The Enfield Haunting

First shown on subscription TV last year, the mini-series The Enfield Haunting was repeated on free TV a few weeks ago. Unfortunately it always seemed to be scheduled at awkward times, so I got fed up waiting and splurged £6.99 on the DVD. I’m really glad I did – it’s by far the best fortean-themed “based on real-life events” dramatization I’ve seen to date.

The usual problem with this genre is that the events in question are either 100% anecdotal or else utterly banal. That’s certainly not true here, where the case – more commonly referred to as “the Enfield poltergeist” – was exhaustively documented by means of photographs, audio recordings and multiple eyewitness testimony. Taking place in a north London council house in 1977-78, it was essentially a working-class version of The Exorcist, focused around a highly strung schoolgirl, her divorced mother and her three siblings.

I don’t know a huge amount about the case, but as far as I can tell the dramatized version sticks to the facts pretty faithfully. The characters are all based on real people, and the general sequence of events – including the bringing-in of psychic investigators and the intense interest of the tabloid media – is also true to life. No doubt events have been streamlined to some extent to make a more coherent story, and the main characters have been embellished to make them more interesting. However, the basic motivations of the two investigators – the eagerly credulous Maurice Grosse, who’s desperately looking for evidence of life-after-death, and the more cynical Guy Lyon Playfair, who just wants material for a new book – probably aren’t too wide of the mark.

The production is very British in its focus on acting and dialogue, as opposed to the traditional Hollywood reliance on screaming and special effects. The pivotal character of Maurice Grosse is played by Timothy Spall, who I became a fan of when I saw him in Mr Turner last year. Not that I imagine for a moment that the real JMW Turner was anything like as weird and interesting as Spall’s portrayal of him – and I’m sure the same is true of the late Maurice Grosse!

The Enfield Haunting also differs from more traditional horror movies in maintaining a fortean ambiguity as to what is actually going on. While some of the events do seem to be genuinely paranormal, others appear to be deliberate attention-seeking, and still others may be the involuntary result of emotional or behavioural problems, like a kind of super-Tourette syndrome. Or maybe it’s a mixture of all three. Having dug out some old Fortean Times articles – I found one by David Sutton from 2003 (FT166:39), one by Guy Lyon Playfair from 2007 (FT229:58-59) and one by Alan Murdie from 2012 (FT 288:18-19) – that seems to be pretty much the consensus about the real Enfield poltergeist, too.

With its setting in the late 1970s, The Enfield Haunting is a potentially perfect piece of retro-forteana. However, while I didn’t notice any actual anachronisms, I didn’t get a really strong sense of a “period drama” set four decades in the past either. I was worried this was an indication of just how behind the times I am (I mean, 1977 really does seem like yesterday sometimes) – but in one of the DVD extras the producers explain that they made a deliberate decision to understate the seventies setting, because it would have been a distraction from the serious story they wanted to tell.

As far as I can recall, this is the first time I’ve seen an on-screen actor portraying someone I’ve seen in real life. Matthew Macfadyen’s performance as Guy Lyon Playfair is a great foil to Timothy Spall’s Maurice Grosse – although I’m sure the real-life Playfair was never as snottily pretentious as Macfadyen plays him! Anyway, I saw the real Guy Lyon Playfair speaking at a paranormal conference in Bath a few years ago. Unfortunately it was too dark to take a decent photo while he was speaking, although I got a better shot of him as he was returning to his seat afterwards:

Who was Kirk Allen?

One of the chapters in Nick Redfern’s Science Fiction Secrets is called “The Strange World of Kirk Allen”. I’m fairly sure I’d read about this case somewhere before, though I can’t remember where. It was originally written up in 1954, under the title “The Jet-Propelled Couch”, by a psychologist named Robert Lindner. It concerns a client who was sent to him for treatment several years earlier – a young man whose identity is hidden behind the pseudonym “Kirk Allen”.

Taken at face value, it’s a fascinating – and rather scary – case. At the time Lindner met him, Kirk Allen was working as a physicist on an ultra-secret government project – from the timing it might even have been the Manhattan Project. But Allen wasn’t the sort of person you’d want to see anywhere near an atom bomb. At the age of 14 he came across a series of science fiction books, whose larger-than-life hero had the same name as him (whatever his real name was). Allen became obsessed with the books, convincing himself they were accounts of real adventures he was going to have in the future. But it was only after he started working at the government lab that things got seriously weird. He discovered he could teleport to this alternate existence where he was “lord of a planet in an interplanetary empire”.

Fortunately Lindner managed to cure Allen of his delusion, by pretending to go along with it and making him see how ridiculous it was. No-one has ever worked out for certain who Kirk Allen was, but according to one theory he was a man named Paul Linebarger – who went on to write science fiction himself under the pen-name of Cordwainer Smith.

