Letters to Fortean Times
"Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." Mark Twain
Fortean Times
magazine was established in 1973 to continue the work of Charles Fort. Published monthly in the UK, it contains a rundown of the more bizarre news at hand, features on strange phenomena, curiosities and paranormal experiences and research. It’s a great mag, open-minded but realistic, with a fabulous sense of humour. The first issue I ever bought caught my attention with the headline "HAEMOGOBLINS". How could I resist a magazine with a headline like that? I’ve bought every issue ever since, and it is the only magazine I read virtually cover to cover.One of the most interesting sections of the magazine is the letters section. People will often feel inspired by an article to write of something that happened to them that they haven’t told anyone about for years, even decades, out of fear that people would think them mad or silly. With permission from one of Fortean Times editors, Paul Sieveking, here is a collection of some of these letters published since I began purchasing the magazine in 1997 (except for the Sept 98 issue [FT 114] which I never received, and the April 2001 [FT145] issue which appears to have been borrowed by house fairies and is yet to be returned…)
Read on and enjoy, and if a mention of an article inspires you to find out more, head over to Fortean Times for more of the latest. Their website is still a work in progress and they intend to put letters from future issues on the site as they are published. For that reason my little archive will stop where theirs begins, whenever and wherever that may be.
I have left out any apparent strange occurrences which turned out to have perfectly logical explanations (mysterious little yellow cars that appear everywhere which are the product of cheap Xmas crackers, rainbows that follow you as you walk which turn out to be reflections from ground glass on the ground…). The FT followed by a number refers to the issue number. Where it appears in brackets followed by a colon and another number, that other number is the page number of that issue.
AND ANOTHER THING...some people have been having trouble with the text occasionally appearing in black, making it unreadable. This is not my fault, but rather it's to do with the settings in your web browser. If you've tweaked them at all from the default settings, that's probably the cause.
Helpful Ghosts, Lurking Phantoms and Hauntings
Mysterious Aircraft, Lights, UFOs and Alien Encounters
Conspiracy Theories and Dodgy Government Behaviour
Strange Creatures, Crypto-Beasties and Alien Animals
House Fairies Rearranging Your Stuff…
Bilocation, Doppelgangers and Psychic Projections
"I close the front door on Christ and Einstein, and open the back door to frogs and periwinkles."
Charles Fort
