The Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition

The Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition in Drumnadrochit was much better than I’d expected it to be. As the most hyped-up cryptozoological tourist attraction in Britain, I’d assumed the visitor centre would dutifully tell people what they wanted to hear, with dumbed-down science and lots of far-fetched speculation. But it’s nothing like that at all. It features a series of sober and intelligent audio-visual presentations, together with museum displays of research equipment, newspaper cuttings and relics recovered from various wrecks. As for dumbing down – visitors (even the ten-year-old ones) are expected to take words like “bathymetry”, “pelagic”, “thermocline” and “refraction” in their stride.

In a way the Loch Ness Centre is another example of the Scottish skepticism I was talking about last week. This is particularly noticeable in the case of the best-known theory of the Loch Ness Monster, that it is a long-necked marine reptile such as a plesiosaur which has somehow managed to survive since Jurassic times. Admittedly the Loch Ness Centre features this image in their logo (which you can see in the photo above), and in innumerable toys and other souvenirs for sale in the gift shop. But inside the exhibition they stamp on this theory right at the very start. Any creature that managed to emerge unscathed from the Mesozoic would have been definitively killed off during the ice age, when the whole of Scotland was covered by a kilometre-thick block of ice for tens of thousands of years. Anything in the loch today that is larger than a single-celled micro-organism must have arrived after the ice melted. And why plesiosaurs anyway? They were pushed out of their ecological niche by whales and dolphins, which are found in plentiful numbers in the waters around Scotland.

The seemingly deep-rooted idea that a long-necked monster inhabits Loch Ness only dates from about a hundred years ago. Prior to that, mysterious sightings in the loch always referred to a “huge fish” or a “strange fish”. The word “monster”, prior to the early 20th century, only cropped up in the context of St Columba – the 6th century monk who brought Christianity to Scotland from Ireland. According to legend, Columba “drove away a water monster” in the River Ness near Inverness. It’s important to note, however, that this is a legend relating to a specific event – a miracle associated with a saint – and not recurring monster sightings by ordinary people.

A later development in Scottish folklore were the “water-horses” that were said to inhabit various lochs, including Loch Ness. Called kelpies, these creatures would drag unsuspecting travellers into the water and devour them. A pair of kelpies are the subject of a huge modern sculpture near Falkirk, about a hundred miles south of Loch Ness. At 30 metres (100 feet) in height, this is currently the largest statue in Britain. I only glimpsed it a few times from the M9 motorway, but my cousin, who stayed in Scotland longer than I did, sent me the following photo that she took after I left (she sent it via Facebook, which has the annoying habit of converting good quality, high resolution pictures into small, low resolution ones):

The general conclusion at the Loch Ness centre – again essentially a skeptical one – is that historical accounts of “water horses” and “huge fish” most likely refer to sightings of Atlantic sturgeon. These can grow to several metres in length, and do indeed have a vaguely horse-shaped head. The biggest problem with any large animal living in the Loch is the lack of sufficient food, but that doesn’t apply to sturgeon which are essentially sea creatures that would only be occasional visitors to the loch. While sturgeon have been spotted in and around Scotland in past centuries, they are virtually unknown there now (except for the definitely-not-monstrous First Minister, of course).

As for modern sightings of long-necked or serpentine creatures – most, if not all, of these can be explained as misidentifications (together with a few deliberate hoaxes). The visitor centre gives plenty of examples of floating logs, swimming deer, waterbirds and boat wakes all looking like convincing Loch Ness Monsters. I only spent a few minutes looking at the Loch, but even in that time I took the two pictures below which give an idea how misidentifications might arise. The one on the left contains a few dark specks which, if you zoom in on them, you can see are birds in flight. A couple of them have distinctly arc-like shapes which could be mistaken for “monster humps” under different viewing conditions. The second picture shows a boat trailing a wake, with another long wave that has been churned up by the boat in the foreground. Again, under different conditions (e.g. in foggier weather) the latter could be mistaken for a long, serpentine creature just below the surface.