The full version of “The Jet-Propelled Couch” can be read online – Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Both parts are 13 pages long, but there’s a lot of psychological padding. If you’re in a hurry, the important bits can be found on pages 1, 6, 7, 11, 12 and 13 of Part 1 and pages 1, 8, 10, 11 and 12 of Part 2. Forteans will be particularly interested in page 12 of Part 1, where Allen wonders whether he has “what Charles Fort called a wild talent”!

Reading through Lindner’s account, there are a couple of fairly obvious problems with it (this is why I used the phrase “at face value”). Firstly, he was based in Baltimore – so why on Earth would he have a client who worked at Los Alamos, 1500 miles away? Secondly, he says that Allen was born in 1918, which would mean it was 1932 when he encountered the series of science fiction books featuring the hero who shared his name. But there were almost no SF books in 1932. The only possibility I can think of is the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, featuring the hero John Carter (a common enough name – or even commoner if just one of those names was shared). But the Barsoom novels are all set on Mars, whereas Kirk Allen’s adventures take him on “an expedition to a planet in another galaxy” and into contact with “the Intergalactic Institute”. Stories with that sort of scope did turn up later in the 1930s, but only in the form of magazine serials.

[As an aside, I can’t resist pointing out that if Kirk Allen was his real name, not a pseudonym, then the larger-than-life hero he identified with might have been Captain Kirk of Star Trek. But since Star Trek didn’t appear until more than a decade after “The Jet-Propelled Couch”, that would require time travel as well as space travel.]

Another article I found very interesting (and which clarifies some of the issues I just mentioned) is “Behind the Jet-Propelled Couch” by Alan Elms – another psychologist who happens to be a strong advocate of the “Cordwainer Smith” theory. The most important thing I learned from his article is that when psychologists write up case studies for publication, they don’t just hide their client behind a pseudonym. They change every little detail that might be taken as pointing at the client’s true identity. So in the case of Kirk Allen, there is no way he could have been a physicist who worked at the Manhattan Project, because the hints pointing in that direction are too strong. Similarly, it’s extremely unlikely that he shared one or both his names with a science fiction hero – which again is too clearly hinted at to be true. On her website, Cordwainer Smith’s daughter mentions another investigator who “examined another one of Lindner’s stories, figured out who the person actually was, and found out that Lindner fictionalized the stories far more than you might think”.

So I don’t think Kirk Allen’s fantasy world was based on any specific book or series. It seems more likely that, having immersed himself in SF from an early age, he created his own intergalactic scenario out of his own imagination. And reading “The Jet-Propelled Couch” it really was one heck of a scenario and one heck of an imagination. That makes it even more believable that after he’d rid himself of his delusion, “Kirk Allen” went on to become a successful science fiction writer.

Elms makes a pretty good case for Kirk Allen being Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith. Linebarger wasn’t a Manhattan Project physicist – but he served as an intelligence officer during the war, which is almost as sensitive. Conspiracy theorists will be gratified to see where Elms says one of his informants “implied that I was reaching for secret government stuff and had better back off”.

I read half a dozen Cordwainer Smith stories back in the 1970s, when I used to read a lot of SF anthologies. They’re highly imaginative, galactic in scale … and distinctly weird. Take the picture below, for example. It’s the cover of an anthology I read when I was still at school: Spectrum 4, edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. You might assume the image is an exercise in Daliesque surrealism… but actually it’s an objective depiction of a “A Planet Named Shayol” by Cordwainer Smith.

Some old X-Files

I don’t usually hoard old magazines (except Fortean Times), but I kept these three issues of Cinefantastique because between them they contain complete episode guides to the first four seasons of The X-Files. I was prompted to dig them out last week – not because of the “reboot” currently showing on Channel 5, or from any general sense of nostalgia, but because I needed to do some research for a new book I’m working on. In looking through them, I was struck by how highbrow some of the X-Files episode titles were. Here are a few of the more Fortean examples – two from each of those first four seasons (just focusing on the titles, not the storylines).

The Jersey Devil (Season 1, Episode 5). One of America’s lesser known cryptids, this one dates back to those pre-Darwin days when mysterious creatures weren’t required to conform to the logic of evolutionary genetics. According to Wikipedia it’s “a kangaroo-like creature with the head of a goat, leathery bat-like wings, horns, small arms with clawed hands, cloven hooves and a forked tail”. Wings AND arms AND hooves… they don’t make them like that any more.

Ghost in the Machine (Season 1, Episode 7). This cool-sounding phrase was coined by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in 1949, as a disparaging description of the dualistic theory of human nature (i.e. a spiritual soul inhabiting a material body).

Little Green Men (Season 2, Episode 1). A facetious term for extraterrestrials, which was already well established when Mack Reynolds wrote The Case of the Little Green Men in 1951 – a Fortean-themed detective novel I wrote about in a blog post last year.

Fearful Symmetry (Season 2, Episode 18). This phrase comes from William Blake’s famous poem “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright”. The poem isn’t very Fortean, but its author was – as I explained in A 19th Century Contactee. One of the strangest spiritual creatures Blake claimed to have encountered was “The Ghost of a Flea” – his painting of which I happened to see in the Tate Gallery last year (see photo at the bottom of this post).

