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There is a fascinating new article by a Ross Barkan - an award winning `investigative journalist` based in New York - published in The Guardian. He claims that a new era of Romanticism is afoot and that it will be a response to the failed promises of the software age and the failures of medical...

Some psychology researchers have won the Ignoble Prize for Literature for their attempt to study the phenomenon of Jamais Vu - as detailed here: https://theconversation.com/jamais-vu-the-science-behind-eerie-opposite-of-deja-vu-213596 Jamais Vu is said to be the reverse of the better known...

On a recent visit to London I found myself in one of the famous large bookstores - Foyles I think it might have been. After some looking around, I aked a Sales assistant where the Unexplained section was. `We don't have one`, he replied. `we don't even have a True Crime section`. The...

This query might seem a bit lightweight on the surface - but I believe something deeper is beneath it. So I'm experiencing the same kind of hot weather where I am as you have in the UK. One day I left my school in the evening feeling parched and did something I pretty much never do - I bought...

We have a thread on sherlock Holmes, as is right and proper, but I thought it might be appropriate to also have a thread devoted to ficitional detectives in general. The Fortean aspect to this topic* lies not just in the mysterious circumstances that the sleuths have to unravel - but also in...

So I am at the age - and I suspect many of us on here are -where the elder generation of family and friends, that we know, are dying off or well into decrepitude. That whole generation - let's say war babies and early Boomers - are already a startin g to look like the remnant of the vanished...

We seem to have had quite a few random posts where people are seeking to rediscover a book they read or film they saw, etc, but have forgotten its title. (NB Not to be confused with people asking for recommendations - which is a different thing and has its own thread). I thought that maybe it...

There's a fascinating `think piece` penned by a poet (or poetess if you prefer) in the current Independent which seeks to account for the pleasure many of us get from being indoors and cosy - when there is a rain and or thunderstorm raging outside the window. A term for it has even been coined...

If I had to make a list of subjects in which I'm not particularly interested in - medicine would be on there. Yet despite that I do like a good medical thriller. And Robin Cook's name is synonymous with the medical thriller viz stories involving conspiracies hatched in medical establishments...

So Tchiakovsky's quintessential Seasonal `chocolate box cover` child-friendly ballet standard is based on a rather Gothic tale from E.T.A Hoffmann - sometimes called a `German Edgar Allen Poe` - which features a maker of robot toys, a seven headed mouse -king, broken jaws and wounded arms, a...

So the traditional, one might say, classical way to view the ghost phenomenon is that it (or they) represent(s) the `souls` of dead people who have been unable to `move on` and thus haunt people and locations to complain of this or that or to right some injustice. Thus world literature is rife...

So I want to discuss subtle but important genre distinctions (in, mostly, writing) here - and what significance they have. I am a sort of science fiction and horror fan and can read most things which fall into this genre. However, giver me a book of what would be termed Fantasy - straight...

Calling all Sandgrounders (Southportians) (I know there are some on here). So I remember growing up in Southport in the early seventies, possibly even late sixties, when there was a short mass panic amongst parents of young kids. This panic centred around `the Greenjackets` - a supposed street...

For me there does seems to be a direct correlation between scepticism (concerning Fortean matters) and the ageing process. To spell it out: I find myself becoming more doubtful about claims of the extraordinary the older I get. I suppose it's an equivalent of the old canard about people...

Though it was mentioned by Ramon last year (https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/extraordinary-popular-delusions.9700/#post-1938285) I thought the `tulpenmanie` period of the `Dutch Golden Age` is Fortean enough to have its own thread. And it is getting alluded to quite a lot these...

I think it's fair to say that this site is, by and large, a sceptic one. Claims of the paranormal and the extraordinary tend to get debunked on here. There is also, I would say - rmore questionably - a tendency to accept the claims of sceptical denunkers as a default option. With this mind, I...

I first caught the beginnings of this series when it was a touring stage show called `Fright Night` on at a small arts theatre in Leicester. I could connect with it. but only a bit later when it became a TV show - `Garth Marenghi's Dark place` - did it become something I really loved - and have...

