Weird News

It may seem paradoxical to talk about “news” on a retro-themed blog, but the traditional Fortean fascination with weird news for its own sake – rather than being pitched as evidence for some specific theory or other – seems to be increasingly a thing of the past. I think that’s a shame, and it’s one of the reasons I still look forward to getting Fortean Times every month. While its online competitors are busy promulgating their favourite conspiracy theories, the magazine – as it says right there on the cover – remains dedicated to “The World’s Weirdest News Stories”.

There are a couple of really good ones in the current issue, January 2015 (pictured above, together with the January issues from 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010). On page 9 there’s the story of a London shopkeeper who was robbed last September after being put in a hypnotic trance by a customer, the whole thing having been caught on CCTV. Then page 26 has a collection of stories, all from 2014, about various people who turned out to be alive after being declared dead by doctors.

While these stories may lack the kneejerk like-share-comment appeal of a Bigfoot sighting or UFO encounter, they do have two major advantages over big-ticket Forteana of that kind. For one thing, they’re not just anecdotal events – they’re a matter of public record, with multiple witnesses. Secondly, there’s no obvious CSICOP-style wet blanket that can be thrown over them. With Bigfoot, for example, the skeptics can always say it was a bear or someone dressed in an ape costume. On the other hand, I really can’t see how they could debunk the hypno-heist – except perhaps to claim the shopkeeper was a willing participant who helped set the whole thing up for the cameras. But if that was the case, I’m sure the police would have had something to say about it – wasting their time is a criminal offence in Britain, after all.

One of the strongest arguments against claims of the paranormal – or any kind of enhanced mental powers – is that if people really possessed them they would use them to make money. That’s another thing I like about this story: if a person was capable of hypnotizing someone into doing something they didn’t want to do, this is exactly the sort of thing they would do. They would be out robbing wine merchants, not wasting their time appearing on Britain’s Got Talent. The only thing I find suspicious about the story is that it only happened once – not a whole string of times.

The other story, about people “coming back from the dead”, is even harder to debunk. The doctor writes out a death certificate, and the victim is seen alive some time after that – it’s as simple as that. Of course, they didn’t really die and come back to life; they were alive all along and the doctor just made a mistake. But that’s not debunking the mystery – it’s confirming it. The mystery in this case is how someone who is alive can display all the symptoms of being dead. Whatever the explanation is, it’s unlikely to be a purely recent phenomenon – which means that countless people may have been unwittingly buried alive over the years!

If you look at the cover of the magazine, “The Return of the Living Dead” and “Hypno-Heists” are the second and third items listed under “The World’s Weirdest News Stories”. The first item is “Unidentified Flying Humans”, referring to the case of a commercial airliner which reported a near miss with a human-like figure last October.

Unlike the other two stories, this one was picked up big-time by numerous online Fortean blogs, forums and websites. The general approach was to give a single-sentence summary of the encounter and then use it as a springboard for wild speculations about (a) extraterrestrial visitors to the Earth, (b) highly evolved flying reptiles surviving undetected since the Jurassic period, (c) secret military research on personal flying suits, and any number of similarly offbeat ideas.

The piece in Fortean Times, written by Jenny Randles, takes a completely different approach to the same subject matter. Instead of extracting a few details from newspaper accounts and making them fit a pet theory, she took the trouble to find out more facts about the case, not fewer. It turned out, for example, that the plane in question was on a completely different heading and at a much lower altitude than it should have been, having just recovered from an aborted landing. That doesn’t explain the encounter, but it does make it more likely that it was a fleetingly glimpsed paraglider or something of that kind. This sort of data-driven thinking – as opposed to theory-driven – is another reason I like the magazine so much.

Creeping Coffins

What have these three books got in common (apart from being battered mass-market paperbacks dating from the early 60s?). There’s a murder mystery by John Dickson Carr called The Sleeping Sphinx, a science fiction novel by Lionel Fanthorpe (using the pseudonym “Bron Fane”) called U.F.O. 517, and a non-fiction compendium called Great World Mysteries by Eric Frank Russell.

No prizes for guessing the answer is going to be Fortean in some way. Eric Frank Russell, although he was best known as a science fiction author, was one of the earliest British disciples of Charles Fort. There have been several articles about him in the last few issues of Fortean Times, as part of Bob Rickard’s series on “The First Forteans”. The other two authors have also featured in fairly recent FT articles – I know because I was responsible for both of them! I wrote about “Fanthorpe’s Fortean Fiction” in FT297, and about the Fortean aspects of John Dickson Carr’s “Locked Room Mysteries” in FT 288.

The cover of the Carr novel depicts an old coffin, and the strapline mentions “restless coffins”. And that’s the connection between the three books – coffins that move of their own accord!

The relevant chapter in Russell’s book – the only non-fiction one of the three – is called “The Creeping Coffins of Barbados”. This seemingly poltergeist-like case will probably already be familiar to readers who, like me, can remember a time when there was more to Forteana than Bigfoot videos and leaked government UFO documents.

The events occurred in the early 19th century, in a churchyard on the south coast of Barbados. Over a period of several years, every time the Chase family’s private vault was unsealed to add a newly deceased relative, the coffins were found to be in wild disarray – often standing on end. The coffins were always carefully put back in their correct places, only to be found scattered about at random the next time the vault was opened. Increasingly elaborate precautions were taken to prevent unauthorised entry to the vault, but all to no avail. Eventually they gave up and abandoned the vault.