Paper Clip (Season 3, Episode 2). This is a reference to Operation Paperclip, a real world “conspiracy” that brought hundreds of German scientists – many of them war criminals – to the United States in the aftermath of WW2, giving them clean new records and salaried positions working for the U.S. government. It may be no coincidence that “Nasa” sounds a bit like “Nazi”.

Talitha Cumi (Season 3, Episode 24). This is one of several X-Files titles derived from a foreign language. In this case it’s Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. It’s a quote from the New Testament, which of course is full of Jesus quotes, but most of them only appear in translation. This example (from Mark 5:41) is one of only about a dozen that are given in the original Aramaic first (I’d be interested to know why they were singled out in this way). From the King James version: “And he took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.”

Tunguska (Season 4, Episode 8). This, of course, was the site of a mysterious explosion that flattened two thousand square kilometres of Siberian forest in 1908. It was probably caused by a meteor impact, although several odd things about it have led to various alternative explanations (e.g. an exploding UFO). As mentioned in my post about Ian Watson last year, his novel Chekhov’s Journey offers a particularly weird interpretation of the Tunguska event.

Terma (Season 4, Episode 9). This has to be one of the most obscure X-Files titles of all. It’s a technical term from Tantric Buddhism, referring to secret teachings carefully handed down among the inner circle of adepts. Such as, for example, that Tantric classic “Sex Secrets of the Ancient Masters” (which I really must get round to writing one of these days).

Pound-Shop Forteana

Here are two DVDs I bought for just a pound each (obviously) in a Poundland store last week – The Dyatlov Pass Incident and Skinwalkers. Both movies are based on true events of the Fortean kind. I first heard about Skinwalker Ranch at a talk by Ian Simmons at the Fortean Times Unconvention in October 2004, while the Dyatlov Pass incident made the cover of FT245 in February 2009. Both films were released in 2013, so the fact they’re already being sold at a massive discount suggests that perhaps they’re not very good. In the case of Skinwalkers that’s true – it might have made an enjoyable video game, but as a feature film it’s simply atrocious. On the other hand, The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a brilliant, five-star, film – the best low-budget horror movie I’ve seen in a long time.

Both films take the form of “found footage” following the disappearance of a team that set out to investigate the mystery in question. In the case of Skinwalker Ranch it’s essentially a modern take on the “haunted house” theme – with the usual ghosts, poltergeist phenomena and spectral hounds joined by UFOs, ancient aliens and animal mutilations. In the movie the ranch is being investigated by a group of professional paranormal researchers, and one of the few positive things I can say about it is that the entire cast looks the part (i.e. unattractive social misfits with no discernable personality). Their behaviour is anything but professional, though – the film belongs to the visceral school of horror, with large amounts of screaming and very little in the way of ratiocination.

The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a different matter altogether. To start with, the central mystery is far more intriguing. Instead of a rambling mashup of subjective phenomena occurring over an extended period of time, it’s tightly focused on one specific incident that left real physical evidence (nine dead bodies, to be precise). The aforementioned Fortean Times article, from 2009, began as follows:

The story sounds like something out of a low-budget horror movie: nine young students go on a skiing holiday in Russia’s Ural Mountains but never return. Eventually, their bodies are discovered – five of them frozen to death near their tent, four more bearing mysterious injuries – a smashed head, a missing tongue – buried in the snow some distance away. All, it seems, had fled in sudden terror from their camp in the middle of the night. [...] At the time, seemingly baffled investigators offered the non-explanation that the group had died as a result of “a compelling unknown force” – and then simply closed the case and filed it as “Top Secret”.

The incident took place in February 1959; the FT article coincided with its 50th anniversary. There are several factors that make Dyatlov Pass one of the 20th century’s most intriguing Fortean mysteries. What was the “compelling unknown force” that caused the students such terror? Why did the deaths from hypothermia occur before – not after – the deaths from crushing physical injuries? Why did several of the bodies show signs of radiation damage? What were the mysterious orange lights seen in the sky around the time of the incident? Most intriguingly of all – why did the Soviet military (this was during the Cold War, remember) stamp the case Top Secret and close the area off to civilians?

The film follows a group of American students who attempt to follow in the footsteps of their Russian predecessors – only to suffer the same fate. This is a much more cerebral film than Skinwalkers – with intelligent, educated characters who think things through and don’t do very much screaming at all. It has a strong plot – unexpectedly so for this type of film. The viewer is presented with a number of obvious choices (Was it a UFO encounter? Was it a Yeti-like creature? Was it a natural accident that has morphed into something more sinister through folklore and misinterpretation?)... and then – culminating in one of the most perfect twist endings I’ve ever seen – the movie comes up with a completely different, even more satisfying, explanation of its own. There’s a fine line between whetting the appetite and spoiling the plot, so I’ll just say “Philadelphia Experiment” and leave it at that.

