One of the key services planned for the CFI is an online archive of Fortean periodicals (including , ufology, cryptozoology, psychical research and so on). Recently, I saw an example of how this could be done.

Inspired by the images of old news clippings posted by Mike Dash and Theo Paixmans in this forum, I'd like to share with you a recent little bonanza. Thanks to a tip from Brian Chapman on the forteana mail list - forteana@yahoogroups.com - these digitised clippings came from a recent and short-lived trial run of the long-anticipated digital archive of the Times, spanning 1785-1985. For a few days in mid-August 2007, the Thompson-Gale host site - see www.gale.com/ - made the entire 200-year archive freely available for genealogy researchers as part of National Family History Week.

Alas, I only discovered it one day before the free password expired and had only an hour or so to test it for Fortean data. The Times archive is now only available through their regular subscription procedure - www.gale.com/Times/  

As anyone who has used the rather eccentric indexes to ancient runs of the Times will know, they were made for a different era, one of gentlemen scholars with lots of time on their hands. They were indexed, usually, on the short headline so you also had to have a talent for coming at your subject obliquely; a ‘frog fall', for example, may have been indexed as ‘A Curious Phenomenon' or an SHC might be ‘Shocking Death in Putney'.

Academia has long been a little suspicious of the Fortean world, and with some reason. There has always been so much woolly thinking, so many unprovable hypotheses, and so little truck with the scientific method on our side of the academic iron curtain that — setting aside the rationalists at CSICOP — aspiring scholars have chosen to stay well clear of our subject when it comes to selecting areas of study, and most especially when choosing a topic for that most important of academic hurdles, the PhD thesis - a critical decision that can heavily affect one's chances of securing employment thereafter.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. Students of folklore, social studies and psychology have occasionally turned their attention to the sort of topics covered in Fortean Times. But even in these disciplines, the problems of securing funding, a supervisor and — above all — maximising the prospects of finding a job have deterred all but a few from pursuing serious study of Fortean topics, now matter how sceptical the writers’ viewpoint.

That this is a great shame goes pretty much without saying. Few able researchers in our field have the luxury of devoting three or more years to full–time work on any topic, or of utilising the sort of resources available in great universities and large academic libraries. But the problem works both ways. When was the last time you saw a truly academic work, much less an unpublished thesis, referenced in a book by a Fortean author?

Fancy owning a piece of Fortean history? Well I can't quite offer it I'm afraid but I can literally offer the next best thing! <Having checked a few things I take it all back - I can offer it - it is indeed number 31 the house of the Wrights that is for sale>

Cottingley is forever in our minds courtesy of Arthur Conan Doyle and the fairy photographs of Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths from 1917 and 1920. There are so many Fortean aspects and indeed cliches in this case that I shall not rehash them here. Cottingley is currently experiencing a bit of a building boom and new streets are being added, streets with names such as Oberon Way, Lysander Way and Goodfellow Close. There is already a Fairy Dell there. But Main Street survives. This is the street where the girls were staying at the time, specifcially in number 31.

Number 31 was sold in July of 2000, for £57 000. But it now appears that next door is up for sale.

Estate Agent advert

A mere snip at £154 995

The estate agent description inlcudes mention of the fairies:

The Rat Queen of London

Central Europe may have its Rat Kings - bundles of rats permanently joined together by their tails; between 30 and 50 examples have turned up in the last 400 years or so depending on who you ask, and preserved ones are to be found in museums in Hamburg, Hamlein, Stuttgart and Gottingen (I borrowed that one for the Fortean exhibition I did in Croydon), but only London has a Rat Queen.

Of all the ghastly trades pursued in Victorian London, few were worse than that of the Toshers, who rummaged about inside the city sewers retrieving anything even vaguely saleable, well, except maybe the "Pure" Collector, who gathered dog shit for the tanning trade - they had a special glove for the task. Given the foulness and danger inherent in their work, it‘s not surprising that toshers were a superstitious lot, and according to one named Jerry Sweetly¹, their superstitions featured the mysterious Rat Queen, who could bring a man luck in the pipe, and he claimed to speak from personal experience.

