked to identify as Welsh, and lived out his later years in Wales, Powys the writer was unquestionably English and had almost every negative trait that goes with that. He was class-ridden, snobbish, at times xenophobic and priggish; he was sexually immature, not to say perverse; he was (literally) anally retentive, bound by habit and routine, unadventurous with food… But these failings were more than compensated for by a unique appreciation of the Universe and its machinations. With a deep, poet’s understanding of Nature and Cosmic Law, Powys could instinctively detect the butterfly effect at work. As his characters tread their…

Exploitation cinema can be grim and grubby, but time and again it offers the most honest responses to the anxieties of the age. On the surface, Ms. 45 is pure grindhouse provocation: a shy (and mute) young woman is raped twice in one New York day – first among the trash cans of a putrid alleyway, then in her supposedly ‘safe’ apartment. So, she takes a 45-pistol dropped by her second attacker, and walks the streets at night, shooting men dead. Michael Winner’s Death Wish had shown how audiences would root for a victim pushed into ‘righteous killing’ and earlier rape-revenge movies did the same for women. Yet what’s so clever about Ms. 45 is that she doesn’t just kill ‘bad men’, she’ll kill any man. Even, the ‘nice ones’.…

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SELF-DOMESTICATING RACCOONS Over the years, Raccoons, which originally lived in woodland, have become as ubiquitous in North American cities as urban foxes are in the UK. In the wild they eat insects, fish, nuts and berries, but in cities they raid bins and live off human leftovers, earning them the nickname “trash pandas”. Research by University of Arkansas biologist Raffaela Lesch has found that this change of habitat is having a significant effect on the raccoons. With her students, Lesch used the community science platform iNaturalist to look at 20,000 photographs of raccoons from across the US and compare the appearance of the urban animals with that of their wild relatives. They discovered that urban raccoons are undergoing a process of “self-domestication” – taking on some of the characteristics of…

PAUL DEVEREUX returns to the pages of FT bringing mystery holes, ancient cannibals and fairies HOLY MOLY An archæological mystery, first noticed accidentally due to aerial photography in 1933, is etched across the hillside of Monte Sierpe (Serpent Mountain) in the Pisco Valley in southern Peru. It takes the form of an organised, even regimented “band of holes” stretching for 1.5km (nearly a mile) and is thought to date to the Chincha Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1400), but continuing in use (whatever that was) into Inca times (AD 1400-1532). There are about 5,200 aligned holes or pits, averaging two metres (6.5ft) wide and up to a metre (3.3ft) deep, arranged in segments. In each segment there are numerical patterns of the holes – they are not random. Nobody knows the…

SPACE DUST Speaking on the Ecosystemic Futures podcast, Richard Banduric, a former propulsion engineer for NASA and Lockheed Martin, now CEO of Field Propulsion Technologies, a space engineering start-up, made the claim that trillions of tiny invisible extraterrestrial devices are hidden across the Earth. As is usual with such revelations, he did not produce any physical evidence. Banduric said that he suspects the dust-like tech forms a vast, invisible sensor network covering the world. He said that it was unlike anything he had ever seen, and that it was not just decades ahead of current technology, but hundreds of years beyond it. Banduric also said that the sensors were being examined by the US military and outside contractors, who were trying to reverse-engineer the gadgets, but with limited success. He…

THE OCCULT GAUDÍ On 30 October 2025, a cross was set on the spire of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia cathedral of Barcelona, turning it into the world’s tallest church – a title previously held by Ulm Minster, in Germany. Ulm’s spire rises to 161.5m (530ft), but Barcelona’s new cross reaches 162.91m (534ft), beating the record by 1.4m (4ft 6in). General-Anzeiger, Bonn, 1 Nov 2025. Gaudí (1852–1926) was a very pious man and was actually declared as Venerable by Pope Francis in April 2025. Though he came to be called ‘God’s architect’ in his later years, he had strong anti-religious tendencies in early life and experimented with many new ideas. As a youth, it is said that Gaudí was interested in Spiritualism and attended many séances. He…

CREMATION POSTPONED One morning, after 65-year-old Chonthirat Sakulku had been bedridden for two years with deteriorating health, her brother found that she had stopped breathing and assumed she was dead. He alerted the rest of the family and arranged for his sister’s cremation at the Wat Rat Prakhong Tham temple on the outskirts of Bangkok. When he arrived with Sakulku’s coffin, accompanied by relatives who had travelled nearly 500km (311 miles) from the province of Phitsanulok for the ceremony, he was met by Pairat Soodthoop, the temple’s general manager. Soodthoop explained that the cremation could not be carried out without an appropriate death certificate being produced, but as he explained how to obtain one he was “startled” to hear a faint knock from the coffin, so asked for it to…

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SNAKE REVENGE Some years after he had sw-allowed a snake’s raw gall bladder “for a dare”, a man named Li, from Hunan, China, started getting optical disturbances in the form of a “mosaic like thing” appearing in his vision. When he visited an ophthalmologist, they found nothing wrong with his eyes, but an MRI scan showed there was a foreign object behind them. However, as the visual problems had ceased, Li decided not to undergo the surgery needed to investigate further. Some months later, though, he started blacking out, foaming at the mouth, and had convulsions, leading to another MRI that identified a worm living in his brain. This time, surgeons carried out a craniotomy to extract the unwelcome guest, and managed to remove an intact 18cm (7in) parasite, still…