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.

The Ambrose Collector

Just over a century ago, the American author Ambrose Bierce disappeared in war-torn Mexico. On December 26 1913 he wrote “I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination” – and he was never seen or heard from again. The case remains one of the classic unsolved mysteries, and there are dozens of conflicting theories as to his fate. A recent article describes several eyewitness accounts of his death, all in different places at different times.

There are much weirder theories, too. Many years earlier, Bierce wrote an odd little story called “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field”, about a man who starts to walk across a field – and suddenly vanishes into thin air. This has led some people (and by “some people”, I mean the makers of Ancient Aliens) to speculate that Bierce stumbled across a secret portal to another dimension... which he described in veiled terms in the story, before eventually passing through it himself.

Not surprisingly, Charles Fort was interested in the case of Ambrose Bierce. He wrote about it in Lo!, and again in Wild Talents. In the latter book he linked the story to another disappearance – that of Ambrose Small in Canada in 1919. The problem that fascinated Fort was “what the disappearance of one Ambrose could have to do with the disappearance of another Ambrose”. This led to a characteristically Fortean speculation: “Was somebody collecting Ambroses?”

The bizarre notion of an Ambrose Collector crops up in a novel I read several years ago, and then forgot all about until I was reading about the Bierce case recently. The book in question is Compliments of a Fiend by Fredric Brown, who is best known for the numerous science fiction stories he wrote in the 1940s and 50s. Some of the best of these, such as his novel What Mad Universe, foreshadow the work of Philip K. Dick in their portrayal of counterfeit, mind-created worlds. I mentioned Fredric Brown in just this context earlier this month, in my post about Mad Scientists, Zombies and the Loch Ness Monster.

But Compliments of a Fiend (1950) isn’t science fiction. Fredric Brown was an equally prolific writer of crime novels, and several of them feature a young detective named Ed Hunter and his uncle Ambrose. With a name like that, it was only a matter of time before the pair came up against the Ambrose Collector!

The novel isn’t especially Fortean, and it makes no attempt to explain the disappearance of either Ambrose Bierce or Ambrose Small. But it does have a villain who uses the pseudonym of “the Ambrose Collector”, and the corresponding quote from Wild Talents is referred to several times in the course of the plot. I read Compliments of a Fiend because it was recommended to me by someone who is a big fan of Fredric Brown, so I know at least some people think it’s a great book. As I mentioned earlier, however, personally I found the novel rather forgettable – although it’s a decent enough mystery story, and definitely one for Fortean completists.

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”:

Big Black Cats: Physical or Paranormal?

Many Fortean phenomena, from ghosts and UFOs to Bigfoot and other cryptids, revolve around witness accounts of strange sightings. In most cases, if the object seen is what the witness believes it is – an extraterrestrial spacecraft, the spirit of a dead human being, a huge hairy apeman – then it would be a truly earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting event. When it comes to the subject of “Big Cats in Britain”, however, that’s just not the case. The issue here is simply a known species that happens to be a few thousand miles from its normal habitat. For this reason, the whole subject of “out-of-place animals” is one that’s never really interested me that much. But last week I came across a couple of blog posts that made me look at the subject in a different light.

First there was The Big Cat Mystery from Kate Kelly's blog The Scribbling SeaSerpent. Amongst other things, Kate says: “There is another line of thought that they are creatures from the spirit world that pass across occasionally into ours; the rationale behind this theory being that the cats described by witnesses are so variable in appearance.” This is a really fascinating idea. Prior to the 20th century, there were frequent sightings of “phantom black dogs” in Britain, which were emphasised to have supernatural qualities. They were unnaturally large, they had glowing eyes, and they appeared and disappeared in the blink of an eye. In more recent, more materialistic times, these black dogs seem to have been superseded by “black panthers” and “black pumas”, which witnesses describe as being flesh-and-blood creatures – although they may not be.

The second piece I saw last week – a similar idea approached from a different angle – was all about an ancient pagan ritual called the Taigheirm. This was the subject of a post by Nick Redfern on the Mysterious Universe blog, called Sacrifice and Supernatural Cats. Before I go into details, I’ll just try and squeeze in the painting on the left, which I saw on the Dark Classics blog a few days ago. It’s called “A Scene of Sorcery”, and it was painted by Domenicus van Wijnen around 1685. It’s a depiction of some kind of demonic ritual, although it’s not the Taigheirm, and it’s got a cat in it, although no-one seems especially interested in sacrificing it. But it’s a really spooky painting, all the same.

According to Nick’s Mysterious Universe post, the Taigheirm ritual had its roots in pagan times, but continued to be performed in remote parts of Scotland well into the 19th century. The ceremony involved the sacrificial roasting of domestic cats, with the aim of “coming into communication with the powers of darkness”. According to a supposed eyewitness account, “after a certain continuance of the sacrifice, infernal spirits appeared in the shape of black cats. There came continually more and more of these cats; and their howlings, mingled with those roasting on the spit, were terrific. Finally appeared a cat of a monstrous size, with dreadful menaces.”