The start of a new year is a time for looking back, for looking forward, and - perhaps most entertainingly of all - for checking out how well the world's assorted psychic doom-mongers have been doing in the prediction stakes.

Thirty years ago now, Irving Wallace and David Wallechinsky asked many of the leading sensitives of the day to list their forecasts for the future, then published the results in ever-wonderful People's Alamanacs 1 & 2 - which readers of this blog will know still rank among my favourite reading matter. A few hedged their bets with the sort of vague, undated prognostications that you can never really label "wrong" - suggesting that "a cure for blood diseases will be found" sometimes between 1975 and the far-distant future strikes me as a fairly safe bet. Most, though, filed startlingly-precise and unmistakably media-friendly predictions revolving around imminent disaster on a national and global scale.

In an attempt to be fair, I've checked every prediction from the Almanac #1 that's both firmly dated and reasonably unambiguous, and tried to choose a balanced selection from them. Bearing in mind, then, that a far-seeing psychic gazing into his or her crystal ball back in 1975 ought to have been able to predict the collapse of Communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, AIDS, Gulf Wars I and II, the Falklands conflict, a female British Prime Minister, the assassination attempt on President Reagan, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the rise of reality television, the death of Diana, the destruction by plane of the World Trade Center, and the Boston Red Sox finally winning a World Series, let's take a look at how the Almanac's all-star line-up fared.

Psychic #1

Malcolm Bessant of the College of Psychic Studies, London

Predictions for 1975-80

It's always good to start the new year with a look back at things past - it's a chance for us to make sure we don't repeat the same mistakes if nothing else! And if we look back to Charles Fort we can see how much things have changed.

Whilst working on his collection of data of the damned Fort had to travel to major library collections and fortunately he had a bequest which meant he could devote the necessary time to his researches. Availability and ease of access were major issues for Fort and for many who followed in his footsteps, but look at the situation now in 2008. We have the internet - communication with fellow researchers of any of our Fortean interests is a lot quicker than good old snail mail - we can even carry out real time conversations through the net without the previously prohibitive phone call charges of the past. The net itself is a vast and ever changing resource - we can check and recheck facts to our hearts content. Ok anyone can put up a web page and say anything they want but looking at one source isn't research - it's plagarism! Cross checking of information is so much easier now, what would have taken months in the past can be accomplished in days if not hours.

Many reports of interest are originally published in newspapers and journals - many of which have online archives which are searchable. I popped the phrase "mermaid" into the online archive section of The Scotsman newspaper and produced a range of hits from 1817 onwards. And each one was accompanied by a pdf of the original article - how long would it have taken me to search all edtions of the paper - either paper copies (if I could get hold of them) or on microfiche? And how many mistakes would I have made? Being realistic the online search engine may have made mistakes but there are probably less than I would have made! This makes research of articles so much easier - it's a godsend, it really is.

The invisible mongoose that lives in the wall has asked me to make a list of the best books I read in 2007. I’m not one to argue, so here’s a double-handful of titles arranged in no particular order.

The Trickster and the Paranormal (Xlibris, 2001) by George P. Hansen.
A dense, occasionally baffling disquisition of how the paranormal works. Contains a staggering amount of information about skeptics, sociology, parapsychology, stage magic, literature, hoaxing, shamans and religion. The last 200 pages can be a real briar patch, but the author presents complicated material as clearly as possible, tells interesting stories, like his work on the Brooklyn Bridge abduction case, and includes some first-rate dish. From time to time I muttered, “What the hell is he talking about?” but by the end I felt like I actually understood something about the supernatural. Then I had a nervous breakdown.

The Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena 2nd edition (Rough Guides, 2007) by Bob Rickard and John Michell.
Whether you’re a budding fortean or someone who can use “lithobolia” in a sentence, you will enjoy this overview of the paranormal. The Guide contains fresh and familiar material, but what makes it really interesting is how the contents are arranged. Instead of sections on “poltergeists” or “UFOs”, the authors use headings like “teleportation” that describe what seems to be happening. This makes it easier to discuss phenomena without preconceptions and avoids the “linkage blindness” that can occur with familiar categories. The book’s a little unwieldy for bathtub reading, and there’s an arguable fact or two, but it’s a glimpse of what the great, unwritten, Encyclopedia Forteana might be like.