Exactly the same story is recounted in the Fanthorpe novel, where it’s given a characteristically Fanthorpian explanation involving a time-travelling flying saucer. A number of more conventional explanations are discussed in Russell’s book, ranging from malicious damage and natural phenomena to supernatural activity. The Barbados case wasn’t unique – Russell also mentions a similar case that occurred on the island of Oesel in the Baltic, as well as two in England. For himself, Russell says he “refuses to credit that any coffins have been moved around anywhere by ghosties or eerie beasties or things that go bump in the night. Whatever shifted the coffins at Barbados and elsewhere was, I believe, a force natural enough though not within our knowledge even at the present date.”

Others who investigated the case came to very different conclusions. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, favoured a supernatural explanation, referring (as quoted by Russell) to “bodily emanations, and the residual life-force supposedly remaining in the bodies of suicides and others who have died before their time.”

Talk of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes brings us neatly to John Dickson Carr and his own fictional detective, Gideon Fell. Carr is best known for his “locked room murders”... and the creeping coffins case is a classic example of a locked room puzzle. Strangely, however, this particular novel – The Sleeping Sphinx – isn’t a locked room murder at all. It’s a very clever mystery, as you’d expect from Carr, but it’s one of the few Dr Fell stories in which the murder itself doesn’t have any “physically impossible” aspects to it.

My guess is that either Carr’s publisher or his agent told him the novel had to include an “impossible mystery” in order to please his readership (the book dates from 1947, by which time Carr’s name was virtually synonymous with the locked room genre). So the scene with the coffins was tacked on as an afterthought. That’s not a spoiler, by the way – there’s no suggestion in the novel that the “restless coffins” have any direct connection to the murder, except for the tenuous link that one of the coffins involved is that of the murder victim.

In the novel, the solution to the coffin mystery comes at the very end of the book, even after the solution to the murder itself. So I won’t say what it is – except that it’s not supernatural! Carr doesn’t mention the Barbados case explicitly, although he refers briefly to the Oesel case and the two English ones. However, he does borrow a detail from the Barbados case, where fine sand is sprinkled on the floor of the vault in a vain attempt to detect the footprints of any intruders.

In a footnote Carr mentions a book called Oddities, dating from 1928, by Rupert T. Gould. Russell’s book also refers to Gould’s Oddities. I’m not sure if this is the same book, under a different title, as one I saw for sale a few years ago – “A Book of Marvels”, also by Rupert T. Gould. I would have bought it, except that the copy in question was thoroughly saturated with stale cigarette smoke – one of the few things that can totally ruin the pleasure of reading an old book, as far as I’m concerned. So I had to settle for photographing the cover and contents page... which as you can see includes a chapter entitled “The Vault at Barbados”:

Unusual Atmospheric Phenomena

This picture was taken in 2008 by my cousin Ewa Babarowski, from the balcony of her apartment in Montreal. She sent it off to Astronomy magazine, saying “As the Sun set one evening, I observed a sword-like column of light pointing straight up from the horizon. What was it?” This appeared in the December 2008 issue, with the reply that “What you saw is called a Sun pillar. This vertical shaft of light extends upward from the Sun. It's usually observed at sunrise or sunset. Sun pillars form when sunlight reflects off the surfaces of falling ice crystals...”

Sun pillars are also mentioned in the first book I reviewed for Fortean Times, back in the January 2012 issue – Fireballs, Skyquakes and Hums by Anthony Milne. I found the book’s technical explanations rather erratic, which is why I only gave it a rating of 7 out of 10, but it’s a useful source of data on unusual aerial phenomena – or at least, it is for those of us who don’t think an unusual aerial phenomenon has to be an extraterrestrial space vehicle in order for it to be interesting.

Of course, you can never underestimate the devout UFO believer’s ability to see extraterrestrial space vehicles in any unusual aerial phenomena... even ones that don’t look anything like space vehicles. I was surprised, though I probably shouldn’t have been, to see in the Wikipedia article about sun pillars that “light pillars have also been known to produce false UFO reports”.

Another naturally occurring phenomenon that really does look quite UFO-like is the saucer-shaped lenticular cloud. Ewa sent me a rather impressive example of one of those too. She took this photograph during a hiking trip in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in July 2011:

A couple of months earlier, a smaller (and therefore even more UFO-like) lenticular cloud appeared over Weymouth Bay. This photograph of it was kindly supplied by my Weymouth-based friend Peter Harriman:

That picture is dated 16 May 2011. Ten days earlier, on 6 May 2011, Weymouth experienced an even stranger-looking cloud – an Arcus Roll Cloud. This was unusual enough that it even made the local newspaper (the Dorset Echo): “Concerned residents in Portland and Weymouth thought they were being hit by a tornado during a dramatic thunderstorm...” Here is one of Peter’s own photographs of the roll cloud, taken from almost the same vantage point as the lenticular cloud above (although with a wider field of view):

Many thanks to Ewa and Peter for allowing me to use their photographs. I hope neither of them imagines that appearing on this blog will bring them internet fame, though – last week’s post only got 63 views!

Anomalous Progress

I belatedly realized that I missed a significant anniversary earlier this year. I’ve been buying, reading and hoarding Fortean Times for 20 years now. The earliest issue in my collection is FT67 (cover-dated February-March 1993), which was the first issue I ever saw in W. H. Smith (I’d bought a previous issue—FT60 I think—from another shop just over a year earlier, but I hadn’t been impressed enough to hang on to it). It was only after I started reading FT in earnest that I got interested in Forteana in any depth. I’d read various books on the paranormal and “unexplained mysteries” in the 1970s and 80s, but only at the popular mass-market level.

