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OK, so this felt pretty Fortean at the time, and it's still an anomaly because I can find no explanation. Maybe some of you technical types out there can shed light on it and debunk the idea that my phone is haunted. Background I have a 2017 Samsung Galaxy A5. I have very few non standard...

I found this on Facebook. I don't know who took it, when or where. It looks convincing to me. Apparently it is a dead pike (predatory fish) trapped in the fork of a tree, and then with a bird's nest in its mouth. I was a scuba diver for many years and saw many pike. I was not aware that...

For a few years in my childhood in the late 1960s, I lived in a rented flat above the coach garages in the stable block of Letton Hall. Letton Hall was a minor stately home in mid Norfolk (UK). It was formerly occupied by landed gentry, [edit, I originally wrote Lord] Baron and Lady Cranworth...

I had never even heard of the Tenerife Airport Disaster (1972) but You Tube suggested video to me. I didn't watch the video but, out of curiosity, looked it up in Wikipedia. Bizarrely, If you type just "Tene" in the search box, the suggested results are, in this order, Tene, Tennessee...

Not quite a paradox, for the pedants, but it's a snappy title. I have the sort of brain that makes unexpected connections between ideas, and a thought came to me yesterday. Many years ago, I read of an author who decided in the final stages of editing that her protagonist should have brown...

I revisited Carl Wark yesterday. Carl Wark is an ancient feature commonly interpreted as a "hill fort" although it is unconventional in design. It is in the Peak District National Park a few miles out of Sheffield. Historically, it was in the county of Derbyshire but I believe that it is now...

This surprised me this morning. I have spent much of my life around rivers, canals and lakes. I sail, I own an inflatable boat, I kayak, and I cycle along river banks and towpaths. I am used to seeing Canada geese either randomly dotted on the water, or on the bank, or flying overhead...

A quick forum search for Stonehenge produces 20 pages of results. A similar search for Grimspound produces only 8 results, 3 of which are passing references in the Stonehenge thread! The other 5 are in the Creepy Small Villages thread. This shocked me as Grimspound is every bit as impressive...

I stumbled across a reference to this the other day, looked it up, and was astounded. I had never even heard of it, but when I mentioned it to a workmate who is a history buff, he told me he'd actually been to see it. In 1916, Lochnagar crater was the biggest crater ever made by human...

Before I start: this post is about how one aspect of language shines a light on some bizarre historical attitudes to race. I would like to make a personal plea not to divert this into a more general discussion of race relations, particularly in regard to current or recent events. No politics...

A man in his 30s with no underlying health conditions was offered a Covid vaccine after an NHS error mistakenly listed him as just 6.2cm in height. Liam Thorp was told he qualified for the jab because his measurements gave him a body mass index of 28,000. He told BBC Radio 5 Live: "I've put on a...

Presented with a report of an anomaly — a Bigfoot sighting, a blurry photo of the Loch ness Monster, a supposed "time slip", or a strange figure at the side of a Lincolnshire road — how do we start to consider whether it is true, or a hoax, or something else entirely? I spent several years...

Forteans tend to be interested in more than just "mysteries and anomalies": more than just UFOs, poltergeists, Thylacines, and Bigfoot. We tend to have a wider interest in "stuff". I know I do. One particular area that I suspect interests many of us is the category of "well known facts" that...

This morning I was woken by a loud knock on the door: a firm and distinctive syncopated pattern of 3 raps. I'm a musician and dancer and I have a good sense of rhythm and I could reproduce that rhythm now. I immediately thought I must have slept in. We are waiting for a couple of Amazon...

In the time of the Nazis, Jewish names such as David, Jacob and Samuel were removed from the German phonetic alphabet and replaced with other words, some of which had a more Aryan meaning. For example, Nordpol ("north pole") refers to Hitler's belief in a mythical northern race of Aryans...

South African lottery. The balls drawn are 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and the Power Ball: 10. There were 20 winners, sharing the prize, which is more winners than usual. This random sequence of balls is exactly as probable as any other sequence. All that is unusual about it is that the numbers are...

A rare and Fortean sighting indeed: a science article from the BBC which is detailed, well written, balanced, looks at the likely causes and consequences, and doesn't trivialise or sensationalise! The story is of Orcas/killer whales following and repeatedly head butting yachts and fishing...

This is pretty creepy. For Kim Kardashian's birthday, her husband, Kanye West, commissioned a hologram of her late father speaking a birthday message. Her reaction was that it is the most thoughtful present ever. However, the hologram is only speaking the script that it was given, and this...

Part of my job used to be designing training material for a small team investigating household and motor insurance fraud. For those of us who are interested in the sort of Forteana that involves reports of anomalous sightings (UFOs, Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster (LNM), ghosts etc.) there are some...

Fish jumps out of the sea, stabs boy all the way through the neck with its beak. Boy has to hold the fish steady all the way back to shore to stop it wriggling and making his injury worse. Warning: the photo is a somewhat unpleasant. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-51224468

A 100-year-old print of the famous Cottingley Fairies photo hoax has sold for £1,050 at auction. The original pictures were posed in 1917 by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in Cottingley, Yorkshire. Two prints were on offer at the auction held at Moore Allen & Innocent in Cirencester...

Sort of. The entire skeleton of a caiman found concealed under a Welsh primary school floor. For decades, there were unsubstantiated stories, then they found it by accident. Photo in article. (A caiman is similar to an alligator, so I suppose this was an "unsubstantiated alligator"...

A link to a short film and a related BBC article about a red kite that has white feathers. It is unclear whether it is leucistic or albino. As it has some dark patches, I'd guess the former. It was not long ago that these magnificent birds were almost extinct in Britain. They have been...

The BBC website has an article on Congenital Melanocytic Naevus which is posh medical speak for brown birthmarks. As I have a medium sized one on my left foot, I took an interest and did some searching. I found this case. The pictures of the lady concerned are interesting in a voyeuristic...

Young girl feels ill. Goes to bed. Falls into a coma. 4 days later, she wakes up to find she's had a baby. She has a rare condition which means she has two wombs. One continued to menstruate and she had no visible signs of being pregnant. Mother and child doing fine. Quite a lovely story...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-47144738 Given the generally poor standard of BBC reporting these days, this is a surprisingly good article. Not brilliant, but at least worth a read. It's just a general piece about why people believe in conspiracy theories. Or, at least, why They want us to...

He was only trying to kill a spider... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-46735263

2012, Stoke on Trent, England: a woman goes to her local doctors' surgery, is seen by a locum, and given a course of watching religious TV and going to religious services. In one such service, a preacher speaks about sacrificing an owl. The woman is traumatised. (The owl was disgruntled too...

Not sure if this should be in the Cryptozoology thread! A giant statue of a sinister looking gorilla as part of a crazy golf course. A local resident complained that it was "staring into her bedroom" and she asked for it to be moved. Now, allegedly, locals are complaining that they can see...

Not only a silly story showing the depths to which the hard earned privilege of democracy has been dragged in the USA, but with the added bonus of the antagonists being named Cockburn and Riggleman, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45009077

Fairly generic report, thin on detail, but it looks like a recent alleged sighting. Also references to other non-native species seen in the area. https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/exmoor-beast-large-cat-thick-1797603

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-44343012 Not strictly cryptozoology, as wallabies are a known "introduced species" in parts of the UK, but an unusual sighting of a white (albino?) one. It's not clear to me whether there is evidence that it was albino rather than leucistic...