Fortean Times

Welcome to our penultimate issue of 2021, in which we mark a pair of notable 50th anniversaries. November 1971 witnessed one of the strangest and most audacious heists in modern history, when a mysterious man wearing a now iconic dark suit and sungla

While “squirrel kings” have been reported on a number of occasions in recent years (see FT300:14, 355:25, 373:9, 383:9), with the most recent one, involving seven baby squirrels in Grand Blanc, Michigan, in October, true rat kings – balls of rats wit

In Canada, Julie McCann, 38, of Vernon, British Columbia, has set an unofficial world record for running on all fours. On 10 August she completed the 100ms (328ft) in 22.99 seconds, comfortably beating the official Guinness Women’s World Record of 25

• In April, the New Forest was haunted by someone in a gimp suit. Hampshire police were looking for “a naked man wearing bondage gear” after someone described simultaneously as being “naked” and as wearing “bondage clothing, boots and a green rucksac

New research published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B documents the first ever scientific evidence of a talking duck. The duck, a male musk duck named ‘Ripper’, hand-reared in captivity at the Tidbinbilla Nature Rese

Tim Whittard and Matt Everett put together three little words: fortean, film and festival. Just four months later, over 90 filmmakers from across the globe had submitted their work and the event had taken place. The venue was the Sherborne Cinema in

A MONTHLY EXCAVATION OF ODDITIES AND ANTIQUITIES Tall el-Hammam, a major Bronze Age city located in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea, was destroyed c.1650 BC by some kind of exceptional force, an event that has caused much speculation in recent ye

“Everything that is called true must merge away indistinguishably into something called false” – Fort, Books, p148 Another round of ancient-modern juxtapositions, the two halves, though somewhat differing in content and style, forming a recognisable

In Barcelona, Colombian singer Shakira was attacked by a pair of wild boars in a city park. The animals grabbed her bag and headed off into woods where they shredded it and destroyed the contents. This was just the latest incident in a continuing con

Surgeons at the Soroka Medical Centre in Beersheba, Israel, have separated one-year-old conjoined twins who were connected by the back of the head. The twin girls, who have not been named, were separated in a 12-hour operation that involved dozens of

I hope very much, in the coming months, to publish the second part of the Fairy Census. The first 500 fairy encounters covered 2014-2017 (see FT362:30-37). The second load will cover 2018-2021. If you have any fairy experiences, please send them in.

In the annals of crime, there is an endless fascination with the unsolved, Iand especially with the unidentified perpetrator. Jack the Ripper and his crimes live on today precisely because no one knows who he was. Similarly, there are the enduring co

Hello again, welcome back to the concluding part of our expedition to the Mysterious World, ITV’s most disturbing tea-time television series of the 1980s. We have a final three episodes before us, presented from his personal archive by Fort-fan and s

There are countless holes in the ground: some are full of water, some are open voids. The obvious question one might ask upon encountering a hole, pond or lake is: “How deep is it?” The answer isn’t so obvious. Legends and tall tales have always eman

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE EDITOR AT DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM Dir Mitch Jenkins, UK 2021 Available on digital platforms Possibly the first film Alan Moore hasn’t demanded to have his name removed from, The Show is a typically phantasmagorica

Congratulations to Rob Gandy for introducing us to a new winner in the highly contested category of “Most Ambiguous Photograph of a Ghost”. The image accompanying his “Weird Wheels of the Wolds” article [FT407:49] is allegedly of a phantom woman, and

I was very interested in your recent article about the Cottingley Fairies [FT410:14-15]. In May 1975 I was working as a researcher on the ITV children’s programme Magpie. While looking for items that might interest our young audience, I came across a

Mary Tresize was born at Madron, near Newlyn in Cornwall, in 1766. She married William Kelynack, a member of a well-known Cornish family, and worked as a fishwife for many years, without ever accomplishing anything interesting or newsworthy. In 1851,