Thanks to everyone who voted - here are the results of the CFI Seven Fortean Wonders of the World (in no particular order)

Bigfoot / Yeti	Shroud of Turin	Piri Reis Map
UFO's	Oak Island	Crop Circles
	Nazca

And that's it - that's our list of the Seven Fortean Wonders of the World. If you want to discuss any of these why not pop along to the forums area?

As a Christmas treat, I’m reposting this gem, composed by Paul Sieveking for Fortean Times 177 (October 2003), which celebrated the 30th year of publication. This list of curious titles and amusing author names was collected by Paul Sieveking and others (including me) while working on the last hard copy edition of the British Library Catalogue of Printed Books, (1979-1985).   

Well that's the second round now closed and the third starting. Some last minute rallying of groups led to a surge in numbers of votes cast for certain categories - nothing wrong with that - the important thing is that peoples voices are heard and that people vote. If you want to argue about the inclusion or non-inclusion of things from the list please feel free to use the forum area - that's what it's there for.

The final 20, which can be voted on on the right hand side of this page or on the round three dedicated page, are an interesting list. They've all earned their place - firstly one or more people took the time to nominate them and then they've successfully come through two rounds of voting. But what will make it? What will be in the final list of Seven Fortean Wonders? It's down to you - if you want something there vote for it and persuade others to do so via the forum. The final list will be available at the start of 2008 and it will be a list of seven with no rank or ordering - they're in the list or they're not, it's as simple as that.

The first round of voting for the Seven Fortean Wonders has now closed.

Thanks to everyone who took part we now have a smaller list for the second round. Again you will be able to nominate your choice and the twenty with the highest number of votes will go through to the next round and after the third round we’ll have our list of seven. You can vote from the side bar or at the Round Two web page.

You can see the final 38 here.

Don't forget, you can also discuss the candidates (and a few other things) over at the CFI Forums.

A project such as this relies on your participation so thank you very much for the voting so far and stick with it! Some people have announced that they were finding it too tough to vote in the first round as the choice was too wide – hopefully this will make it easier although I suspect not – it’s still a mighty impressive list of Forteana. If you know someone who didn’t vote first them round give them a shout – it’s definitely not too late. The more people who take part the more representative the poll will be.

Like you we here at the CFI have no idea who will win – we all have our favourites and we hope they’ll make it through to the end – but we’ll have to wait until January 1st 2008 for the announcement. If you don’t vote they might not be there and then you only have yourself to blame! One thing you can do to make sure your personal choice gets through is to use the forums and argue your case – we already have some discussion there from round one – lets have some more.

I know some people have expressed some dissatisfaction with the voting system – well I’m sorry about that but a system had to be chosen and whatever method we went for there would always be some dissent. This is the system we’ve got and this is what we’re going with – if you have any views you’d like to express again please feel free to use the forums as an area of debate we can then take on board ideas for future polls.

In conclusion – many thanks for everyone who has voted so far and thanks in advance for the votes that are about to come in in the future rounds. I know the final list of seven will be a strong guide for some future holidays for me – I hope it will inspire you too. Many thanks.

Zapasita Leader Subcommandante Marcos          Subgenius deity Bob Dobbs

When the New Seven Wonders of the World was announced, Loren Coleman suggested making a list of seven fortean wonders to accompany it. I found the prospect of choosing a world list intimidating, however, and decided to concentrate on the United States.

The qualifications for being one of the New Seven Wonders were not rigorous; candidates had to be "man made, completed before 2000, and in an "'acceptable'" state of preservation." [1]. I used the same criteria, including some choices that represent a category of objects.

That said, here they are, ready to be made into postage stamps and collectible spoons, the Seven Fortean Wonders of America.

After a slightly longer than anticipated gestation period (computer problems which took the CFI blogs down) the voting for the Charles Fort Institute Seven Fortean Wonders of the World is finally here.

On the Seven Wonders web page you can see a list of all 79 nominations. Each is linked to a paragraph giving more details and there are further links to more information so you can find out as much as you like about each candidate before you vote. We've also set up a forum for discussion - just log in and champion your favourites.

