What's your favourite Fortean Mystery?

[Screaming Lord Byron]

Fortean phenomena is properly defined as any occurence that appears to defy the laws of nature. Examples of fortean events include the raining of frogs, flesh, flower petals, fish and various other items. These are the types of things that one generally thinks of when referring to fortean phenomena, but the definition is inclusive of other paranormal activities. For example, the stigmata and spontaneous human combustion are considered fortean phenomena, as well as the existance of unidentified lights in the sky. Practically anything that is defined as paranormal can be rightly called fortean.

A personal favourite for me would be live animals encased in stone. Over the decades there have been countless reports of small animals (often frogs) which have been discovered completely entombed in rock. There is never any evidence of how the animal managed to get there, the age of the animal, or how it could possibly survive. Often the animals are found encased well inside the stone, suggesting that they have been entombed for millenia.

What are your favourites?

[Loonman]

1. Shadow people

Strange stuff.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

2. Yeah, have you seen some of the footage. Really unnerving.

[Loonman]

6. There are very few things that freak me out

Shadow people is one of them.

I'm very accepting of paranormal activity, and have witnessed stuff(not seen) that I cannot logically explain(that doesn't mean I'm soliciting DUers for logical explanations, I've heard and dismissed them all).

[Screaming Lord Byron]

7. People can't accept that certain things are for now inexplicable

Eventually science may well explain everything in our universe, but for me, I like the fact that there are unsolvable anomalies.

[benburch]

3. Teflon Presidents

Amazing, but true. These appear to be otherwise normal Republicans, but are made entirely of high-tech chloroflourocarbons to which S**t does not stick!

[Screaming Lord Byron]

8. Yeah, I believe they can be controlled by an implant in the left ear.

I had heard they were plastic replicants who recieve instructions from their evil scientist creater Boris Karlrove in the implant. No one would be fooled into thinking they were human, though, right? I mean, no one's that stupid, right? right?

[Screaming Lord Byron]

4. 'fox-elves cut off the people’s hair'

Not the most fascinating phenomenon, but that is my favourite phrase ever.

http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/177_hairsnippers.shtml

In the sixth chapter of Wild Talents (1931), Fort, at the end of a discussion of puzzling outbreaks of hair-snipping in western cities, spends a couple of pages describing a panic in China in 1876 1. Beginning in Nanjing in May 1876, invisible and uncatchable culprits were cutting off people’s pigtails, generally instantaneously and without the owner’s knowledge. The panic spread to Shanghai and Hangzhou during the summer, and men in Shanghai, fearing attack from behind, held their pigtails in front of them. Quack doctors offered charms and soldiers were stationed on the streets. The use of acid to remove the queue was mooted, as it was thought impossible to cut it with shears without the victim feeling anything. Suspects included the charm-sellers (hoping to stimulate business), mischievous children and missionaries. But while Fort tells only one tale, there are many more.

The earliest case I have found so far dates from AD 477, when the History of the Wei Dynasty records, laconically, that “fox-elves cut off the people’s hair”. The same work records another outbreak in AD 517, in the capital, Luoyang, that terrorised the population. Around July that year, the empress-dowager Ling issued a decree that all persons found cutting hair should be whipped outside the Thousand Autumns gate by the chief of the guards 2.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. Why I have...

27 unmatched socks.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

9. Check your house for portals to alternate dimensions.

They're the usual culprits.

[Whitacre D_WI]

10. Here ya go:

PROGRAM Palindrome
IMPLICIT NONE

INTEGER, PARAMETER :: Length = 30
INTEGER, DIMENSION(1:Length) :: X
INTEGER :: Size, Head, Tail, I

READ (*,*) Size, (X(I), I=1, Size)

WRITE(*,*) 'Input array:'
WRITE(*,*) ( X(I), I=1, Size )

Head = 1
Tail = Size
DO
IF ( Head >= Tail ) EXIT
IF ( X(Head) /= X(Tail) ) EXIT
Head = Head + 1
Tail = Tail - 1
END Do

WRITE(*,*)
IF ( Head >= Tail ) THEN
WRITE(*,*) 'The input array is a palindorme'
ELSE
WRITE(*,*) 'The input array is NOT a palindrome'
END IF
END PROGRAM Palindrome


on edit: no, that's FORTRAN.

Never mind.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

11. READ (*,*) Size, (X(I), I=1, Size)

Well that's easily debunked for a start. That's been proven to be a fake.

[AlienGirl]

12. Time-slips, mysterious vortices that open and swallow beds,

radio/telephone anomalies, and other stuff that doesn't easily fit into *any* accepted paranormal category. The more it makes absolutely everyone confused, the more I like it! :thumbsup: Particularly if it implies some bizarre physics malfunction.

Tucker

[RandomKoolzip]

13. I had a tree fort when I was a kid.....

And the only mystery is how my dad never found out I was stealing his Playboys and hiding them up there.

No, but serioously, the Fortean Times has had some great articles in the past, and they were ballsy enough to feature a cover story on "News Scrubbing" about 9/11 mere month after the event. Ah, Limeys rock sometimes....

[Screaming Lord Byron]

18. Charles Fort would be a hilarious critic of Bush et al.

I'm sure he could prove Bush's total non-existence.

[Lisa]

14. fish, etc. falling from the sky

I'm a sucker for "things falling out of midair for no apparent reason".

[Screaming Lord Byron]

17. Yeah, what's with that? There are many documented instances.

Usually water creatures.

[starroute]

15. I have a mad crush on Fort himself -- does that count?

Charles Fort is one of my heroes. I love his epigrams, like "One measures a circle, beginning anywhere." And I love his prose style. Here's the opening of "The Book of the Damned":

A procession of the damned.

By the damned, I mean the excluded.

We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them -- or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.

Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.


How can you not love someone who writes of "Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy"? It sounds like a line out of "Desolation Row."

[Screaming Lord Byron]

16. He's like the Oscar Wilde of weirdsville. I love him.