I thought we could do with a thread which mentions, and celebrates, hard copy newsletters or magazines - apart from Fortean Times, of course -which are concerned with the unexplained and paranormal and so forth. Bonus points if they are from non-English speaking countries or regional. Bigger...

This one isn't in any way paranormal. It is more a question of altered perceptions but is `Fortean ` enough, I think, to belong here. It occured about two weeks ago. I was taking the underground Metro to a class, alone, in the late morning. I was in an introspective mood and was musing - in a...

I think I first came across this story in a Reader's Digest Bumper book of Mysteries, or such like, and am fairly sure I have since also come across it in a similar coffee table compendium. In both cases the story was related as though it were factual. Perhaps you know it too. It goes like...

NOTE: This line of discussion was spun off from the Hopkinsville 'Goblins' thread. ------------------- There's a short story by Isaac Asimov - one of his earlier ones (so probably published in the fifties) - called (if I recall rightly) `The Alien Way`. In this, a young boy rescues a small...

This has bugged me for years. You may recall that back in the early noughties - circa 2004 or thereabpouts - the illusionist and confidence trickster Derren Brown was a big name on television. This was on the back of a TV series in which he performed a series of fiendish stunts on members of...

I first got wind of this story from my students - as the national media seem to be keeping shtum about it. Public buildings, including schools and churches, are receiving bomb threats sent by encrypted E-mails in the cities of Russia and Moscow especially. This has been leading to widescale...

I have long been aware of the idea that UFOs could represent probes coming back from our own distant future and piloted by what we ourselves will ultimately become. This hypothesis has always entertained me, and I like the optimism of it too- after all, it supposes that humanity will not only...

Nice little nondescript oddity: So last weekend a fragment of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteorite that landed in a lake in Eastern Russia (and is on display at a museum there) - seemed to cause the glass dome which encases it to levitate of its own accord! Read all about it...

From last November: this short video filmed in Brazil. Now the immediate source is the ridiculous Scott Waring - but he didn't film the video, so let's not be too quick to shoot the messenger. In fact I first came across this new sighting in the Russian hard copy press.The claim is made there...

Not wishing to make a freakshow out of what might be a man with disabilities...but... Posted by Igor Burtsev, the Russian yeti researcher, the original province of this video seems to be unkown - as does the location at which it was shot. There has been a suggestion that what we are seeing is...

The idea of `the superfluous man` can be found in a lot of Russian literature - and many of the central character of Russian stories from the Nineteenth Century are described as being `superfluous men` (perhaps the best known being Eugene Onegin, the hero of Pushkin's verse, which was also...

The reason I ask this is because I don't - or at any rate haven't for a long, long time. Just to be clear: by `nightmare` I mean a very frightening dream involving an unusual and traumatic incident of the kind that makes you wake up with a start. Don't get me wrong. I have a very active dream...

Stumbled on this while reaearching dystopias on youtube. A clever fake - or have I been out of the old country too Long? Comments and reactions please!

From the reputable Moscow Times: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/03/russian-military-deployed-combat-telepathy-in-chechnya-report-claims-a65077 Gist: A journal produced by the Russian Defence Ministry called Army Digest` has claimed (in the February edition) that soldiers were triaed...

Such is the claim hinted at in this book, (but also to be foumd elsehwhere): https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Scenes-Inside-Canyon-Laurel/dp/1909394122 (I should say that I haven't read this book myself, but just discussed it with a mate of mine who has). Apparently it makes a lot of the fact...

My mention of The Hound of the Baskervilles on the Folk horror thread got me thinking about an interesting subgenre of horror/suspense. It is a sort of rationalist-mundane horror where the supernatural element in the proceedings are unmasked at the end of the story. They get to be explained...

I'm chewing over a very old chestnut here - but it's an interesting experiment in perception and possible paredolia. The Hugh Gray 1933 photo of an alleged Loch Ness Monster is thought to be the first of its kind. The received wisdom of it has since become that it shows nothing more than a dog...