The voting is split into three rounds, initially from 79 down to 40, then 40 to 20 and finally 20 to the all important 7. The final result will be anounced on the 1st of January 2008 - be sure to log onto the Blogs to check how you favourites have done, the result will also be on the original voting page.

Thanks to everyone who has taken the trouble to put forward their nominations, thanks to everyone who votes, thanks to Dino for setting things up, thanks to Loren Coleman and all at The Anomalist and thanks for all who have helped to spread the word including the Russian UFO magazine (click image for big version).

and a fantastic two page spread in The Sunday Sport!
(click image for big version)

We want this poll to be as representative as possible so the more voting we have the better - spread the word, tell all your friends, get them to vote and get them to tell their friends as well. vote. Vote. VOTE

The name Herman Webster Mudgett is largely forgotten, but he was an infamous figure in late 19th century America.

Mudgett, better known as "H.H. Holmes", was a successful swindler and serial killer who built a "Murder Castle" in Chicago, a three-story human abattoir complete with shops, apartments, and its own crematorium. He was captured in 1895 and wrote a death-row memoir in which he claimed a total of 27 murder victims, including men, women and children. Mudgett was hanged and, at his request, the coffin filled with concrete to discourage grave robbers.

True crime buffs remember the Castle, but there is another aspect of the story that suggests the man's malignant influence was not cemented into the ground with him.

According to David Franke's book, The Torture Doctor:

It's one thing to read about the delusions of elderly professors, long a source of exasperation and amusement to forteans, but dealing with the consequences of their behavior first-hand is quite another,. Nobel Prize winners, though, seem to be in a class of their own when it comes to waywardness, as I have been finding out in recent weeks. Over the years, Nobel laureates have espoused vitamin C as the cure for all ills(Linus Pauling),admitted having regular conversations with talking raccoons (Kary Mullis) and spent years espousing dubious right-wing causes (William Shockley), and this is a far from comprehensive list of outside-the-box ideas either. Most recently, James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA’s structure , has elevated himself to this dubious pantheon, by opining in a Sunday Times interview that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He went on to say there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true" This was subsequently made front-page news by the Independent, who accused Watson of racism. As I was supposed to be running a public interview with him days later and staging an exhibition on his work (already unexpectedly complex due to the Northern Rock banking crisis and chronic vagueness from the exhibition provider) this led to interesting times

One of the great joys of reading history is the endless capacity it possesses for throwing up the unexpected.

There I was, ploughing happily through Richard Holmes’s well-researched and anecdote-rich Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front in my bath, when I ran across an old friend in quite unusual circumstances. ‘Structural and personal problems prevailed,’ writes Holmes in a passage otherwise dryly devoted to the problems encountered by British artillery in suppressing German heavy guns. ‘Perhaps the most notorious came in VI Corps in late 1916 when the Amazon explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett arrived to take up the new post of corps counter-battery colonel. He immediately declared that he was not in the least bit interested in the innovative work being done on the detection of German guns by flash-spotting and sound ranging… The only counter-battery shots which he would allow were those against targets clearly visible from British lines - or those he had personally detected on his ouija board.’

Richard Honeck (1877-after 1963), an American murderer, served what is believed to be the longest gaol sentence ever to terminate in a prisoner's release. Jailed in 1899 for the killing of a former school friend, Honeck was paroled from Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois on 20 December 1963, having served 64 years and one month of his life sentence. In the decades between his conviction and the time his case came to public notice again in August 1963, he received only a single letter – a four-line note from his brother in 1904 – and two visitors: a friend in 1904, and a newspaper reporter in 1963.

My recent stumble across mention of this oddity in Irving Wallace and David Wallechinsky's incomparable The People's Almanac (New York: Doubleday, 1975), p.1341, inspired a brief flurry of research in the online archives of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune - the magnificent repositories of which are now fully keyword searchable from their first issues to the present day. A quarter of an hour's work was enough to flesh out a story easily bizarre enough to make the pages of FT – a good example of just how quickly researchers can move in this digital age.

^{Photo courtesy of Iain Thornber}

Mention of Loch Morar in my last post put me in mind of a legend from the same district that is not at all well known among Forteans, but which combines, in an interesting way, two distinct folklore motifs: those of the ‘loyal pet’ and the ‘harbinger of death’.