Crashed UFO in London

Hot on the heels of his Alien skull simulacrum, Paul Jackson has obtained further photographic evidence of extraterrestrial visitation in the form of this crashed flying saucer, which he spotted near his hotel while staying in London last week. I assume it’s meant to be some form of abstract sculpture, although Paul said he couldn’t see an identifying plaque on it, and his own caption confidently reads “A crashed UFO in Canada Square, Canary Wharf”.

Looking through Paul’s album from his London trip, another vaguely Fortean picture is this statue by Enzo Plazotta called Homage to Leonardo, which stands in Belgrave Square. It’s modelled after Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” drawing, which features prominently in the early chapters of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. But the image is interesting in its own right as a depiction of the Hermetic symbolism of the individual as a “microcosm within the macrocosm”.

Alien skull simulacrum

Paul Jackson found this enigmatic object in his garden a few days ago while clearing some gravel. What could it be? Is it just an oddly-shaped pebble, or is it a prehistoric stone-age carving in the realistic likeness of an ancient alien? It’s an oddly-shaped pebble, of course.

The iconic image of the “gray alien”—big eyes, big forehead, small mouth, small nose, no ears, no hair—has become a deeply ingrained part of modern culture. But it’s a relatively recent phenomenon, and it’s interesting to spot them turning up in anachronistic settings, such as the Alien simulacrum in the coat of arms of Florence, and this Alien-looking demon from a 1941 pulp magazine.

A few days ago I was looking at issue #1 of Dell’s Flying Saucer Comics, published in April 1967. This was well before the image of the gray alien was imprinted on the public consciousness in the 1980s and 90s. But many of the aliens featured in the comic have gray-like characteristics -- much more so than most popular-culture aliens of the period. In particular, there’s a six-page story called “Far-Out Physical” which features aliens that not only look a bit like grays, but indulge in gray-like activities such as abducting earthlings and subjecting them to medical examinations... as can be seen in the sequence below. I don’t think the alien dialog has been censored (although “bloody” was still quite risqué in the sixties)... I think the empty speech bubbles are meant to signify that their language is unintelligible to humans!

What's going on here?

This week's post was originally called "The Politics of Relativity"... which was a  bad idea from the start, since I've never understood politics and I've forgotten most of what I used to know about relativity. I've had so many errors pointed out to me that it's too much hassle to correct them all -- I've just removed the post altogether. Here instead (more on my current intellectual level) is a photograph from Paul and Melanie Jackson depicting an enigmatic statue on the War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle, which is printed in the latest issue of Fortean Times (FT288).

(Ahem) The same issue also contains an article by myself entitled "The Locked Room Mysteries". And my review of Galileo's Selected Writings. In case you're interested.

Annual Report

The Forteana blog has survived its first year! When I started it in January 2011, it was only meant as a quick test to work out how to use Blogger... hence the rather unimaginative title. But since then I’ve done 130 posts, on a wide range of topics including (clockwise from top left): unusual museums, weirdness in renaissance art, out-of-place aliens, folklore, cryptozoology, retro-futuristic science, ancient civilizations and witchcraft.

Much to my surprise, I see that I’ve had 47,000 page views -- an average of 360 views per post. So a big “Thank You” to everyone who reads the site and links to it... especially Patrick Huyghe and Rick Stokes at The Anomalist, who are by far my most consistent referrers! I’m also grateful to the various people who’ve supplied me with material when I was in danger of running out of ideas... particularly Paul Jackson, who has travelled the world in search of photographs for the blog (or more accurately, he’s travelled the world taking photographs, which he’s then kindly let me post on the blog).

An obvious mistake to make when starting a blog is to post all your good material early on, before anyone has started reading it. That’s what I did, and it’s meant that some posts that were really interesting (in my biased opinion) have languished with virtually no page views. In this context, I could mention: Dinosaur Orbit, Precogging Philip K. Dick, Nick Pope at the MOD, Seth Shostak on SETI and Cosmic Geometry in the West Country.