Looking back at those early FTs, it occurs to me that at some point in the last 20 years my attitude to Fortean subjects underwent a distinct change. I don’t mean anything as dramatic as a flip from “believer” to “skeptic” – I’ve never been close to either category. I’ve never seriously believed that UFOs are vehicles piloted by extraterrestrials, or that ghosts embody the surviving consciousness of dead human beings. But I’ve never been a skeptic either, in the sense of dismissing anomalous phenomena from consideration simply because they are anomalous. During the 1990s I became fascinated by a whole range of anomalous phenomena, and I was convinced that with sufficient study they could be fitted into the mainstream paradigm... at which point they would cease to be anomalous.

Some time around 2003 I changed my mind. The rosy-spectacled idea that the anomalous phenomena of today are the mainstream phenomena of tomorrow no longer seemed credible. The reality is that anomalous phenomena are self-perpetuatingly anomalous. This wasn’t because of anything that happened in or around 2003 – it was because I’d been following the subject with close interest for ten years. I wasn’t really aware of the change at the time, but looking back through my old FTs and remembering the way I responded to the various stories at the time, it’s clear that’s what happened.

Thinking about it analytically, there are two sides to the problem: (a) lack of progress in areas where you would reasonably expect to see progress, and (b) ongoing progress (or at any rate change) in areas where you would logically expect to see no change at all. I’ll explain what I mean.

When I first became an avid reader of all things Fortean in the 1990s, I was under the impression (as I suspect many newcomers to the subject are, whatever the time period) that the world was on the brink of a massive paradigm shift that would lead to the mainstream acceptance of many things previously considered paranormal. There were theories of “mind-matter unification” and “macroscopic quantum systems” that promised to explain a whole range of psychic and holistic phenomena. There were tantalizing hints that antigravity systems had been demonstrated in the laboratory. The ideas of Hancock and Bauval were going to revolutionize our understanding of ancient civilizations. And a lot more in the same vein.

The reality, of course, is that none of it ever comes to anything. The world of anomalous phenomena isn’t interested in solving mysteries... it’s interested in perpetuating them. I made the mistake (coming from a scientific background) of assuming the subject had something in common with science. But it doesn’t. Science starts with the evidence and looks for explanations of it. The vast majority of ufologists, ghost hunters and cryptozoologists do just the opposite – they start with an explanation and look for evidence to support it. That’s why the state of progress—as far as any real insight is concerned—is exactly the same as it was 20 years ago.

The only people who aren’t going to be disillusioned by the situation are the Conspiracy Theorists. From their point of view, it’s a no-brainer the Government will stamp on anyone as soon as they come close to revealing the Truth (personally I’ve never really understood this viewpoint – particularly as the Conspiracy Theorists themselves spend their lives expounding the very Truth the Government is supposed to be suppressing).

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a flip side to all this. While there’s been no perceptible progress in understanding anomalous phenomena in the last 20 years, there’s been an ongoing evolution in the phenomena themselves. In some areas, such as the continuing sagas of Roswell and Bigfoot, it’s almost like watching a soap opera. If Roswell was a real flying saucer crash, and if Bigfoot was a real species, you simply wouldn’t expect the underlying data to evolve over the decades in the way they have.

Back in the 1990s, another magazine I read occasionally was Magonia, which promoted the so-called “psycho-social” hypothesis. This is an unfortunate term, because it suggests everything is glibly dismissed as the product of a deranged mind or mass hysteria. But the Magonia people meant something more constructive than that. If I remember correctly, the basic idea was that the whole area of anomalous phenomena—the way they’re described, the context they’re put in, the way they’re investigated and the theories proposed to explain them—are all the product of a (largely unconscious) collective exercise in imagination. The analogy is with a role-playing game, in which the players are so immersed in the game they don’t realize it’s a game.

One of the big things in the early 90s was the “alien abduction” scenario, where the bulk of the evidence took the form of memories retrieved through hypnosis. That’s a perfect medium for the unconscious imagination to work in, particularly if prompted (again unconsciously) by the expectations of the researcher. I don’t think Magonia was accusing anyone of deliberate deception. Instead, the idea was that an apparently mysterious phenomenon could be created and developed spontaneously (possibly around the germ of a real but mundane event) based on current social and cultural expectations. Today, with the rise of the internet and social media, the possibilities for “unconscious collective creativity” are greater than ever before. And you never know what’s going to happen next.

I’m as fascinated by the world of anomalous phenomena today as I was 20 years ago. The only difference is that in those days I thought of it as a sub-branch of science. Now I think of it as a sub-branch of the entertainment industry.

Spooky Action at a Distance

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a popular account of quantum entanglement that failed to mention Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” quote. That’s not surprising, because quantum mechanics is a notoriously difficult subject to communicate to the non-specialist. It needs all the memorable sound-bites it can get... especially ones that a layperson can relate to. If you saw an experiment in which an electron in one location seemed to know what another electron somewhere else was doing, then the word “spooky” might well spring to mind.

Part of the appeal of the quote is that “spooky” is a colloquial word, rarely encountered in serious writing. It’s quite a recent coinage, as you can see from the Google Ngram chart below. “Spooky” was virtually unknown before the 20th century, and its usage only really took off in the 1970s and 80s. When Einstein used it in a letter to Max Born in 1947, the word was still quite novel (you can view the original context here – it’s on page 158 of the original, on the left-hand-side of page 90 of the scanned PDF).

There’s a catch, however. Einstein’s letter is translated from German, and what he originally wrote was not “spooky action at a distance” but “spukhafte Fernwirkung”. The Ngram stats for spukhafte (or spukhaft) are different from spooky – the word was at the peak of its popularity around 1947, and its usage has declined since then. This led me to wonder if “spukhaft” might have a slightly different meaning from “spooky”.

