Last year, with the DVD in one hand and The Complete Books of Charles Fort in the other, we took a romp through sci-fi legend Arthur C Clarke’s teatime television series The Mysterious World (FT410:32-39, 411:42-47, 412:44-49). But instead of wallowing in Eighties nostalgia, or merely reviewing the programme with the benefit of 21st century hindsight, we sought to reassess the mysteries themselves and how our thinking might have evolved over the intervening decades.
We discovered that much of Clarke’s content was already a little old and flaky by the time the show was broadcast. He was able to dismiss quite a few of his own cases in each episode, and the handful of genuine mysteries that still begged a solution had, with very few exceptions, not fared well since.
From our vantage point, the iconic Mitchell-Hedges skull of the title sequence looked dull and tarnished, a 20th century fake exposed by modern analysis. The infamous ‘Baghdad Battery’ was lost, and the once awe-inspiring phenomena of ball lightning had fizzled out under mainstream acceptance.
But we were left with a conundrum. Despite our advances in knowledge, we remained challenged by the accounts of the ordinary people interviewed on camera. There may have been no scientific proof forthcoming for Ogopogo or the Sasquatch, but there were still plenty of people willing to testify to the reality of lake monsters and ape-men – and far stranger things besides.
For the follow-up series, originally broadcast in 1985, producer Adam Hart-Davies took the programme deeper into this rich vein, into the realm of the more esoteric and experiential aspects of forteana, mirroring the journey that Fort himself took in his later books.
You can watch along at home with the 2015 Network DVD release. In the coming episodes we will encounter visionaries, clairvoyants, spoon benders, telepaths and stigmatics, and we must ask ourselves: will it prove so easy to dismiss the inhabitants of the World of Strange?
