Fortean Times

Welcome to our first issue of 2021, in which you’ll find plentiful and wide-ranging weirdness to greet the new year, including the first in a brand new series examining the mysteries of Lincolnshire, starting with the strange story of ‘The Ruskington

EDITOR DAVID SUTTON drsutton@forteantimes.com FOUNDING EDITORS BOB RICKARD (ft-bobrickard@mail.com) PAUL SIEVEKING (sieveking@forteantimes.com) NEWS EDITOR CHRISTOPHER JOSIFFE (csjosiffe@forteantimes.com) ART DIRECTOR ETIENNE GILFILLAN (etienne@forte

ESCAPED CLONED FEMALE MUTANT CRAYFISH TAKE OVER BELGIAN CEMETERY telegraph.co.uk, 23 Oct 2020. Denmark’s culled minks rise from mass grave thejournal.ie, 26 Nov 2020. PEOPLE TURN TO CUSTARD AND GRAVY AMID THE PANDEMIC BBC News, 10 Nov 2020, Naughty e

Police in Vietnam confiscated an estimated 345,000 used condoms which had been cleaned and resold as new. After the raid on a warehouse in the southern province of Binh Duong, police detained a woman who explained that the used prophylactics were fir

Each year in New York City, the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree is erected at Rockefeller Plaza. This year’s tree was found to harbour an unexpected stowaway – a very small owl. The tree was cut down in November at Oneonta, New York State, and the

When a helicopter survey of wild bighorn sheep stumbled on a mysterious metal monolith in Utah, a photograph of the find quickly went viral (see p4). The Utah Department of Public Safety kept the location secret, not because they were hiding alien te

Medical researchers in the Netherlands have made a surprise anatomical discovery, finding what appears to be a pair of salivary glands hidden inside the human head, somehow overlooked by scientists for centuries. The ‘unknown entity’ was discovered a

When handling old, rare, precious, delicate books and other paper documents you should always wear gloves. On telly, the gloved archivist reverently hands the mediæval manuscript to the gloved celebrity and they only take their gloves off when they’r

The news that AI boffififins have created an algorithm that can tell the difference between conspiracy theories and real conspiracies was greeted with a peal of hollow laughter in this particular garret of Fortean Towers. Leaving aside the painfully

Last month, I explained how my links with Gwrych Castle in Abergele (home of the relocated I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!) started with a photo of Coronation Street actors I took there in 1963. In 2002, I bought a bungalow near Gwrych. The cast

On 20 July 1861, a 47-year-old London spinster received a visit from her cousins that would forever transform her life and work. Georgiana Houghton had trained as an artist but had given it up 10 years earlier when her beloved sister Zilla died in ch

In 1978 artist Jeffrey Vallance bought a frozen fryer chicken at the Ralph’s Supermarket in Canoga Park, California. He later buried the hen at the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery after a brief memorial service. He also installed a grave marker for the froz

Central Asia, the land of the ’Stans, is obscure to most outsiders, with the entire expanse merging into one giant Generikhstan, a backwards, post-Communist ‘Borat Country’ of scant importance to the wider world. This cartoon image is not wholly fair

The first time we heard the story of Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) and his famous ear, it was the clean version from our lovely primary school art teacher Mrs Unwin. He was a bit touched, but passionate about his girlfriend, and sliced off his ear as an

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Ghosts of Futures Past Merlin Coverley Oldcastle Books 2020 Pb, 320pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780857304216 Divided into three sections – ‘Hauntings’, ‘Experiments with Time’

Examining the Photographic Evidence (2003-2007) Manuel Borraz Aymerich & Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos FOTOCAT Report #8, July 2020 https://www.academia.edu/43589341/THE_MARFA_ LIGHTS_Examining_the_Photographic_Evidence_ 2003_2007 Mystery lights or “g

Jessica Hundley (ed.) Penny Slinger, Johannes Fiebig, Thunderwing Taschen 2020 Hb, 520pp, £30, ISBN 9783836579872 Massive Science, illustrated by Matteo Farinella MIT Press 2020 78 cards plus 94-page booklet, £27.50, ISBN 9780262539937 The tarot has

Martin Stiff Comic Toolbox, 2020 Hb, pp224, £23.99, ISBN 9781838131203 In terms of fantastic fiction the German Democratic Republic is an underused setting. We’re more used to encountering East Germany in spy stories than horror stories, yet the sens

Creepy Cove Community Church www.peterlaws.co.uk/creepy-cove Peter Laws, the reverend who reviews horror movies and freaky films in these very pages, has launched his own forteanfocused podcast. Creepy Cove Community Church is presented as a horror-t

CONTACT US BY POST: PO BOX 66598, LONDON N11 9EN, OR E-MAIL SIEVEKING@FORTEANTIMES.COM PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS The report of an “Irish Wildman” [FT399:67] is not unusual. Stories about the ‘Wild Irish’ were common in England in the

It was Autumn 1986. I was in my mid-20s, late to leave the nest, living with my widowed father until I was in my mid-30s. We were more like flat-mates than father and son. My elder brother Paul, meanwhile, had flown the nest back in 1980 when he marr

Travel restrictions, lockdowns and short, cold winter days have kept many an adventurous fortean housebound these last couple of months. Even though there is hope of release on the horizon, a return to the pre-pandemic days of carefree travel is stil

Frederick John Kempster was born in the London suburb of Bayswater in 1889, the second youngest boy in a large family. On Christmas Day 1897, his father, the milkman Joseph Kempster, died of asthma and bronchitis aged just 50, and his mother soon str

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FORTEAN TIMES is a monthly magazine of news, reviews and research on strange phenomena and experiences, curiosities, prodigies and portents. It was founded by Bob Rickard in 1973 to continue the work of Charles Fort (1874–1932). Born of Dutch stock i

A Philippine village’s police chief was killed when he raided an illegal cockfight and a razor-sharp metal blade worn by the birds severed his femoral artery. Authorities in Northern Samar province have been clamping down on cockfight gatherings. Coc

THE FINAL VOYAGE OF THE SS OURANG MEDAN A BRIEF HISTORY OF RADAR AND UFO RESEARCH + EXORCISTS AT LARGE, WEIRDEST GHOSTS, FANTASTIC BEASTS AND MUCH MORE… FORTEAN TIMES 402 ON SALE 28 JAN 2021 ■