Spooky comes from “spook”, which is an informal, rather playful term for ghost. The German word Spuk also means ghost, but as you can see from the chart it’s been around longer. The word occurs in the first scene of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer (mentioned a few weeks ago in Fortean Opera)... a gloomy Gothic tragedy, which isn’t the sort of place you’d expect to find a childishly jolly term like “spook”. The Norwegian sailors, on hearing eerie voices emanating from the Dutchman’s ship, say: “Welcher Sang! Ist es Spuk? Wie mich’s graust!”... which is rendered in the English version as “What a song! Are they ghosts? I’m filled with fear!”

If “Spuk” simply means ghost, with no cosy Halloween or Scooby-Doo overtones, that makes me wonder if “spukhaft” is better translated as “ghostly” rather than “spooky”. If so, it would place a somewhat different emphasis on the Einstein quote. If you say something is “spooky”, that’s not so much a description of the phenomenon itself, as your reaction to it – something is “spooky” if it makes you uneasy because you can’t explain it. On the other hand, if something is described as “ghostly”, that’s saying something about the phenomenon itself. It’s being labelled as supernatural, non-physical and possibly even irrational. For a scientist to refer to something in these terms is tantamount to saying it’s not real.

The closest idiomatic phrase I can think of would be “mystical action at a distance” rather than “spooky action at a distance”. If Einstein objected to “mystical action at a distance”, he wasn’t the first one. As I’ve mentioned before, this was the reason Galileo heaped ridicule on Kepler for his suggestion that the Moon was responsible for the Earth’s tides (see Galileo wasn’t always right...). Soon after Galileo’s time, Newton explained the tides—and the motion of the Moon and planets—as consequences of the gravitational inverse square law. On the face of it, this was nothing more or less than “action at a distance”, and many people objected to Newton’s theory on the metaphysical grounds that action at a distance was illogical and therefore impossible. Numerous mechanical explanations of gravitation were put forward to try to get around the need for action at a distance.

My understanding of the German language is only marginally better than non-existent, so I really don’t know what Einstein meant by spukhafte Fernwirkung. He might have meant “spooky action at a distance” in the sense that English-speakers would understand the term – i.e. that he found the concept unsettling, if not downright scary, because it was seemingly supernatural. But I’m not convinced the emotive overtone of the word “spooky” was intended at all. He may just have been saying “I don’t believe in it, because I don’t believe in the supernatural”.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what Einstein meant. “Spooky action at a distance”, as the phrase is commonly understood, is a perfect description of quantum entanglement. Wittingly or unwittingly, Einstein gave quantum physics one of its most accessible memes, right up there with Schrodinger’s Cat, the Many-Worlds Interpretation and the God Particle.

Fifty Years of British UFO Research

As a sweeping generalization, British UFO researchers are less single-mindedly fixated on the extraterrestrial hypothesis (and concomitant beliefs such as alien abductions and government conspiracies) than their American counterparts. Of course there are exceptions on both sides, but British ufologists do tend to adopt a “more things in Heaven and Earth” approach to the subject. This was certainly the message that came across during the first day of the BUFORA (British UFO Research Association) 50th Anniversary Conference that I attended yesterday.

The first speaker was Lionel Beer, who (although he doesn’t look old enough) was a founder member of BUFORA back in 1962, before I had even started school. He talked mainly about the development of British ufology in the 60s and 70s, when it’s probably fair to say the focus was still on the extraterrestrial hypothesis here as in America. But I was really interested in what Lionel had to say about government involvement in the subject. He brought out a subtlety that hadn’t occurred to me before, but makes perfect sense based on what I know of that period in British history.

There is no doubt that during the 1970s the police Special Branch (whose responsibility was national security and counter-insurgency) took a strong and active interest in UFO groups. That’s a well-documented fact. But it’s not the same thing as saying that they took an interest in the subject of ufology. The British authorities in the 1970s weren’t all that paranoid about an alien invasion, but they were paranoid about far-right anti-government extremists. The authorities believed that certain far-right political activists were infiltrating UFO groups in order to recruit new members. That sounds very unlikely to me, because I’ve never met a far-right UFO enthusiast in my life (although I’ve met many far-left ones)... but the fact is that it’s what the authorities believed. And it’s certainly true that if you’re looking for people with a deep-seated hatred of the establishment, a UFO group is as good a place as any to start.

The second talk was by Heather Dixon, whose subject was “Developing an understanding of the Reality behind the Myths”. Essentially this was a very lucid exposition of the statement, often made by people in BUFORA, that “98 per cent of UFO cases turn out to have a perfectly rational explanation”. In some cases the explanation is physical—for example an astronomical object or atmospheric phenomenon—and in others it is physiological, for example sleep paralysis. Almost by definition, a UFO sighting is something that is novel and inexplicable to the witness, and outside their previous experience. If they have an interest in UFOs, or have been immersed in sci-fi popular culture, they may interpret what they see in ufological terms even if it is something completely different that is outside their experience, such as a rare conjunction of two astronomical objects.

Many people will dismiss this sort of talk as “scepticism”, but it’s really the only way to go about serious ufological investigation. In the real world, it’s inevitable that some UFO reports will turn out to have perfectly mundane explanations. At the same time, other cases—the ones Heather calls “High Strangeness” cases—defy rational explanation. Something is going on that science can’t explain. But that still doesn’t mean it’s extraterrestrials. Many people in the Western world, seeing something they’ve never seen before, will mentally pigeonhole it as a UFO because that’s the way they’ve been brought up. You sometimes hear patronizing statements about primitive peoples along the lines “of course, if they encountered extraterrestrial aliens, they would interpret them as gods or angels or spirits”. But why not the other way around? If a sci-fi geek encountered a god/angel/spirit he or she would interpret them as a space alien!

