Fortean Times

Since 2021 Connecticut seems to have been experiencing something of a UFO flap, with a steady flow of reports from the state being made to the US National UFO Reporting Centre (NUFORC). While one sighting was clearly a partly deflated weather balloon

With Ukraine surprising the Russians by failing to welcome their invasion with open arms, and the subsequent war demonstrating the less than stellar performance of their military, Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine has taken on a more mystic

The remains of the last recorded living thylacine, which died in Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania, on 7 September 1936, were long thought to have been lost. They were known to have been passed to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), but for

Dustin Procita and his wife Jeanette believed that the massive fire that destroyed their home on a northern California cattle ranch, killing one of their dogs and two rabbits, was caused by a meteorite hitting their house. “I heard a big bang,” Proci

Assaults by orcas off Galicia, Spain, (see FT401:17, 412:21) continue. On 20 September 2022, a Norwegian sailing yacht was attacked by a school of the killer whales, which bit and chewed on the vessel until it could no longer be manoeuvred. The yacht

If you wanted to discover the inventor of the electric toaster, the answer used to be relatively simple: you could Google it, or look it up in any one of a dozen books on inventors, and find out that it was Alan MacMasters, a Scottish scientist who c

There is considerable hubbub at the moment over a claim that a ‘long-lost Roman emperor’ has been unearthed, on the basis of a coin long dismissed as a fake but now deemed authentic. Various websites have sprung up. I am grateful to David Barrett for

• After experiencing pain in her abdomen and back in 2015, Lyndsi Johnson’s symptoms got steadily worse, so that she suffered frequent projectile vomiting and passed out up to 10 times a day. Johnson, 28, faints if she stands up for more than three m

Looking at historic maps of Scotland, you will see the land represented is peppered with crosses, marking the sites of battles and murders. Many of these locations are said to be haunted. The whole country was once blood-drenched, reeking with violen

Serial orphan impersonator and fantasist Samantha Azzopardi was back in the news in August. Having racked up an impressive array of charges around the world under the names of Emily Peet, Lindsay Coughlin, Dakota Johnson, Georgia McAuliffe, Harper He

Prediction is a slippery business at best; unless you’re Baba Vanga, you’re unlikely to get a government pension for it. But this time of year seems to bring out the Nostradamus in even the most sober of commentators. The Conspirasphere is generally

Toilet seats: yuck! I recently spent a weekend choosing, buying and installing a new loo seat (here in the jet set, life is basically one long thrill). Among its selling points was that it had undergone an undefined “antibacterial treatment” that wou

John Harney was one of the last of the early generation of British ufologists whose interests were excited as teenagers by the American UFO waves of the early 1950s and books such as Morris Jessup’s The Case for the UFO; Waveney Girvan’s Flying Sauce

Is the ghostworld an equal opportunity employer? I don’t refer here to race or gender, but to the much more curious and, I suspect for ghosts, more serious inequality between epochs. As a very, very general rule ghosts seem to get rarer the further w

The annual Liverpool LightNight is a fun, free event that takes place across the city and I always check for its weirdest events, such as ‘The Cryptid Petting Zoo’ (FT333:52-53). Back in 2019, my attention was drawn to ‘Torquemada: In The Mind Of The

The island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, which lies around two miles northeast of Venice, was used from 1468 as a quarantine area for sailors arriving from potentially infected lands.1 During the major pandemics that struck the city in the 16th and 17th centu

For anyone with a sense of adventure, an enquiring mind and a love of the weird and wonderful… Every month, Fortean Times takes you on an incredible journey into the unknown where you’ll encounter some of the most fantastic phenomena on Earth… and so

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE EDITOR AT DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM Dir various, US 1963-65, Medium Rare Entertainment, £74.99 (DVD), £94.99 (Blu-ray) The Outer Limits has been unfairly hidden in the shadows of The Twilight Zone, yet it is an equa

On the topic of precognitive dreams, I think one has to regard them in the light of how the subjects of dreams arise generally. I think there is not much doubt that the dreaming mind selects images or subjects from waking life more or less randomly,