PILLAR OF LIGHT A bright, greenish, beam of light was seen in the sky near Feltwell in Norfolk on 3 December at around 5am, not far from the US air bases in Suffolk, prompting speculation about aliens. Jim NR Dale, from British Weather Services, said he believed it was a natural phenomenon known as a light pillar, which can form when clouds containing ice reach the lower levels of the atmosphere during cold winter nights. When illuminated by light from the ground, the crystals act like mirrors and reflect the light downwards creating the appearance of pillars. Dale thought it was possible that in this case the pillar was formed by reflected moonlight, but that an artificial light on the ground was more likely. Later in the day, though, sightings…

“Welcome to the 19th century,” began Jeremy Harte, introducing the Folklore Society’s Legendary Weekend examining ‘Lying in Legend and Tradition’. Gathering at Carlisle’s Tullie House Museum over 6-7 September 2025, this interdisciplinary conference was open to all comers, with contributions invited on “conspiracy theories, confidence tricks, false prophets, fake mediums, tall tales, tricksters, and topsy-turvy land: the imposter and the conjuror, the pseudonymous and the shapeshifter.” We got the lot. Lying is a perfect subject for folklorists who may – perhaps somewhat magisterially – declare themselves unconcerned by the literal truth or falsity of any story or report, focusing instead on how narratives are created and relayed, their functions and meanings. And because stories exist in many versions, who is qualified to say which is ‘the truth’? An archaic joke,…

Do older people see more ghosts? In the 1985 film version of EM Forster’s A Passage to India, a character refers to the tendency of older people to believe in ghosts, remarking “that it’s difficult, as we get older, not to believe that the dead live again.” In Spring 2025 John Cleese, 85, who in recent years has expressed interest in the survival of consciousness, mentioned the effects of the loss of co-stars and friends over the years, confessing it was affecting him: “All these lovely people… I started getting a bit depressed and it was just loss, really, a realisation of the loss. I ought to warn your readers that when you get to your eighties, you’re not prepared. I think Philip Roth once finished one novel about old…

THE FLORENCE FART West Florence High School in South Carolina spent nearly a month between 25 August and 19 September plagued by a mysterious fæcal stench that disrupted classes, caused problems with the air conditioning system and gave students respiratory difficulties. There were reports of “a strong gas-like odour throughout the school” which made people nauseous and dizzy and caused headaches. Some parents reported that their children were staying at home because of the stench and one said, “My son’s asthma has been triggered multiple times because of this and I had to take him to the doctor three times.” A student at the school said, “Every time I go to my second block class, I walk up the stairwell and immediately, teachers are covering their noses and their mouths,…

ATLAS AWAKENS The interstellar comet or spacecraft, 3I/Atlas (FT465:27) excited the world of ufology in 2025. Despite Avi Loeb’s best efforts, most experts regarded it as an unusual object but not a 33-billion-ton spaceship. Beyond the realm of science, others regarded its arrival as a catalyst for awakening. Clare Seagrave, founder of The Intuitive Nutrition Clinic in New Zealand, considers the spiritual meanings of its appearance in our Solar System and notes that some think it carries “interstellar ‘seeds’ or light codes – vibrational information from other star systems that can awaken dormant aspects of the human spirit. Its arrival coincides with a growing desire among many to live in deeper harmony with nature, frequency, and energy. This ‘seeding’ is not something external that happens to us, but an internal…

Devon’s Forgotten Witches 1860–1910 Tracey Norman & Mark Norman History Press 2025 Pb, 144pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781803994215 Of Doves and Ravens The Witches and Wisefolk of Wales and the Borders Benjamin Stimpson History Press 2025 Hb, 320pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781837050093 They weren’t nice people. The cunning folk traced by Tracey and Mark Norman lived in dingy terraces not rustic nooks, where their magic seldom went beyond shuffling cards and mixing powders. Only in turning the screw on clients were they creative. Your face will be drawn down to your toes and you will die aged 39 unless you pay £1, and that’s with 5s discount. If you claim your £2 10s back your aunt will die raving in a madhouse. Your case requires a special visit with board and lodging…

Following their wedding in Aswan, Egypt, Ashraf Abu Hakam, 28, took to the dancefloor with his new wife. Videos show him dancing with her and with other guests, at one point twirling a pole above his head in a traditional Saidi dance. Then, as he takes his wife’s hand again, he suddenly falls to the floor and the music is replaced by screams and gasps from guests crowding round him. Medics arrived on the scene almost immediately, but were unable to revive Hakam, who coroners determined had died instantly of a massive heart attack. Prior to his unexpected death Hakam was thought to have been in excellent health, with no indication that he was suffering from any heart problems. Also dying unexpectedly was Adna Rovčanin-Omerbegović, 26, a nurse and social…