The next talk was by John Spencer, on the subject of “Political, Cultural and Social Influences of UFOs”. This was a strong contender to be the single best talk I’ve ever seen on the UFO subject... and I’ve seen a lot. Essentially it was about the “cultural tracking” aspect of the UFO phenomenon—the way UFO experiences reflect the technology, political issues and popular culture of the time in which they occur. Again, some people will dismiss this as scepticism, but it’s a real effect that has to be faced up to. This became particularly clear as John went through the history of the subject from the 1940s to the present day. In many UFO cases something undeniably extraordinary—and maybe even extraterrestrial—occurred, but the way it was described by witnesses is shaped by the concerns and obsessions of the time.

An interesting point John made is that the contactees of the early 1950s—people like George Adamski—recounted long conversations with the Space Brothers, in which the latter warned the people of Earth in dire terms about the dangers of nuclear weapons. But in those days, every thinking human being on the planet was worried spitless about the threat of nuclear weapons. The Space Brothers never thought to warn the people of the 1950s about something they weren’t already obsessing about, such as ozone depletion, greenhouse gases or global warming.

John’s take on the Roswell incident was also interesting. This took place in 1947, of course, but when I started reading about UFOs in the late 60s and early 70s it was never mentioned. Books of that time never bothered to mention the biggest UFO case of all time, even though it had occurred more than 20 years earlier. In order to believe in Roswell, you have to believe that the United States government is capable of lying, scheming and deception on an industrial scale. Cultural tracking wasn’t ready for that yet. So there was a long pause from 1947 to 1974, when the Watergate scandal proved beyond doubt that the United States government was indeed capable of lying, scheming and deception on an industrial scale. It was only in the post-Watergate world that people were culturally primed and ready to believe in Roswell.

The next talk was by the legendary Jenny Randles, via a live video link from her home in North Wales. Despite her lower public profile of recent years, Jenny was as lively and entertaining a speaker as when I first saw her almost 20 years ago. The subject of her talk was “solved” UFO cases—cases that have been definitively explained as non-extraterrestrial in origin. Who wants to hear about such things? Well I do, because I think such cases can tell you a lot about people’s perceptions and motivations, but apparently most people don’t—Jenny said her book on the subject ended up being sold for a fraction of the cover price in remainder bookshops!

One striking example came from the 1960s, when a glowing orange ball was filmed hovering over an English primary school, as well as being witnessed by dozens of 10 and 11 year old children at the school. Despite having all the hallmarks of a UFO, the cameraman thought it might have something to do with the fact that a US Air Force F-111 fighter-bomber crashed nearby on the same day (in those days, the USAF was allowed to maintain a small number of air bases in the UK, as a goodwill gesture from the British government—and by inference, the British people). But when the USAF saw the photo of the orange ball hovering over the English school, their response was along the lines “Nothing to do with us. The picture was taken 14 minutes before the crash-landing of the F-111, which at no point caught fire. So it’s nothing to do with us. No, sir. If you ask us, it looks like one of them there extraterrestrial spacecraft people are always talking about.” So contrary to popular belief, this was a case of the US authorities actually encouraging an extraterrestrial interpretation of a UFO sighting.

Many years later the truth emerged in a way that leaves no room for any doubt. When the F-111 first got into trouble, 14 minutes before the eventual crash-landing, the crew went through a standard procedure to reduce the risk of an explosion on landing. They ejected all the aircraft’s fuel, and used the afterburner to ignite it, causing a massive fireball. The US aircrew chose to do this immediately over an English primary school. Had it become known at the time that they had effectively placed their own safety over that of British schoolchildren, the goodwill of the British people would have evaporated... and the USAF would have been kicked out of the country. That’s the kind of cover-up and conspiracy I find easier to believe than the extraterrestrial kind.

The last talk I attended was by another living legend: Lionel Fanthorpe. Lionel is now 77, although he looks ten years younger. His talk was on the subject of six alternative theories as to what UFOs (the kind that don’t have mundane explanations) might be. Only one of the six involved extraterrestrials -- the others ranged from ancient Atlantis and Lemuria to the paranormal. There’s no use pretending the talk was anything but an excuse for Lionel to hold forth about the subjects he’s always been fascinated by: timeslips, werewolves, poltergeists etc. But needless to say it was the most entertaining talk of the day, and it did reinforce what I saw as the whole theme of the conference: that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of by the average ETH-believer.

On the Diverse Benefits of being Struck by Lightning

A couple of days ago I came across two unusual tales from the past, which demonstrate that being hit by lightning isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The first is recounted in Mark Pilkington’s excellent little book Far Out: 101 Strange Tales From Science's Outer Edge. It concerns an event that is reputed to have occurred during a service at Wells Cathedral in Somerset in 1596 (the cathedral is famous for the sculptures on its west front, shown on the left, which illustrate the Day of Judgment).

According to Isaac Casaubon’s Adversaria, written a few years after the incident, the Cathedral was struck by a bolt of lightning and the congregation inside was thrown to the floor. When they recovered, no-one was hurt, but they all bore tattoos of the Cross on their bodies. Even the Bishop of Wells and his wife were marked in this way. This was an early example of what later came to be called “keranography”... the theory that lightning could imprint images on the skin in a kind of spontaneous, natural photography. Although the idea is dismissed as pseudoscience today, it’s perfectly true that non-fatal lightning strikes can leave tattoo-like marks on the body. No doubt the pious people of Wells in 1596 interpreted these as the sign of the cross!