The Grey Dog of Meoble (which I have seen given, in the Gaelic in which the story was first told, as an cuth glas Meobhail or an cu glas Mheobail) is a gigantic, shaggy-haired Scottish deerhound whose preternatural appearances are said to presage death to members of the Macdonald clan in the south Morar districts where the tradition first flourished. Tales of the spectral animal’s appearances certainly date to the first half of the nineteenth century; we know that Caraid nan Gaidheal, a renowned Highland piper who died in 1867, had heard the legend (John Gibson, Old and New World Highland Bagpiping (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2002, p.318). They come not only from the tiny crofting hamlet of Meoble (pronounced “Meeble”) – a settlement, now all but abandoned, in an isolated district a mile from the shores of Loch Morar – but from other parts of Scotland and even Canada.

Most tales of the Grey Dog concern the hound’s appearances to Morar MacDonalds who are on the point of death. One typical tradition concerns ‘an old Highland lady who lived in Glasgow in the early 1900s and whose family were closely related to the MacDonalds of Meoble.’ According to this story, the old woman

As someone who is constantly researching some Fortean topic or other, I really appreciate the notes by Mike Dash and Theo Paijmans in their blogs about research resources. I really hope they will continue and the notes build up into a series useful to any Fortean researcher ... and I fully expect to contribute to that series myself.

Here's my first shot, the point of which is that it is well worth monitoring auction catalogues for items of interest. Remember, not too long ago, the well publicised auction of the camera with which the notorious Cottingley fairy pictures were made? Sadly, such items themselves usually fall well beyond what most of us (even collectively?) could afford, but there are good literary gleanings too.

I must thank Phil Baker who, at a recent gathering at Paul Sieveking's home in North London to sort newsclippings, brought to our attention a notice from Christie's auction house of possibly the most famous of all photographs of a footprint of the manimal that westerners referred to as the Abominable Snowman, better known in the Himalayas as the yeti. Closer to the date of the sale, I began to monitor the Christie's website. I had the (daft?) idea of bidding for them myself, but when one newspaper (sorry, lost the clipping) announced that the photos were expected to fetch more than £2000. I wisely let that drop, but I saved the following details from their online catalogue in case they were not available after the auction.

It has seemed to me that one of the most important questions about our existence is what happens to us at or after death. It is a question with far-reaching implications. If some sort of sentience can have any detectable independence of the human body, either in life or after its death, the proof would affect the fundamentals of morality, psychology and neuroscience, and (I presume) the more obscure realms of physics that deal with multiple dimensions and mysterious quantum energy states.

Besides the challenges it would make to current scientific understanding, the affect on religion and culture in all its forms are almost beyond imagining as it impacts upon every single person alive at the time. The possibility of some sort of survival of death is not just a personal matter, but must extend to all those who have lived and died before us. In turn it would raise questions about the nature of consciousness, personality and society itself. We'd even have to redefine death and what we mean by the 'dead'.

Obviously, we have no idea what such a survival may entail or what form it might take. Yes, we have a wealth of literature purporting to be communications with the deceased, full of accounts of dying and the world beyond, but it is narrative not fact. The best you can say is that they are the experiences of those who think they are in contact with the deceased, for we have no practical way of distinguishing between the real and the imagined here, especially when it might be based upon misperception or misinterpretation.

Well, mid-August found me visiting my in-laws in the South of France, they live up in the Black Mountains, about an hour north of Carcassonne, a hair-raising drive along roads that are all hair-pin bend, not quite wide enough for two cars and populated by locals whose driving technique tends towards the "drive as fast as possible down the middle and everyone get out the way" approach. This made for interesting times when driving an unfamiliar rented Renault Twingo - my thoughts on transport for the next visit tend towards 4 wheel drive army surplus Tatra trucks. The in-laws actually live just outside a place called Lespinassiere, 15 minutes up an unmade track in a house called Cavaielle that seems to have been there for longer than anyone can trace, and which was once the centre of a farming hamlet, now overgrown once more by the surrounding forest. A strange and atmospheric place. It is also about an hour and a half from Rennes-Le-Chateau, so, as a Fortean, this was an opportunity I could not miss, and sloped off for a day to visit.

