30 years ago in the Forteanverse

 

I decided to dig down close to the bottom of my Fortean Times collection to have a look back at issue 73 from February/March 1994, 30 years ago. As you can see from the picture above, its eyecatching cover features an enormous shark that's apparently crashed down from the skies into a suburban house. That's something that would undoubtedly have caught the attention of Charles Fort himself, who was fascinated by reports of fish (usually much smaller ones than this) falling from the sky. But this one, of course, is a fake - made from fibreglass, and created as an artistic statement in 1986. Located in the Oxford suburb of Headington, there's a lot more to be said about this shark - but fortunately I don't have to, because there's a detailed account of it on Paul Jackson's blog Random Encounters with the Unusual, together with several pictures Paul took himself in 2016. You can find his blog post here.

Opening the magazine and turning to the editorial, there's an item that really brings home just how much the world has changed in the last 30 years:

We now have an e-mail address on Internet ... which will mean nothing to those without a modem, but everything to the very strange people who cruise the computer bulletin-board and news services.

I'd forgotten until I read that, but there really was a time when anyone who used the internet was considered "very strange"!

As for the fortean content of the magazine, less has changed than you might think. One of the main features deals with phantom hitch-hikers and similar roadside ghosts, while another concerns rumours of large, out-of-place animals (such as the alleged Beast of Bodmin) roaming the British countryside. Those are exactly the kind of "modern folklore" stories that still loom large in the pages of FT today.

The magazine also contains the results of a reader survey, which I found particularly interesting for a subsection of questions about conspiracy theories. Thinking back, I was only just becoming dimly aware of the existence of such things in 1994 (largely thanks to FT itself), and I'd guess the majority of the wider population had never even encountered the concept yet. But FT readers were clearly way ahead of the game. Regarding belief in high-level conspiracies to suppress the truth about various subjects, here are some of the results:

• Inventions that would undermine big business and government - 64.3%
• Crashed UFOs being studied by the military - 52.3%
• International conspiracies above government level, e.g. Illuminati - 39.6%

Towards the end of the magazine, my eye was caught by a rather dubious-looking ad for "2-way mirrors". On looking closer, I saw that the same firm was offering other equally questionable items such as skeleton keys and electronic bugging equipment, as well as advice on how to beat slot machines and avoid paying TV licence fees, parking fines, road tax etc. Somehow I doubt that a similar ad would be allowed today! So for posterity's sake, here it is (just to be on the safe side, I've blacked out all the company details):