A few hours after reading Mark’s book, I got an e-mail from Ray Girvan drawing my attention to a curious story about Mary Anning (1799 - 1847), who lived in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast... about 40 miles south of Wells. Mary Anning is the greatest figure in Lyme’s history: she discovered the first fossilized ichthyosaur when she was just twelve years old, and went on to become one of the most highly skilled and highly regarded fossil-hunters of the nineteenth century. She was recently voted the third most influential British woman in the history of science. And—if you believe a local legend—it’s all because she was struck by lightning when she was a toddler.

Much as I hate Wikipedia and its militant skepticism, there’s no denying that if something appears there—and remains there for more than a few hours without being tagged or deleted—then it must be undisputably True. And the story about the lightning strike is right there in the Wikipedia article on Mary Anning. Apparently, when she was 15 months old, she was sheltering under a tree with three women when the tree was hit by lightning. The three women were killed, but little Mary survived. That much is fact. But what of her family’s claim that the lightning strike turned her into a genius? Obviously no-one can know, but I’d like to think it was true!

Lisztomania

The great pianist and composer Franz Liszt was born two hundred years ago on 22 October 1811. Almost half-way back to that time, in August 1912, my grandfather E. P. Whitehouse (don't bother looking him up -- he was a junior clerk on the Great Western Railway) drew the caricature of Liszt reproduced on the left. The drawing is based on a small sculpture by Jean-Pierre Dantan that can be seen in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris (the sculpture itself dates from 1836, when Liszt was just 25).

The term Lisztomania sounds like a modern coinage, but was actually first used by the poet Heinrich Heine in 1844. At that time, however, "mania" had quite a different meaning. Nowadays it refers to an intense fad or craze, whereas originally it was a medical term referring to a serious derangement of the mind. Here is Heine's description of the audience reaction to one of Liszt's concerts:

"What tremendous rejoicing and applause! A delirium unparalleled in the annals of furore! And what is the real cause of this phenomenon? The solution of the question belongs rather to the province of pathology than to that of aesthetics. The electric action of a demoniac nature on a closely pressed multitude, the contagious power of ecstasy, and perhaps a magnetism in music itself, which is a spiritual malady which vibrates in most of us... all these phenomena never struck me so significantly or so painfully as in this concert of Liszt's."

Apparently it was female listeners who were affected the most: fainting, screaming hysterically, wearing his portrait on brooches, taking cuttings of his hair, and even collecting his coffee dregs and discarded cigar stubs. It all sounds a lot like the Beatlemania of the 1960s, or any of the countless manias since then. This leads one to suspect that, despite the apparent change in meaning, the basic "mania" phenomenon is the same as it always was. What struck people as a serious derangement of the mind in the 1840s is now seen as the normal behaviour of young human females when they get close to their musical idols!

Liszt died in 1886, two years before the oldest surviving audio recording was made... so sadly we will never know what all the fuss was about. However, in parallel with his performing career Liszt was also a prolific composer, and many of his works are still popular today. He was a great innovator, and single-handedly created the musical form known as the symphonic poem, as well as producing two full-length symphonies based on Goethe's Faust and Dante's Divine Comedy. These were considered revolutionary at the time, because they attempted to tell a story using purely instrumental music. For some reason, the musical establishment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century enforced the view that all non-vocal music had to be abstract, and that if it tried to represent something then it was garbage. This is similar (although with one subtle and easy-to-miss difference) to the view of the artistic establishment that all painting had to represent something, and if it was abstract then it was garbage.

The Year Without a Summer

British readers could be forgiven for thinking that 2011 was the "Year Without a Summer", but actually the phrase refers to 1816. In that year, not just Britain but the whole of the Northern Hemisphere was plunged into a kind of apocalyptic nuclear winter. The chief cause was a volcanic eruption a year earlier on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia... the biggest eruption the planet had seen for more than a thousand years. 80,000 people were killed instantly, and the ash cloud that was blasted into the upper atmosphere blotted out the sun over half the world, causing surface temperatures to plunge to record lows.

Across Europe crops failed, food prices soared and famine was widespread. People took to the streets: there was rioting, arson and wholesale looting. Nowhere was the problem felt more acutely than in Switzerland, where the government was forced to declare a state of emergency. In the area around Lake Geneva it rained almost every day, the Sun was perpetually hidden by clouds, and there was frost even in August. Not a pleasant place at all -- certainly not the sort of place for a wealthy young British aristocrat to suddenly choose to relocate to.

But that's just what Lord Byron did. Byron (left, as painted by Géricault) was a romantic poet who was famously described as "mad, bad and dangerous to know". In the summer of 1816, together with a few house guests, he moved into the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva.

The conditions at the time -- not just the cold and gloom, but also the primitive responses of the population at large -- inspired Byron to write one of his most famous poems, called "Darkness". The poem extrapolates the situation to a time when the Sun itself has grown dark, and people revert to a savage, animal-like existence. As with all poems, "Darkness" can be interpreted in a number of different ways. On the face of it, it's simply an attempt to portray in realistic terms what might happen if such a catastrophe befell the Earth. That's probably the way most people would read it today, and it's certainly the way I viewed it until I read what other people had written about it.

What that straightforward interpretation misses is the fact that in those days most people believed in the literal truth of the Bible, and its predictions about the way the world would end. It was expected that sinners would go to Hell, which is effectively what Byron's poem is describing -- except that in his version, everyone ends up in Hell. There is no salvation for the virtuous. This bleakly pessimistic view (which most people today would consider simple common sense) must have been intensely shocking at the time.