Whether the “Big Black Cats” encountered in Britain today are likewise paranormal phenomena, or whether they have any physical reality, is a moot point. The same could be said, of course, about many other Fortean sightings... with one important difference. Ufologists, for example, have a tendency to burst into tears if you suggest UFOs may have a non-physical explanation. It simply isn’t as exciting as the idea of nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrial spacecraft. On the other hand, a ghostly creature from another realm of existence is far more exciting than a flesh-and-blood member of the genus Panthera, that just happens to find itself on the wrong continent!

For anyone who is interested in raw data on British Big Cat sightings, I helped to set up an online resource on the subject last summer: The CFZ Mystery Cat Database. This draws on a huge number of news reports collected over several years by Jon Downes and his colleagues, for which I've tried to produce a user-friendly interface. The result is only partly satisfactory – it seems to work with some browsers but not others. Also, the keyword assignment was done mechanically, rather than by a human – so it quite often throws up irrelevant results (or misses relevant ones). For what it’s worth, I also produced a short demonstration video on YouTube.

The Tamam Shud Mystery

I’m a sucker for any kind of mystery – the more abstruse and intellectually challenging the better. For that reason I’m a great fan of the classic puzzle-style detective novels of the 1920s and 30s, written by people like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. But not everyone agrees. The commonest criticism of such fiction is that it isn’t “true to life” – real world murders don’t take the form of an enigmatic intellectual puzzle. Maybe that’s true as a general rule, but it’s a rule with one striking exception: the Tamam Shud case.

I was reminded of the case by a new blog, TAMAM SHUD, that has just been started by Gordon Cramer (who supplied the information for my recent post about Microwriting). Gordon lives in Australia, where the case is quite well known, but it’s less widely known outside Australia. I first encountered it just 18 months ago, in a blog post by Mike Dash entitled The Body on Somerton Beach. Anyone wanting a broad overview of the case should definitely read Mike’s post, while Gordon’s new blog is a great place to catch up with some recent research on the subject. All I’m going to do here is provide a quick introduction for people who may never have come across the case before, or who want to refresh their memories about it.

It started with the discovery of a dead body on Somerton Beach near Adelaide in South Australia, on the morning of 1 December 1948 (early summer in the southern hemisphere). The man was reported to have been seen sitting in the same spot the previous evening, behaving as if he was drunk. But he’d definitely been alive then – the Coroner set the time of death as some time after 2 am. To this day the victim has never been convincingly identified – he is usually referred to as “the Somerton Man”.

An autopsy revealed extensive lesions of the internal organs consistent with acute poisoning, although no trace of the poison itself was discovered. “Undetectable poisons” are extremely rare, and accident was ruled out. The official view tended towards suicide, although why a suicide should choose to employ an undetectable poison isn’t clear – especially as the extent of internal damage suggests the man died slowly and painfully. The circumstantial evidence points to murder, not suicide.

The same is true of the fact that extreme care had been taken to remove all evidence of the man’s identity. Why would a suicide do that? He was carrying a few commonplace items, but no wallet or keys that could identify him. All the labels had been carefully cut out of his clothes (which incidentally were of high quality, and in good condition – this wasn’t some homeless down-and-out). There was, however, one other item found on his person – the thing that transforms this case from a plodding police-procedural into an intellectual conundrum worthy of John Dickson Carr. And it’s the thing that gives the case its famously evocative name: TAMAM SHUD.

In the fob pocket of the victim’s trousers, there was a small, tightly rolled scrap of paper bearing the words “Tamám Shud” (pictured on the left). Now Tamám Shud is an old Persian phrase corresponding to “The End” in English or “Fin” in French – the words that are traditionally written at the end of a book. But the script isn’t Persian, although it’s printed in a mock-oriental font. The source of the phrase was less of a mystery in 1948 than it would be today. It’s the closing line of a book called The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, by a Victorian poet named Edward Fitzgerald. The book is loosely based on a mediaeval Persian work, but it belongs to the mock-oriental genre that was enormously popular in Victorian times, and remained so into the mid-20th century. At the time of the Somerton Man case, in 1948, there were thousands of copies of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam floating around the English-speaking world, in dozens of different editions. All the Adelaide police had to do was find the edition—and preferably the exact copy—that the scrap of paper bearing the words “Tamám Shud” had been torn from.

It wasn’t as easy as they thought. Of all the dozens of editions in circulation, none of them used that particular font. Then after almost eight months of searching, the book suddenly turned up. A local man claimed to have found it, around the time of the Somerton Man’s death, dumped in the back of his car a short distance from where the body was found. He only realized its significance when he saw an appeal in the press. It looked like it was the long sought-after volume all right – even down to the fact that the last page, which should have borne the words “Tamám Shud”, had been torn out. It turned out to be a very rare edition of the work – something similar had been produced by a New Zealand publisher, but it wasn’t quite the same. This copy seemed to be one of a kind.

