Fortean Times

CAPUCINE DESLOUIS THE ART OF THE WEIRD You’ll notice that our June issue has a loose theme running through it: we have focused on the often surprising relationships between the world of strange phenomena and that of the visual arts, a decision prompted in part by two major exhibitions running currently in London that each provides a food for fortean thought. The identity of ‘Jack the Ripper’, and the killer’s subsequent quasi-folkloric afterlife, has exercised many a mind since the conclusion of the unsolved Whitechapel murders, with contributions in these very pages from the likes of Therese Taylor, Jan Bondeson, Scott Wood and the late Ripperologist and one-time FT stalwart Nick Warren. In our cover story (p28), Billy Rough tackles what must be one of the strangest Ripper theories, as…

WITCH VS WITCH Some believe that Germany’s failure to invade Britain during the Second World War was due to the intervention of Britain’s magic practitioners, organised by Dion Fortune (see FT267:34-41). Whether or not that was the case, witches on both sides of the Ukraine war have now mobilised to support their countries. In what seems more like a media stunt than an actual magical working, on 12 March the “Great Witches of Russia” held a general council in support of Vladimir Putin. This involved more than 100 witches gathering in Moscow and carrying out a 20-minute ritual to boost Putin and Russia, filmed by Russian TV. Presided over by Aljona Polin, who was described as “Russia’s leading witch”, the participants, dressed in matching dark hooded robes decorated with birds…

FORK IN THE BRAIN Fairview, Oregon, is seeking a Guinness World Record for the tallest fork, having installed a 37ft (11m) one outside a new food truck plaza. “We wanted something on the corner, and then one of the design teams said, let’s just put a fork here and we’ll come back to it, and it just kind of stuck in the brain,” said Mayor Brian Cooper. “You can come up with an entire marketing scheme of ‘Take a left at the fork’, ‘The Fork in Fairview’”. The current tallest fork is 35ft (10.5m) high and is in Missouri. [UPI] 16 Feb 2022. CHOPPED POTATO In Cyprus, locals awoke on New Year’s Day to find someone had chopped down the 13ft (4m) “Big Potato” that stood at the entrance to…

• When Indiana paramedics were called out to an emergency in a rural area, they found 57-year-old chicken farmer Christopher Adams lying drunk on his henhouse floor, naked, covered in blood and with a live, five-pound (2.3kg) chicken sticking out of his rectum, clucking loudly. After unsuccessfully attempting to remove the bird there and then, they took Adams and his chicken to hospital where the hen was extracted in a delicate seven-hour operation, with both man and chicken surviving. “The bird was dying of suffocation when it got here. It had already badly lacerated the patient’s bowels in a desperate attempt to get out and was still gashing at it like crazy,” said a hospital spokesperson. The chicken suffered only minor injuries, but Adams needed seven blood transfusions and more…

WHO BY FIRE When the fire department of Laranjeiras do Sul in the Brazilian state of Paraná were called out to deal with a burning lorry on the BR-158 highway, they found the vehicle’s cargo box ablaze and despite their efforts, it was almost completely destroyed. The only parts remaining were the rear doors with a painting of Our Lady of Aparecida, the patron saint of Brazil, on them, which were completely intact and undamaged, showing no sign of the effects of fire. Fire department spokesperson Carlos de Souza said they could not explain why the doors were undamaged saying: “It burned very quickly, the only explanation is really something supernatural, a miracle”. viraltab.news, 12 Jan 2022. WHO BY WATER When Father Stepanos Doudoukjian, parish priest at St Peter Armenian…

BBC Researchers digging at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota in the US have turned up an extraordinarily well-preserved fossil dinosaur leg complete with skin. Professor Paul Barrett from the London Natural History Museum said: “It’s a Thescelosaurus. It’s from a group that we didn’t have any previous record of what its skin looked like, and it shows very conclusively that these animals were very scaly like lizards. They weren’t feathered like their meat-eating contemporaries.” The leg was found on its own, with no evidence of the rest of the dinosaur anywhere in the vicinity. “This looks like an animal whose leg has simply been ripped off really quickly. There’s no evidence on the leg of disease, there are no obvious pathologies, there’s no trace of the leg being…