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Faux Forteana: Portraying Mundane Things As Fortean

EnolaGaia

EnolaGaia

I knew the job was dangerous when I took it ...
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I'm starting this thread for illustrative purposes. The point is to illustrate egregious spin-doctoring of a situation to make it seem supernatural or paranormal when it's obviously nothing of the sort. In other words, the subject here is blatant misinformation / disinformation based on glossing something mundane with a generous frosting of "woo factor."

Admittedly, such misinformation may be the result of mere misunderstandings or idiocy. However, the dynamics of social media have fostered an increasing proliferation of more deliberate disinformation for the sake of garnering clicks or likes.
 
Here (and following) are two examples of a 'woo-factor-ized' story that surfaced recently ...

This July 2021 AccuWeather article describes a mysterious abandoned villa on a beach in El Salvador in terms of its possibly having "washed ashore."

Mysterious mansion ruins on beach captivate onlookers​

Seashells, shark teeth and sand dollars are all things you expect to find when combing the beach. Beachgoers in Costa del Sol, El Salvador, though, have discovered the mysterious ruins of a villa that washed ashore on the picturesque La Puntilla Beach.

Travelers began flocking to the site after a Salvadoran TikTok user, Cholopanza Vlogs, posted a clip of himself traveling to the villa ruins on the popular social video platform, as well as a much longer vlog on YouTube. His TikTok went viral, racking up more than 400,000 views.

The abandoned villa, which has clearly seen better days, rests right where the waves meet the sand, with water flowing in and out of the ruins' lower level as the tides shift. Some suspect it ended up there courtesy of the very powerful Hurricane Mitch, which was notorious for its copious rainfall and blamed for more than 9,000 fatalities, in 1998. ...
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FULL STORY (With Video): https://www.accuweather.com/en/trav...-el-salvador-beach-captivate-onlookers/977543
 
Now here's the (Google-translated) real story of the mysterious villa, from a local newspaper. The "mystery villa" isn't something that "washed ashore." It's a former hotel, unwisely built out on the beach, which is being reclaimed by the sea due to beach erosion.

ElSalvadorMysteryVilla.jpeg

The story of the dark house that the sea is swallowing in La Puntilla

Some versions of the locals indicate that it was in 1998, during Hurricane Mitch that the structure was damaged, so it stopped being a hotel, and later became the headquarters of a Christian church.

76 kilometers from San Salvador is La Puntilla beach, in San Luis La Herradura, department of La Paz. In recent days, that place has gone viral after photographs of an abandoned house in the middle of the beach circulated on social networks.

The cracked structure, leaning to the left and nestled in the sands of that famous beach is not a house. In the past, 25 years ago, it was a hotel, and its name was Hotel Puerto Ventura. Its unfortunate story tells that the owners of that hotel decided to build it several meters into the beach, but the force of nature was stronger, and over the years, the waves of the sea hit the structure, flooded it until it closed. ...

The former Puerto Ventura hotel is not the only one of which remains in the middle of the sea. A few meters to the left, there is another two-level structure, built of concrete blocks, which is also abandoned and which the sea is also swallowing. ...
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FULL STORY (With Photos & Video): https://translate.google.com/transl...ntilla-20210708-0073.html&prev=search&pto=aue

ORIGINAL SOURCE (In Spanish): https://www.laprensagrafica.com/els...ta-tragando-en-La-Puntilla-20210708-0073.html
 
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People seem more gullible to exaggerated depictions of normal things these days. When you make a video about it that appears online, people don't bother to fact-check, they just share it. I'd guess that about 75% of weird events that make the news are not weird at all but the story is just "reported" as is, no verification or clarification is done whatsoever. Mundane stuff doesn't go viral. People are generally poorly informed about natural processes, assuming stuff they've never seen before is new and mysterious.
 
Sharon Hill said:
People seem more gullible to exaggerated depictions of normal things these days. When you make a video about it that appears online, people don't bother to fact-check, they just share it. I'd guess that about 75% of weird events that make the news are not weird at all but the story is just "reported" as is, no verification or clarification is done whatsoever. Mundane stuff doesn't go viral. People are generally poorly informed about natural processes, assuming stuff they've never seen before is new and mysterious.
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I think there is, as you say, a good (read: bad) degree of gullibility these days, and again, as you say, this may be partially due to a lack of knowedge (although I think a desire for the less ordinary is equally to blame, and you, I believe, have done some work on this), but there is a more worrying trend:

An increasing number of people a) are not very interested whether an explanation is true or false, it is the 'flavour' of the experience they focus on; b) think that if they believe a proposition is true, that belief holds equal or greater importance than the verifiability of actual states of affairs in the world.

At the innocuous end of business, we have the rise in popularity of this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_tripping

And at the deep end we have conspiracy motivated murders and vaccine scepticsm in the middle of a pandemic. I'm told that a fair number of new-agers who once contented themselves by allowing sunlight to enter through their rectal sphincters are now LARP-ing Q-Anon for jollies.

Strange days indeed.

Former live roleplayer: enjoyed pretending to be a goblin; never believed I was really a goblin; never thought goblins were real.
 
I find looking at the impact on people of what some may describe as mundane stuff to be just as fascinating as that of inexplicable Fortean events. The recent Case Of The Girl, The Dog and The Motorcycle being a classic example. What is not "fortean" to some, certainly is to others. But I get the points EG is making.
 
Kondoru said:
When is Forteana not Forteana?
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I would say it relates to the boundary or distinction between:

(a) the observation or apprehension of something anomalous versus ...
(b) the interpretation one applies to describe / frame / identify / explain the anomaly.