Several of the earliest posts were based on letters that I’d sent to Fortean Times over the years, but were never printed. These included The Da Vinci Code and Mediaeval Symbolism, The Great Moon Hoax and Alien Simulacrum (left). As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, my success rate at FT has shot up over the last few months -- I’ve even got a full-page “Forum” article in the current issue. I’m getting very bigheaded about this -- I’ve just set up a new web page to keep track of my appearances in Fortean Times!

Fossil Hoaxes and Simulacra

Today, it's taken for granted that fossils are the petrified remains of once-living animals. This idea has been around since antiquity, but from the days of ancient Greece right up to the eighteenth century it was in constant competition with an alternative theory: that fossils, although formed in the shape of living creatures, have never actually been alive themselves -- they've been made of stone right from the start. As with so many "wrong" ideas, this one appears to have originated with Aristotle, or at any rate it was popularized by him. Aristotle believed that fossils were spontaneously created inside solid rock as the result of a natural creative force.

Inevitably, when Aristotle's ideas were appropriated by the early Christians, this "natural creative force" was interpreted as God. One of the last and most enthusiastic proponents of this theory of fossil formation was Johann Beringer, a Professor at the University of Würzburg in Germany. In 1726 he published a remarkable illustrated book, Lithographiæ Wirceburgensis, which can now be read online. You can skip the text (which is in Latin) -- the pictures at the end are the important thing. Beringer's fossils don't look like anyone else's, before or since. Here are just a few of them, depicting spiders on their webs, strange chimerical creatures and even frogs caught in the act of mating!

Of course, Beringer was the victim of a hoax. The fossils were carved out of limestone by students of his, spurred on by a couple of rival professors that Beringer later took to court over the affair. It's said that Beringer tried to buy up all the existing copies of his book so he could destroy them... it's a good thing for Fortean posterity that he didn't succeed!

One of Beringer's contemporaries was Johann Scheuchzer. Unlike Beringer, Scheuchzer held the "correct" view that fossils were the remains of once-living life-forms... except that he believed they were all deposited during the Great Flood described in the Book of Genesis. Scheuchzer was particularly interested in fossil plants, and he wrote a book on the subject called Herbarium Diluvianum, published in 1723. Like Beringer's book, this is in Latin and can be read online.

The picture on the left, taken from Scheuchzer's book, appears to show a couple of human simulacra seen in fossilized bark. As far as I can make out from the Latin text (or rather, from the garbled translation of it that I got out of Google), the simulacrum on the right has been embellished by a crude rustic hand using a paint-brush, whereas the one on the left is entirely the product of Nature. Of these two assertions, I can readily believe the first but I'm dubious about the second. I suspect the engraver has subtly "improved" the original... the 18th century equivalent of photoshopping!

The Loch Ness Monster, a cloned sheep and a dubious dog

As mentioned in my previous post, the second half of Paul and Melanie Jackson's honeymoon was spent in Scotland. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to hear that they had an encounter with the Loch Ness Monster... or at least a reasonable simulacrum of Scotland's most famous cryptid (click the picture to see a larger version). The photograph was taken at Fort Augustus at the Southern tip of Loch Ness, and depicts a tree branch that has apparently grown naturally into the distinctive shape of the monster's neck and head. However Paul suspects the teeth were added by a human hand!

While in Scotland, Paul and Mel also came face-to-face with two other legends of the animal kingdom: Dolly the Sheep and Greyfriars Bobby. The former was the first artificially cloned mammal, while the latter was a dog who became famous for displaying exactly the sort of sentiment that sentimental humans think dogs ought to display.

Dolly the Sheep was "born" in 1996 at the Roslin Institute just outside Edinburgh (I put "born" in quotes for dramatic impact, though sadly it's not really necessary: despite being genetically engineered, Dolly was born in the usual way -- not synthesized in a vat of bubbling nutrients as one might have hoped). She died in 2003, after which she suffered the indignity of being stuffed and put on display at the National Museum of Scotland (right).