A third interpretation I've come across suggests that the poem wasn't meant to be taken seriously -- that in effect it's a satire on the social situation at the time. By taking current events and exaggerating them, Byron is poking fun at the ignorance of the masses and their mindlessly self-defeating behaviour. Again, to get your head round this, you have to put yourself back in the mind-set of the time at which the poem was written... not an easy thing to do. Whatever Byron's original intention, there's no doubt that the poem set the tone for the gloomy "end-of-the-world" sub-genre of science fiction so beloved of British writers in the later nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries.

Although it's virtually forgotten as a meteorological phenomenon, the non-summer of 1816 did have a couple of lasting cultural effects. Unable to do anything outdoors, Byron and his house-guests had no alternative but to stay inside and write. Byron, as we have seen, wrote the poem "Darkness". His guest Mary Shelley wrote the original version of Frankenstein. And another guest, John Polidori, wrote a short novel called The Vampyre -- not a well-known work in itself, but culturally significant because it transformed the gawky, red-faced, red-haired, pot-bellied vampire of East European folklore into the cool, sophisticated, aristocratic vampire of modern times... modelled at least in part on Lord Byron himself!

William Buckland: an early Fortean experimenter

Mysterious falls of frogs or toads from the sky are among the most iconic of all Fortean phenomena. Less well-known, but just as inexplicable, are cases of trapped frogs or toads that are found alive when solid rock or masonry is broken open. At one time such occurrences were a mainstay of popular folklore, as described by Jan Bondeson in Fortean Times a few years ago (Toad in the Hole, FT221:38, April 2007). The heyday of the subject was between the late 17th and early 19th centuries -- just when the idea of testing theories via practical experimentation was coming into vogue. The "entombed toad" theory is ideally suited to testing by experiment, and numerous amateur naturalists rose to the task... though generally in a clumsy and unscientific way.

Amongst all the amateur experimenters, there was one professional on the case -- Dr William Buckland, Professor of Geology at the University of Oxford. Buckland, the son of a parish priest, was born in 1784 in Axminster (the bust on the left is in the museum in nearby Lyme Regis). By all accounts Buckland was an unusual character, possibly due to the odd mixture of a scientific vocation with a religious upbringing. As things turned out, Buckland seems to have been a good deal more open-minded than either the clergy of the time or his fellow scientists!

Buckland's experiments, as described in the Fortean Times article, were pretty rigorous. He used two types of rock, limestone and sandstone, and made twelve cavities in each. A live toad was sealed into each cavity using glass plates and clay. The blocks of stone were then buried for a year, after which they were dug up and examined through the glass plates. The toads that had been sealed in sandstone (which is non-porous) were all dead, whereas at least some of the toads sealed in limestone (which is porous) were still alive. The limestone block was re-buried... but after another year the remaining toads were all dead. Buckland concluded that it was impossible for toads to survive long periods of incarceration, and that therefore the popular accounts must be erroneous. In the Fortean Times article, however, Jan Bondeson suggests that there were flaws in Buckland's experimental method and that his conclusion was more pessimistic than it ought to have been.

Buckland also conducted experiments on a completely different subject, and in these he was more successful. On the Dorset coast, pebbles are occasionally found which when broken open contain a distinctive structure and what appear to be small bones and fish-scales. Buckland speculated that these objects were fossilized excrement, deposited by large marine creatures such as ichthyosaurs -- a theory he proved to his own satisfaction by dissecting a number of fish and injecting their intestines with quick-drying cement! Buckland coined the word "coprolite" to refer to these fecal fossils... and he liked them so much he had a special table made to display his best specimens! The table is now in Lyme Regis Museum in Dorset.

The Mystery of Flight 19

While I was researching this weekend's blog post, I came across an interesting piece of Fortean history... even though it wasn't what I was looking for! It is, I believe, the earliest speculation in print regarding a potentially paranormal explanation for the disappearance of Flight 19 in December 1945... the incident that would later give rise to the myth of the Bermuda Triangle.

The scan on the left comes from a "letter to the editor" (from one Edward R. Walker of Colorado) in the August 1946 issue of Amazing Stories. There can be little doubt that 'Six Navy planes disappearing all at once off the coast of Florida' is a slightly garbled reference to the loss of Flight 19 (consisting of five Avenger torpedo bombers) and the subsequent loss of one of the search aircraft (a Martin Mariner flying boat).

The letter in itself isn't particularly interesting... after all, the incident must have made headline news only a few months before the letter was written. What is far more significant, historically, is the editor's reply. And part of the significance is just who that editor happened to be!

In 1946, Amazing Stories was edited by none other than Ray Palmer... who later became famous as the editor of Fate magazine. It was Fate, under Palmer's editorship, that first popularized the Bermuda Triangle mystery in the early 1950s. But Fate didn't appear until 1948, when Palmer left Amazing... or more accurately, when he was forced to leave Amazing. The magazine was supposed to be devoted to science fiction, but Ray Palmer, as editor, had consistently alienated his publishers and traditional SF fans by focusing on "non-fiction" mysteries of the Fortean kind. Foremost among these was the Shaver Mystery, which dominated Amazing in the last few years of Palmer's editorship. This particular issue (August 1946), for example, contains a short "semi-factual" novel by Richard Shaver himself, as well as a two-page feature on The Shaver Mystery by Palmer.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Palmer's comments on Flight 19 (reproduced at left) show a distinctly Shaverian bent: 'Not a sign, not a message, just instant disappearance. And no fuss about it since, just official forgetfulness. Your editor would like to KNOW what happened, because it wasn't anything ordinary. As a matter of fact, this is only one of hundreds of mysteries of this type which have baffled the world in the past few years. But we hear nothing further about them because "officialdom" and "explainers of everything by means of book larnin'" can't explain them. We think Shaver has come closest to a real explanation, and after all, a poor explanation is better than none at all.'