My take on Fort emphasizes the role of puzzling evidence that contradicts established knowledge / doctrine / etc. Such evidence may be circumstantial and merely suggestive (i.e., (a) above), or it can be attributed weight by contextualizing it in specific terms contrary to common knowledge or even common sense (i.e., (b) above).

Position (a) can involve nothing more than 'woo' - i.e., finding oneself in the 'uncanny valley.' Position (b) involves traversing the uncanny valley and planting one's flag (however seriously or finally) on one of the hills (figuratively - explanatory vantage points ....) lying beyond.

Going back to the villa example ...

Simply discovering a ruined villa with features suggestive of Greco-Roman style sitting isolated on a beach is an instance of (a) - Weirdness Typifying Forteana (aka "WTF").

Going further to adopt an explanation for this WTF - e.g.:

- A concrete building miraculously transported to the beach by a hyper-mega-tsunami;
- A substantial structure teleported to the beach by aliens; or ...
- A remnant of Atlantis uncovered by the tides

... is an instance of (b).

If one considers WTF-level oddities to be Forteana, the villa is Fortean regardless of the application of an extraordinary explanatory context (or face value validity thereof) simply because it induced some 'woo factor' in the given observer(s).

If one considers nothing properly Fortean until it's contextualized with an extraordinary explanation, the mundane historical explanation de-escalates the villa to the status of something odd which challenges no accepted knowledge except where one should build one's seaside hotel.
 
EnolaGaia said:
My take on Fort emphasizes the role of puzzling evidence that contradicts established knowledge / doctrine / etc. Such evidence may be circumstantial and merely suggestive (i.e., (a) above), or it can be attributed weight by contextualizing it in specific terms contrary to common knowledge or even common sense (i.e., (b) above).
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You are so interestingly addressing a fundamental point, which I questioned in my nascent days on the forums - because I really wasn't quite sure what Fortean actually encompassed - and kept a note of this, which was one response, suggested as helpful:

Thread 'What is Forteana? (Bob Rickard's 'The Fortean Scope')' https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/what-is-forteana-bob-rickards-the-fortean-scope.3101/

If perhaps appropriate, this was another reference I kept, in a similar vein:

This is reproduced from the introduction of the book Phenomena, by John Michell and Robert Rickard (1977):

http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/phenomena.htm
 
Comfortably Numb said:
If perhaps appropriate, this was another reference I kept, in a similar vein:
This is reproduced from the introduction of the book Phenomena, by John Michell and Robert Rickard (1977):
http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/phenomena.htm
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It's worthwhile to note the following excerpts concerning Fort as "the father of modern phenomenalism":
From his lifetime's collection of anomalies and irregularities in the scientific world-image he identified many previously unrecognised types in phenomenal reality, such as the UFO, the fireball and the teleportation effect. More than that, he developed, subtly and humorously, a philosophical view of life capable of adapting itself to the widest possible range of experience. He delighted in all the products of nature and imagination. He accepted everything that happened in life and rejected all interpretive myths, even scientific ones. ...
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The two enemies of phenomenalism: suppressions and explanations.
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The distinction I drew earlier between an observation / experience and an explanation projected onto it represents (roughly speaking) the line past which Fort may well have rejected the latter out of hand and the essential appreciation of a phenomenon per se is lost.

Circling back to this thread's stated theme ... It's also the boundary past which someone can - and will - attempt to leverage you into believing what you perceived must be an instance of explanation X and thereby tacitly enlisting you into the ranks of X believers.

In the narrowest case 'X' may be a particular alternative doctrine (e.g., the ETH, or even some more specific sub-species of the ETH). In the most general case 'X' may simply represent a belief that your observation was abnormal, miraculous, etc.

The spin-doctoring aimed at making you think a villa washed ashore or a carved keyboard simulacrum represented actual ancient technology is nothing short of an attempt to bias you toward buying into an explanatory commitment that Fort would have avoided and which was inimical to his orientation.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The spin-doctoring aimed at making you think a villa washed ashore or a carved keyboard simulacrum represented actual ancient technology is nothing short of an attempt to bias you toward buying into an explanatory commitment that Fort would have avoided and which was inimical to his orientation.
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Might this illustrate your astute points perfectly.

Not pseudo anomalies...

"I am a collector of notes upon subjects that have diversity — such as deviations from concentricity in the lunar crater Copernicus, and a sudden appearance of purple Englishmen — stationary meteor-radiants, and a reported growth of hair on the bald head of a mummy — and 'Did the girl swallow the octopus"?

Charles Fort, Wild Talents
 
Yithian said:
I think there is, as you say, a good (read: bad) degree of gullibility these days, and again, as you say, this may be partially due to a lack of knowedge (although I think a desire for the less ordinary is equally to blame, and you, I believe, have done some work on this), but there is a more worrying trend:
Click to expand...

People want the world to be enchanted, thus the backlash against science, logic, and reason. There is most definitely an "anti-authority" trend. So, maybe it's all these factors.

I worry. Belief in nonsense or mystery is a lot of fun but when you prefer magic and bullshit as ways of interpreting the world, we're in dangerous territory.
 
Just to return to EG's initial point that "such misinformation may be the result of mere misunderstandings or idiocy", what surprises me is when some people still cling to outlandish explanations, when the incident has been thoroughly debunked.
The Cumberland Spaceman with the supposed men in black embellishment is a classic example and yet, even after the publication of the colour-corrected photo clearly showing the mum, and the admission that the men in black were just two blokes having a laugh, a couple of forumists (including Fortean royalty!) still felt there was something unearthly or paranormal going on.

I think I'm on safer ground with my particular interests in ancient mysteries, as you cannot easily prove that the Azores aren't the basis of the enduring Atlantis legend or that Brutus/Britto of Troy didn't come to Britain 3,000 years ago!
 
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