There was another unusual thing about the book. On the inside rear cover, so faint that it could only be read in ultraviolet light, there was what appeared to be a coded message – five lines of handwritten letters with no obvious meaning. Although it’s a fascinating subject, I won’t say anything else about the code here because the fact is no-one knows what it means. It’s one of the things that particularly intrigues Gordon, and you can read about the Somerton Man Code Page on his blog.

There was also a telephone number pencilled inside the book. This turned out to belong to a young local woman named Jestyn. When questioned by police, she said she had given a copy of The Rubaiyat to a man named Alfred Boxall a few years earlier. So did that mean Alfred Boxall was the Somerton Man? No – because Alfred Boxall was still alive, and he still had his copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam... complete with the Tamam Shud page!

The Somerton Man case was never classified as a murder investigation, or any other kind of crime. The police were simply trying to identify an unidentified body. So their questioning of witnesses—such as Jestyn, and the car-owner who found the discarded book—wasn’t as deep or persistent as it might have been. As a result, the case remains bafflingly unsolved – a striking counterexample to anyone who claims that real life is never as mystifying as a detective novel.

Who was the Somerton Man? How did such an apparently well-to-do individual manage to die without being missed by anyone? If it was suicide, why did he use an untraceable poison? Why did he destroy all evidence of his identity? If he was murdered, who was the murderer and what was the motive? What is the significance of the scrap of paper bearing the words Tamam Shud? Was it torn from the book found in the car? If so, who put it there, and why? Who wrote the five-line coded message, and what does it mean? Why was Jestyn’s phone number written in the book? Is there any significance to the fact that it was a very rare copy of a very popular work?

There are other questions as well, that I haven’t even touched on – peculiarities of the dead man’s physiology, similarities with other unexplained deaths... even links to the murky world of Cold War espionage. Needless to say, many amateur detectives have tried their hand at solving the mystery, leading to many fascinating theories and suggestions. But there is still a shortage of hard facts – the Tamam Shud case remains tantalizingly unsolved.

Theoretical Crankology

The biggest problem with being interested in anomalous phenomena is that people assume you’re a crank. There’s good reason for this, since many of the most vocal proponents of the subject really are cranks. But just what is a crank, and how do you tell the difference between a crank and a serious researcher? For a long time I thought this was one of those grey, subjective questions that it’s impossible to answer, but it’s just occurred to me that there might be an objective, black-and-white criterion after all. It all comes down to what a person finds interesting, and what they find boring. Anomalies don’t exist in isolation, but they can only really be understood in a wider context (for example, cryptozoology in the context of mainstream zoology, ancient aliens in the context of ancient history, etc). My theory is that serious researchers will be as interested in the broader context as they are in the anomalies, while cranks are bored to tears by the context -- which to them is just an irrelevant waste of time.

To be honest, I didn’t really come up with this idea myself, but I got it from a recent blog post by Nick Redfern. He was talking about some of the more annoying traits of ufologists, and one of these was the fact they never “turn off the ufologist switch”. Well, I think serious ufologists do, but the cranks certainly don’t.

There are plenty of really interesting things to see in the sky besides UFOs. A ufologist who wants to be taken seriously ought to be a half-way decent plane spotter and a half-way decent amateur astronomer -- at least to the point of knowing where to look for Venus, Mars and Jupiter on a particular night. Many of them do, of course... but not the cranks. I’m suspicious of anyone who thinks planes and planets and re-entering space junk are simply “boring” things that debunkers use to explain away UFO sightings.

There’s a similar situation in cryptozoology. One of the reasons I have so much time for Jon Downes and his colleagues at the CFZ is that they’re as happy talking about insects and spiders and amphibians as they are about monsters. These are real creatures, which may be rare or outside their natural habitats -- but they’re not cryptids by any definition. Yet it’s only by understanding the behaviour and ecology of known species that you can have a hope of understanding the unknown ones. In a recent article, Jon described himself as a “naturalist, cryptozoologist and journalist”, in that order: he put naturalist before cryptozoologist. Now, that’s my kind of anomalist -- and there’s nothing remotely cranky about it. A crank is someone who thinks there are only two species of creature in the woods: (a) Bigfoot, and (b) everything else, which is simply a distraction and a waste of time.

I often get accused of being a skeptic, but that’s not true (well, I suppose it’s true from the point of view of the sort of cranks I’m talking about, but it’s not true from any rational point of view). I’m interested in physics (in fact I’m reasonably well qualified in it) and I’m convinced there are major discoveries waiting to be made in areas like gravitational control and inertialess propulsion. But I’ve got no time for the countless internet cranks who claim to have proved Einstein wrong, yet can’t even get the units on each side of an algebraic equation to agree -- let alone understand the finer points of tensor calculus.