I have been meaning to tackle this one for ages, but I just can't seem to find the right vocabulary to accurately describe what it is that I want to talk about. However, I've decided to press on regardless. For as long as I can remmember, but particularly in my adult life, I have been prone to...

One of the oldest UFOzines on the net seems to have vanished. You try to get them and this happens: http://ufodigest.com:8080/ They were a bit of a mixed bag, but ore recently they featured a column by Nick Pope which was worth a glance. It'll be sad if they're gone - it was almost an...

Philip Mantle has unearthed a rather intrigiung UFO shot taken in the Russian city of Voronezh shortly after the (in)famous alleged encounters there: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5714327/photo-russia-ufo-aliens-jason-gleaves-expert-real-rare/ And if you are not familiar with this awkward...

I thought this was rather decent. Not too kooky, this constitutes an overview of where - like it or lump it - UFO research and thinking is at now. It concludes with a defence of a modernised and more nuanced variant of the hoary old Extraterrestrial Hypothesis - which is refreshing when...

I'm already hip to this groove: see my threads (in this section) on Colin Forbes and Earth: Final Conflict - both of which could, in their separate ways, easily come under the `Spy Fi` umbrella. https://www.tor.com/2009/11/06/spy-fi-is-just-around-the-corner/

Tell us about your favourite dystopian novels and films here. Me?I'm getting through my third reading of `Living Souls` by Dmitry Bykov (Alma Books 2010. Translated by Cathy Porter) and, honestly, it gets better each time. We are in Russia at some unspecified time in the future, but a matter...

So I mean those stories you read or films you watched - whatever- sometime ago and they have stayed with you, haunted you even, for this or that obscure reason. For example, for me: The Overman Culture by Edmund Cooper (1973). This is the ideal teen coming-of-age novel (but I first read it when...

So I once knew a chap - same generation as me (now fifties) -who told me that when he was growing up (hence the seventies) in some southern town, the local post office or gift shop would sell postcards - postcards! - which featured graphic scenes of rail and traffic accidents on them together...

This shot -taken by a customs officer in Madre de Dios, Peru in 1952 - has always intrigued me. The cigar shaped (some say saucer shaped) object is clearly giving off a trail of fumes in its wake. On the one hand this detail would be hard to fake in those pre-digital image times, but on the...

I was wondering if there are any other Colin Forbes fans out there. His string of pulp novels from the early Eighties to the mid-noughties, featuring Tweed and the Special Intelligence Service are a guilty pleasure of mine. His novels are Fortean in the same sort of way Bond , and many...

`Earth Final Conflict` counts as the only Science fiction TV series that I really enjoyed as an adult. The moment it started being shown on Channel 5 from 1997 I was impressed by the way the story dramatised the age old concept of first contact with aliens. It was based on an idea that Gene...

(To Mods: I am pretty damn sure that I began a thread on this before here, but just can't find it. If you can, could you merge them for me?) So I'm currently reading Host by Robin Cook (Pan Books, 2016). In this one he just seems to be revisiting and updating the novel which made his name and...

Swifty's posting of the inexplicable interview with former New mexico governor in which he stuck is tongue out in the midst of a sober interview (Cf The Presidential candidates thread) suggested a new thread to me. This interview with the actress Naomi Watts, undertaken by Simon Mayo, in which...

I'm a great lover of suspense and horror tales in all their forms. These are often described on the bookjackets or in the reviews as being `spine tingling` and hair -raising`. another one that I've come across is `bone chilling`. These are meant to be terms of approval because we are given to...

Calling all Bond fans! I'm afraid this is one of those so called `Mandela Effect` thingies. Yeah,I know - we had a thread on that before, and I was all rather dismissive of it (for the usual reasons: memories can be unreliable, there are many comon misconceptions - etc). I take none of that...

So... this is based on a `human interest` British TV documentary that I caught over twenty years ago. It may have been called something like `He's Not the Man I Married`(or if not, then that was the gist of it, anyway) It concerned the wife of a man who had been in a serious motoring accident...