I've spent the past couple of weeks working in the Seeley Historical Library, Cambridge, where the selection of books on offer is resolutely targeted to the needs of undergraduate coursework. So, browsing the shelves in my chosen alcove in search of something to read in a spare five minutes, I found myself faced with a pretty unappetising selection of material - not least because it turned out that I'd chanced into the section of the library dealing with the Holocaust. In the end, the choice boiled down to Rose's seminal Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (sample chapter title: "The German statists and the Jewish Question, 1781-1812") or a copy of Art Spiegelman's Maus. I'm not too proud to say that, after practically no soul searching at all, I plumped for Spiegelman.

Maus, for those who don't know it, is a 300-page comic book which deals with Spiegelman's father's struggle to survive World War II - no easy task for a Polish Jew who fell into German hands as early as 2 September 1939. It's a harrowing story, not least in its second half, which deals principally with the year that Vladek Spiegelman spent in Auschwitz, but though the book's been out now for more than 20 years, I'd never actually read it before. It was with some surprise, then, that I stumbled across a couple of very interesting accounts of psychic phenomena within its pages.

The first occurs quite early in the book, when, as a result of the German conquest of Poland, Vladek finds himself interned in a forced labour camp during the first autumn of the war. One night he had a dream...

"Don't worry..."

A voice was talking to me. It was, I think, my dead grandfather.

"Don't worry, my child..."

It was so real, this voice...

For Brits of a certain age Arthur C Clarke has a lot to answer for - and I'm not just talking 2001 A Space Odyssey.  In 1980 ITV in the UK started to broadcast Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, a 13 part series looking at unexplained Phenomena.  By this point in my life I was already hooked on Forteana and had already read all of the relevant books in my local library and I had started to build up my own library.  I was however still on my own.  No internet to chat to people, no UnConvention to meet up with like minded folk and I am afraid that at that point I had not even heard of Fortean Times.  So one of my only outlets of Forteana was Arthur and his tremendous show.  The opening credits showed a beautiful skull made of crystal.  I'd read about it and seen still pictures but thiswas a movingimage - it was far more beautiful than I had ever realised.  And then on September the 16th 1980 in an episode entitled Ancient Wisdom there was a whole lot of information on the Skull.  I lapped it up.  It was fantastic.  For me this was rapidly to become one of my three all time favourite Fortean objects (Shroud of Turin and Nessie being the other two). 

I have to say I was more than slightly appalled to receive the news from
Paul Sieveking last Monday that Ken Campbell had died suddenly the
day before at only 66 and seeming so full of vigor and inventiveness
that he looked like he would go on forever, I'd only just been
hearing about how good he'd been in Edinburgh and was about to ring
his agent to book him for my science festival.

In my biographical note I say something like “sorting clippings with
the forteans is the only thing I do now that I was doing 15 years
ago”, since I started this I've lived in 4 different cities, had 4
different jobs, 4 houses, 2 wives, three cats, 5 cars and 2 children,
but every month or so, or as close to that as I can wangle it I have
trundled off down to Paul Sieveking's flat in north London to commune
with the Gang of Fort over a tray of unsorted clippings, and for
something so core to the activities for the Fortean Times what
actually goes on at a clipping sort is remarkably little known by the
majority of readers.

The format of the day has remained delightfully unchanged too. Dramatis
personae usually involves Paul, Bob Rickard, Steve Moore and myself,
and in later years Mark Pilkington, Rachel Carthy and Phil Baker have
joined in, Joe McNally was a regular for a while, and all sorts of
other people have made guest appearances, but the core of sorting
veterans has remained essentially the same. When I first read FT, I
assumed the flow of clippings that came in from all over the world
must be being sorted by a vast army of fortean minions somewhere in
the semi-legendary Fortean Towers, and after sending in my own
clippings for a while thought it would be great to join them so I
could get to see all the stuff the mag didn't have room for, so I got
in touch and volunteered, and was slightly surprised to find it was
just a few stalwarts in a front room somewhere who were pleased to
have another hand to help out.

Things have been a bit quiet of late so I thought I'd tell you a bit about my proposed Summer Holiday trip to London.

Me being me there are two things that are quite important - firstly I want to pack as much into my time there as possible and secondly I want there to be a strong Fortean theme running throughout.

There was one item in the calendar I wanted to see - I'm a member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) so I thought I'd better try and get to one of their lectures so that was a fixed point in terms of dates, everything else could potentially be fitted in around it. So I started looking around at what is on in London that I could fit in.

Firstly I was delighted to find that I could take in a lecture by Benjamin Creme - emissary for Maitreya (basically the second coming and he's already here - apparently he lives somewhere in the East End of London - I wonder if I could pop round for a cup of tea?). I know the basic Maitreya story having been to a couple of Edinburgh based lectures - the lecturer was inspired to join the movement after hearing Creme talk. So he must be inspirational! Oh and he's in his 80's so best to get him whilst I still can!

Next up is a talk and walk by Scott Wood of the South East London Folklore Society (SELFS). Part of the London Magtastic series of events Scott will "take a short tour around London Bridge which will
feature ghostly, monstrous and magical sites. See the sites of a magical
battle with a ghost, the legend of Mary Overy, a wife's ghostly onslaught,
the wizard-artist's studio and much more". Sounds good to me.

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:

I’m uncomfortably aware that the research portion of this blog has gone by the board over the last few months – blame it on my struggles with an upcoming book. So I thought it might be an idea to step back and take a detailed look at ways of getting an entirely new project off the ground, exploiting all the sources that are available nowadays to someone trying to pin down a subject – perhaps one that’s not too well documented and that seems a challenge to research.

All on board? OK, let’s pick a topic and see what we can do with it. Oh, and to inject a little bit of faux excitement in the project – just like on TV! – we’ll also set ourselves a totally spurious time deadline of, say, one hour to gather as much information we possibly can. Well, if it’s good enough for Time Team…

Our subject is one I’ve known of vaguely for years and years, but never properly looked into: the mysterious disappearance of the steamer Waratah, a brand-new passenger ship belonging to the Blue Anchor Line, in July 1909. The ship, a 9,300 ton, single-stack luxury liner intended for the London-Sydney route, vanished off the coast of South Africa with all hands – a total of 211 passengers and crew. According to most accounts, not a single body or piece of identifiable wreckage was ever found, and repeated searches have since failed to reveal any trace of the ship on the sea bed.

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.