I’m also a believer in ancient aliens. Well, perhaps not ancient aliens, but certainly an advanced level of technology (or paranormal equivalent thereof) in certain ancient civilizations. But that comes from a wider interest in ancient history -- trying to understand it in its own context, identifying where there are apparent anomalies, and looking for an explanation of the anomalies. That’s quite different from a crank’s approach, which is the other way around altogether -- starting with the assumption that extraterrestrial visitation is an indisputable fact, then looking for evidence of it and dismissing everything else as an irrelevant waste of time.

[For anyone who is wondering, the photograph above—which die-hard ufologists will find utterly uninteresting—shows the re-entry and breakup of an ATV unmanned resupply craft. Perfectly explicable, therefore only of interest to non-cranks!]

The STENDEC mystery

A recent blog post from Nick Redfern About That "STENDEC" Puzzle reminded me of this fascinating mystery from 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War. A British Lancastrian airliner—a civilian version of the legendary Lancaster bomber—crashed in the Andes in poor weather shortly after sending a message in Morse code to the air traffic controller at the flight’s destination in Santiago, Chile. The message was routine except for its final word: STENDEC. And that’s the start and the end of the mystery: what on Earth does STENDEC mean?

I find the STENDEC mystery fascinating... but equally fascinating are the different approaches taken by the huge number of armchair mystery solvers who have turned their attention to it. Some people clearly want their unsolved mysteries to remain unsolved forever, so any new piece of evidence is described as “deepening the STENDEC mystery” rather than helping to elucidate it. Other people approach the problem as if it was deliberately contrived by the radio operator to be a puzzle for future generations. In reality, aircraft radio operators don’t suddenly start talking in anagrams or cryptograms as if they were characters in a Mensa brain teaser! It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility, as many people have suggested, that the aircraft came under attack from a hostile UFO. What is beyond the bounds of possibility is that the radio operator would signal this fact to the world using the single, unknown, word STENDEC. Even if he could see the word stencilled on the fuselage of the UFO, it’s difficult to believe he would imagine it was the most effective way to get his last, desperate message across.

Except in very unusual circumstances, a professional radio operator will always be trying to get factual information across to the recipient as clearly and concisely as possible. This was even more true in the days of low bandwidth, low signal-to-noise Morse telegraphy. In the case of “STENDEC”, the operator knew the Santiago controller was having difficulty understanding him, because he was asked to repeat the word—which he did, twice, using exactly the same Morse code. He didn’t repeat the message in a less cryptic form, as might be expected, or more slowly—it’s described as being sent “very fast”. So why might the operator have persisted in sending a message he knew the person at the other end was having difficulty understanding?

One possibility is that the operator was deliberately winding up the air traffic controller with meaningless gibberish, or a Sunday Times style brainteaser. However, it’s highly unlikely the operator would do this with a complete stranger, particularly if he wanted to keep his job. Furthermore, being in a WW2-vintage aircraft over a mountain range in bad weather isn’t the time for fooling around. A second possibility, which has been suggested by some people, is that the crew were in a delirious state due to a fault in their oxygen supply—essentially that the operator thought he was making sense when he wasn’t. But if that was the case, why was the preceding part of the message (confirming the flight’s destination and expected time of arrival) perfectly clear and sober? The only other reason for sending a superficially meaningless message is if it is a codeword—something that would mean nothing to an eavesdropper but would be perfectly understandable to the intended recipient, who would be in possession of the same set of codes as the sender.

This is where the STENDEC story—or rather the story of its armchair puzzle solvers—takes a really bizarre turn. It was “revealed” on the internet about ten years ago that STE–ND–EC was a code signal (or rather the concatenation of three code signals) used by the RAF during WW2 to mean “Severe Turbulence Encountered – Now Descending – Expecting Crash”. The Lancastrian’s radio operator was an ex-RAF man, and WW2 had finished just two years earlier. If STENDEC really was a widely used wartime RAF code, then the operator would have known it. The revelation doesn’t “deepen” the STENDEC mystery or “add a new dimension” to it, as many people would dearly love—it destroys the mystery altogether. The beginning and end of the STENDEC mystery is that the word is meaningless in any known language. If it was a codeword used by the RAF, then it wasn’t meaningless (at least, not to the operator who used it) and so the mystery goes away.

The Chilean air traffic controller didn’t understand the codeword, despite it being repeated three times, for the simple reason that he had never come across it before. Chile wasn’t one of the wartime allies -- it was a neutral country. Presumably the Lancastrian’s operator, in the heat of the moment, forgot that. But it all hinges on whether “Severe Turbulence Encountered – Now Descending – Expecting Crash” was a real RAF code from WW2, or a schoolboy’s internet hoax of the 21st century.

This is a good example of people wanting their mysteries to remain mysteries. It would be easy enough for a serious STENDEC researcher—if there is such a thing—to look through all the old RAF codebooks in the National Archives. Either STENDEC is there or it isn’t. If it is there, the mystery evaporates and nothing else needs to be said about it. If it isn’t there, then the “astonishing internet revelation” was a hoax, and shouldn’t ever be referred to except as a hoax. Personally, I suspect it is a hoax, because a straight acronym of this type strikes me as more in keeping with 21st century texting that wartime Morse code. Also, it defies belief that the operator would send his estimated time of arrival in Santiago seconds before saying he was expecting a crash.