The final comment is interesting, because it suggests that Palmer wasn't completely satisfied with the Shaver paradigm... and was ready to abandon it if something better came along. And in 1948, that's exactly what happened, when Palmer became one of the first to jump on the "Flying Saucer" bandwagon!

An anomaly from the early days of TV

Here is a Fortean news clipping from about 60 years ago! 'Engineers and technicians of the BBC have been busy for days trying to solve the mystery of "the atmosphere which suddenly went haywire". They were called in on May 24. Through no fault of the Alexandra Palace staff there were odd noises and peculiar, smeary pictures on London television sets.'

This was from the early days of television, when (in Britain) there was only one channel, broadcasting for just a few hours a day. TV normally requires a direct line-of-sight to the transmitter, but in this case some anomalous atmospheric phenomenon meant that 'broadcasts from Copenhagen were coming here and getting mixed up with Alexandra Palace broadcasts.'

My copy of the news clipping is a black-and-white photographic print, which I found in a folder full of more conventional family photographs dating from the 1950s. Unfortunately the photo isn't annotated, and it's cropped exactly as shown here, so there aren’t many clues as to its date... but the reference to Alexandra Palace probably places it in the early 50s. The "Star" is not the Daily Star, but a London evening newspaper called The Star, which ceased publication in 1960.

Many years later, in December 1975 (by which time Britain had no less than three TV channels to choose from) Issue 13 of the Fortean Times (or rather The News, as it was called in those days) carried a similar report: 'In the weeks at the end of October and the beginning of November, TV viewers were confronted with a strange downward ripple (on all channels)... It seems that many sets in England were also picking up programmes from Sweden, Germany and Switzerland. The met men blame it on "strange weather conditions".'

These days, all you need to do to receive TV programmes meant for the continent is to point your satellite dish at 19.2°E instead of 28.2°E!

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!

The Daemon of Tedworth

The picture above was taken by Paul Jackson while out for a walk yesterday near his home in Wiltshire. It shows Tedworth House, which was the scene of one of the best documented poltergeist cases of the seventeenth century. At that time, the house was owned by a man named Mompesson, who had a dispute in 1662 with a vagrant who had been a drummer in Cromwell's army -- resulting in the latter being sent to prison. While the drummer was incarcerated, Mompesson's house was subjected to a barrage of unexplained phenomena ranging from drummings and other noises to sulphurous smells, strange lights and objects being hurled around. These phenomena were blamed on the drummer, who was said to have used witchcraft to summon an evil spirit, or daemon -- hence the case has become known as "the Drummer of Tedworth" or "the Daemon of Tedworth".

The Tedworth case features prominently in Joseph Glanvill's book Saducismus Triumphatus: Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions, published posthumously in 1681. A facsimile of the first volume of this work is available online, but unfortunately the Tedworth "Case Study" appears in Volume 2!

However, there is a brief mention of the Tedworth Daemon in the publisher's introduction to Volume 1 (see extract on the left), in which he complains bitterly about skeptical non-believers... whom he refers to picturesquely as "Exploders of Apparitions and Witches".

Glanvill's book has another claim to fame, in that it was one of the shudderingly blasphemous tomes referred to by H .P. Lovecraft. Aficionados of HPL will be familiar with the way he scattered book references (both real and fictitious) throughout his stories. The following is taken from "The Festival" (1925):

"...I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that they included old Morryster's wild Marvells of Science, the terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvill, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreia of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred..."

The Daemonolatreia is a real book like the Saducismus, while "old Morryster's Marvells of Science" was invented by Ambrose Bierce in his short story "The Man and the Snake" (1890)... and the Necronomicon, of course, is Lovecraft's own most notorious invention.

POSTSCRIPT 1/3/11... Further searching has uncovered an online copy of the second volume of the Saducismus, courtesy of Cornell University. The start of the Tedworth account can be found here. The following quote, referring to the attitude of skeptics, is particularly amusing: "But 'twas bad logick to conclude in matters of fact from a single negative, and such a one against numerous affirmatives... By the same way of reasoning, I may infer that there were never any robberies done on Salisbury Plain, Hounslow Heath, or the other noted places, because I have often travelled all those ways, and yet was never robbed; and the Spaniard inferred well that said there was no Sun in England, because he had been six weeks here, and never saw it."

Ball Lightning in the Laboratory

Ball Lightning is unusual among Fortean phenomena in that most lay-people don't even realize it's Fortean! However, in spite of countless anecdotal reports, there is no clear-cut, objective evidence for the reality of the phenomenon, and many scientists remain skeptical about its existence -- there certainly isn't a generally-accepted scientific explanation for it.

Now here's a book I bet you haven't got on your bookshelf! I can't say I've read it myself, but I've struggled through the title -- which transliterates as "Sharovaya Molniya v Laboratorii" or "Ball Lightning in the Laboratory". The book was given to me at a meeting in Moscow in 1996, by one of the authors -- a plasma physicist named Vladimir Bychkov. I don't think Ball Lightning was his day job (it certainly wasn't the main subject of the meeting) but he had a pet theory on the subject, and showed us some semi-persuasive videos of a glowing thing inside a glass tube. I think his theory had something to do with polymers and fullerenes, but trying to understand anything a Russian scientist says is always a struggle!