This wonderful view shows the rarely-visited eastern end of monster-haunted Loch Morar, one of the most starkly beautiful, yet utterly inaccessible, places in our overcrowded island.

A century and a half ago, two tiny communities named Oban and Kinlochmorar existed at this end of the 11-mile-long loch, and were home to perhaps score of crofters and ghillies, but there was never any road or even a footpath to connect them to the communities at the western end of Morar and the last inhabitants abandoned their properties shortly after the end of World War I. No one has lived at the head of the loch since then, and it's scarcely surprising that when Elizabeth Montgomery-Campbell and David Solomon wrote The Search For Morag (1972), their ground-breaking study of Morar's lake monster tradition, they recorded only a single sighting from the far end of the loch, nor that I (and I suspect even those with a keen interest in Morar) never had the least idea of what this isolated district actually looked like.

The terrible coach crash in the Alps a few days ago, in which nearly 30 Polish Catholics were killed on their way back from a pilgrimage to La Salette , directed public attention momentarily to a Marian shrine that's long been overshadowed by the better-known and more accessible vision sites at Lourdes, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and Fatima, in central Portugal.

La Salette first came to notice a little more than 150 years ago, in September 1846, when two illiterate peasant children, 15-year-old Melanie Mathieu and Maximin Giraud, 11, reported a remarkable vision they claimed to have experienced while herding cattle on a bleak mountainside some 6,000 feet above sea level. According to one early account, set down by the Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham, William Ullathorne, some eight years after the events they described, the children had just woken from a lunchtime nap when Melanie

If you've been to the CFI homepage or read the editorial section of issue 226 of Fortean Times you'll notice one of our projects is now up and running: the Seven Fortean Wonders of the World.

A recent large scale project 07.07.07 involved the public voting for a list of modern day Seven Wonders of the World. And basically we would like to do the same.

The first stage of the Seven Fortean Wonders of the World is to collect nominations and this stage is open until the end of September 2007. There are two categories, merely to help focus the mind as there are so many things that could be nominated. The two categories are Fortean places and Fortean artefacts. The only thing excluded are people, so Charles Fort is out. However artefacts relating to people are allowable so the two skulls of John the Baptist would be allowable.

The nominations have to be emailed to the CFI address.

While the debate is raging over the final selection of the New Seven Wonders of the World, with such a limited number to choose from the vast heritage of mankind, some will unfortunately always be left out and controversy reigns, although, in a way, the new list started as a private initiative and doesn't seem to have the support of UNESCO. However, as the American newspaper The Iowa Citizen claimed in 1891, ancient Korea had its own seven wonders. Perhaps this would be an ideal solution to implement; let each country make up a list of its seven wonders. It could even stimulate the debate on how to preserve these precious antiquities. But Korea's ancient seven wonders were truly something to behold, if we are to believe The Iowa Citizen or the St. Louis Republic, the newspaper where the article was initially published. Take for instance that 'irregular cube' that apparently seems to float in the air. Antigravity in ancient Korea? An incomprehensible artifact from a dim past, magic, miracle or a rare optical illusion? A wonder is a wonder, and one can still visit the beautiful temple of the floating stone in South Korea.

Iowa, Iowa City, The Iowa Citizen, July 24, 1891

" Very largely we shall concern ourselves with enormous fiery objects that have either plunged into the ocean or risen from the ocean", writes Fort in his The Book of the Damned. Among the many examples that he cites of luminous wheels, luminous bodies rising from the sea or hurthling through the skies, Fort tells of "...an object, described as "a large ball of fire", seen to rise from the sea, near Cape Race. We are told that it rose to a height of fifty feet, and then advanced close to the ship, then moving away, remaining visible about five minutes..."(1)

Interestingly, when scanning several 19th century Dutch newspapers for Fortean items of interest, I found that the incident that had occurred in 1887, was published beginning of the next year in the Netherlands. Sofar I located the item in two Dutch newspapers, the Texelse Courant, of March 11, 1888 and Nieuwe Amersfoortsche Courant of March 24, 1888. These clippings and my translations follow.

Texelse Courant, March 11, 1888