But real mystery lovers don’t want a resolution to the mystery. They want to deepen the mystery and add dimensions to it. They don’t want to know for certain that “Severe Turbulence Encountered – Now Descending – Expecting Crash” was an established WW2 code, or that it was a schoolboy hoax. And I have to say I agree with them!

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!

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."

The Hierophant Mystery

The Hierophant, besides being the name of a Tarot card, was a "paranormal gossip columnist" for Fortean Times. Back around the turn of the millennium, when weird beliefs and crackpot theories were hitting a global peak, this anonymously written column was one of the magazine's most popular features, and was its only really successful foray into the world of satire. The great mystery surrounding the column's author, however, was not "Who was he?" but "Who were they?" -- since the Hierophant had two separate incarnations, with almost diametrically opposed personalities.

To the best of my knowledge, the Hierophant (pictured at left on a Fortean Times mug) first appeared on page 60 of FT103 (October 1997), in a column headed Fortress of Arrogance... and with his name rendered anagrammatically as "Heirophant". From the next issue onwards, however, the column assumed its definitive and orthographically correct title of The Hierophant. Right from the start, the column hit on a winning formula: four or five snippets of "gossip" occupying half a page or so, presented with a mixture of bemused detachment and humour, and describing the seemingly endless stream of "differently sane" ideas emanating from the wackier fringes of the Fortean world. Starting with issue 146 (May 2001) the Hierophant's column was given pride of place on the last page of the magazine, before moving to the Strange Days section in May 2003.

The last column from the "old" Hierophant appeared in FT192 (January 2005). The next issue's editorial carried a small and unsettling item headed Hierophant MIA (exactly what "missing in action" means in terms of Fortean journalism was clarified a couple of issues later -- the Hierophant was believed to have been abducted by aliens!).

Before moving on to the Hierophant's second (and much more bizarre) incarnation, it's worth considering just who was behind the first incarnation. I've found three suggestions on the internet: [1] Daev Walsh, the editor of blather.net (who produced what is alleged to be an online interview with the Hierophant in January 2004), [2] Joe McNally, who worked as an assistant editor at Fortean Times (his name appeared in the magazine credits from the start of 1996 to the end of 2005... thus neatly encompassing the first Hierophant's tenure), [3] a corporate effort by the whole team of FT editors. I could believe any of these... it seems fairly certain that Hierophant 1.0 was both a natural Fortean and a professional journalist. But as for Hierophant 2.0 -- well, that's a different story altogether.

Things really took a turn for the weird with FT208 (April 2006). Virtually the whole of that issue's editorial ("The Return of the Ascended One") was occupied by a long, rambling letter, written in sub-Lovecraftian polysyllables, purporting to be from none other than the Hierophant himself. The editors sounded skeptical ("Is the Hierophant back? Or are we the victims of a rank impostor, delusional fraud or unscrupulous mountebank?"). Nevertheless, this "new" Hierophant was given a full page (more space than the old Hierophant ever received) in the following issue, and indeed in every issue for more than a year. These new articles are a complete departure from the old "Gossip Column" format -- each one being a lengthy diatribe that is short on humour and long on Big Words. The writing isn't bad, but it's in a rather turgid academic style that is quite unlike the easy-to-read journalism of the old Hierophant. But it's not just the writing style that has changed -- it's the whole personality of the author. He now comes across as a humourless, ill-tempered Professor of Sociology (or Liberal Arts, or something of that ilk), and he's aggressively skeptical of anything he considers nonsense... in other words, he's completely un-Fortean.

The new Hierophant made no attempt to emulate the style or subject matter of his earlier namesake. In perhaps his most bizarre rant (from FT214) he says: "almost wherever one looks in the fragmented and slightly demented subculture that swirls under the general heading 'Fortean', one is struck by the scarcity of humour". It's enough to make you throw your copy of the magazine at the wall! (I did the next best thing, by writing a letter to the editor -- which needless to say wasn't printed). The whole point of the Hierophant's column is that it's supposed to BE humour... its author should be providing humour (which his predecessor did month after month for seven years), not complaining about the lack of it!

The new Hierophant was belatedly killed off in FT221 (April 2007). His final paragraph (a return to the sub-Lovecraftian pastiche of his original letter) has him meeting some nameless horror which may (or may not) be Hierophant 1.0. It's difficult to understand why the editors of FT put up with Hierophant 2.0 for so long, given that he was so consistently off-message. But perhaps the articles weren't as bad as they seemed -- they might even have gone down quite well if they'd been published under the author's real name. What was so bizarre was the fact that he chose to take on the persona of another writer whose style and interests were the diametrical opposites of his own!

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!