The birth, life and death of Dolly the Sheep were documented at the time with scientific precision. The same cannot be said of Greyfriars Bobby, the small dog who is supposed to have guarded his master's grave faithfully for fourteen years. As Jan Bondeson pointed out in his recent book Greyfriars Bobby: the Most Faithful Dog in the World, this supposedly well-established story is actually based on a confusing mish-mash of anecdotes, wishful thinking and possibly even outright deception. Jan's research was picked up by the British media earlier this year and reported quite widely (e.g. by The Daily Telegraph)... but it's a fairly safe prediction that the legend will live on unscathed. Why let facts get in the way of what everyone knows to be true?

The picture below shows the tombstone of Greyfriars Bobby (which is revered by humans far more than that of his owner), as well as the nearby statue on Edinburgh's George IV Bridge.

Simulacra in fiction

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the mystery writer John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) frequently used Fortean sub-themes in his novels. For the most part, these involved things like witchcraft, spiritualism or Egyptology, which were popular subjects at the time he was writing in the mid-twentieth century. However, I've just come across a much more obscure piece of Forteana in one of his books -- an example of what Fortean Times calls a simulacrum, or a natural object in the shape of something else (in this case, a human figure).

The book, dating from 1950, is called Night at the Mocking Widow, and was written (as about half of Carr's novels were) under the pseudonym of Carter Dickson. The illustration on the left is from the first edition of the book -- my own copy is a later paperback reprint which has a much less dramatic cover! The story is set in the fictional village of Stoke Druid, which is supposed to lie just off the main road between Glastonbury and Wells in Somerset. The most prominent feature of the village is a rocky outcrop called "The Mocking Widow", which is the simulacrum in question. The following description is taken from the caption of a fictional postcard in the novel:

The Mocking Widow, Stoke Druid. This stone figure, forty feet high, thirty-eight feet round the base and eight feet round the head, stands in an open meadow below the High Street. Its name is perhaps early Christian in origin, derived from the Biblical story of the Cities of the Plain: tradition stating that there once lived here a woman so wicked she was turned to stone. The eyes are each large enough to contain a human head. A visitor in the lower High Street, looking north-eastwards, can easily discern that look of mockery and cruelty which has given the figure its name.

As usual with the Fortean elements in Carr's work, the simulacrum isn't critical to the central mystery, but just there to add a touch of drama to the story. It's also fair to say that Night at the Mocking Widow isn't one of Carr's best books -- at the latest count, I've read 23 of his novels (either written under his own name or as Carter Dickson) and at least 20 of them are better than this one! On the other hand, none of the others features a simulacrum. Enigmatic stone figures of this type occasionally crop up in science fiction, where they inevitably turn out to be the product of lost civilizations or ancient astronauts, but this is the first time I've ever come across one as background scenery in an ordinary mystery novel.

Dorset's Red Sea

Residents of Lyme Regis in Dorset were startled recently when the sea took on a distinctly red colour, as shown in the photograph above. Some locals feared the end of the world or a biblical plague, while other theories ranged from a butchered whale to a bloom of algae.

The mystery was cleared up when it was discovered the authorities were using coloured dye to test the drainage system! This became particularly apparent when they switched from red dye to a rather fetching shade of green, as illustrated below.

The photographs were taken by Chris Andrew, who is Education Officer at Lyme Regis Museum... many thanks to Chris for permission to use the pictures on this blog. Between you and me, I suspect Chris was also the imaginative "local" behind at least some of the theories mentioned above!

Smoking simulacrum

Paul Jackson took the above photograph at Kilve Beach in Somerset at the weekend. It's a pretty good simulacrum of a smoking chimney... or rather, it's a real chimney with a simulacrum of smoke coming out of it. The prevailing wind has had the same effect on the shrub as it would have on real smoke!

A Polish Pact with the Devil

The impressively phallic-looking rock pictured on the left is known as Maczuga Herkuleza (the Club of Hercules), and is to be found in the Ojcowski National Park near Kraków in Poland. The photograph was taken by Ewa Babarowski, who drew my attention to the following connection between the rock and the Faust-like legend of Pan Twardowski...

Twardowski is supposed to have been a sorcerer who sold his soul to the Devil in sixteenth-century Kraków. The character may be entirely legendary, or he may be based on a real person... possibly even the English occultist Edward Kelley, who received his infamous Enochian Keys (by some magical means, quite possibly involving a pact with the Devil) while visiting Kraków in the 1580s.

According to the Polish legend, Twardowski negotiated a contract that saw him endowed him with formidable powers and knowledge until such time as he should go to Rome, at which time the Devil could have the sorcerer's soul and take it to Hell. Twardowski, of course, had no intention of ever visiting the Holy City -- but in fairly short order he found himself wandering into a local tavern which just happened to be called... Rome! When the Devil arrived to claim his soul, Twardowski attempted a few delaying tactics by giving His Satanic Majesty a series of seemingly impossible tasks... one of which was to balance this huge rock on its end!

Roche Rock simulacrum

The picture on the left shows the dramatic form of Roche Rock in Cornwall -- an isolated granite outcrop surmounted by the ruins of a fifteenth century chapel. The photograph was taken by Paul Jackson in September 2006... and by coincidence, in exactly the same month Roche Rock was featured in the "Fortean Traveller" section of Fortean Times (issue 214). Noticing that the right-hand side of the rock looks a bit like an ape's head seen in profile, Paul decided to submit the photo to FT's Simulacra Corner ("We are always glad to receive pictures of spontaneous forms and figures, or any curious images").

FT declined to print Paul's photo, on the grounds that it was too vague and indistinct. Fair enough, you may say... but then a few months later, in May 2007 (issue 222), they did print another reader's picture of Roche Rock in Simulacra Corner... and it was even less convincing than Paul's!

Demonic-looking Cat

Paul Jackson posted this picture of his cat on Facebook yesterday. The photo was taken with a phone fitted with an LED flash, which (cynics would say) is the explanation for the cat's weird-looking eyes. Personally I think demonic possession is a more likely explanation!

Cat's eyes (the other kind) were invented by Percy Shaw, who died in 1976 at a time when the UK only had three TV channels. Shaw was in the habit of watching all three channels simultaneously, on three different TV sets. Not sure how he would have coped in these days of Freesat and Freeview!

Dorset myth-conception

As readers of Fortean Times know, the world is full of "myth-conceptions" which sound so credible they get repeated ad nauseum, even though there is no truth to them. Here is one that has just been pointed out to me by Paul Jackson, concerning the Drax Estate's prominent "Stag Gate" on the A31 (the main route from Dorchester to the M27). The Stag is famous for having five legs -- and everyone in Dorset "knows" the reason for this. But they're wrong, as Paul explains:

"It seems that it has often been assumed (by me too) that the Stag was given a fifth leg to ensure that it looked like it had four legs when viewed from the road. Presumably when it only had four legs, it appeared to have three! However, when reading the Drax estate website I noticed that: Although the stag appears to have five legs, the 'fifth leg' is actually a 'tree stump' originally incorporated into the sculpture to add strength, as can be clearly seen in the photos [reproduced at left]. There are quite a few comments on-line and in publications that the stag has five legs so that it appears to have four when viewed from any angle, which is clearly imaginative but incorrect."

UFO simulacrum

Paul Jackson sent me this photograph, which was taken by Peter Harriman at the 2007 Weymouth Carnival. At first sight it appears to depict an Adamski-style flying saucer firing off some kind of futuristic beam weapons! (Actually what the picture shows is a pair of Red Arrows display jets, but it's still a very dramatic photograph).

Alien simulacrum

Here is another letter to Fortean Times (this one from last June) that never made it into print!
In the Bargello Museum in Florence, there is a sculpture by Donatello which appears to depict a lion holding an alien head. Unfortunately, just as I was about to photograph it, I was told by an attendant that I couldn't (despite the fact that other people were happily taking photos of other objects in the museum, and Donatello died before the law of copyright was invented). Hence the only evidence I can provide is a copy of the illustration in the museum guidebook (first picture). What the lion is actually holding is the coat of arms of Florence (a fleur-de-lys on a shield) but it's an alien-head shaped shield, and the two outer petals of the fleur-de-lys are alien-eye shaped petals. Most strikingly, these two outer petals (in the original Donatello version) are darker than the rest of the symbol. This isn't the case in the copy of the statue in the Piazza della Signora (second picture).