• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

FT352

XEPER_

Death to all but metal
Joined
Mar 3, 2013
Messages
836
This arrived yesterday but, irritatingly, went to my mum's house instead of mine. She gets me a gift subscription as an Xmas present and the people in the subs department always make a total arse of it.

Will post a photo of the cover later when I'm not so furious :fckpc:

:p
 
Sorry, was reading it in the car and left it there so no pic.
I had this issue out in the garden yesterday, enjoying a beer and the sunshine and a couple of little sidelines really made me remember just why I've been reading FT for over 20 years.
And I haven't even started the main articles yet!

Oh, and the weird Aliens/fish is creepy as hell.
 
Haven't got this issue yet as not got round to renewing my FT script. Can anyone see if my letter is featured about my granddad's ball lightning encounter?
 
Havent you been waiting for this to show up for a while?
 
The April Fools Day article was a bit late night internet browsing quality, not helped by the author admitting that's how he'd researched it, but the other articles were excellent. Mike Dash was particularly good on the unsteady nature of a lot of the research Forteans take for granted.

IHTM was too "Minor Strangeness". "I had a weird dream once" - yeah, you and the rest of the world. Great letter from Mr Theo to the reader dismissing him as too PC. Mythconceptions leaves me none the wiser about pelican crossings! But it does remind me of the Steven Wright joke about moving into a new apartment and having a switch on his wall that did nothing, so he would idly flip it up and down. Until he got a letter from someone that read "Cut it out."

Actually, there was a bit in Better Call Saul like that, might be resolved in the new series.
 
The April Fools Day article

The 'weather machine' mentioned there in passing was a whole-edition feature of the Guardian. I have a copy in my loft somewhere! It was very funny.
 
The April Fools Day article was a bit late night internet browsing quality, not helped by the author admitting that's how he'd researched it, but the other articles were excellent. Mike Dash was particularly good on the unsteady nature of a lot of the research Forteans take for granted.

IHTM was too "Minor Strangeness". "I had a weird dream once" - yeah, you and the rest of the world. Great letter from Mr Theo to the reader dismissing him as too PC. Mythconceptions leaves me none the wiser about pelican crossings! But it does remind me of the Steven Wright joke about moving into a new apartment and having a switch on his wall that did nothing, so he would idly flip it up and down. Until he got a letter from someone that read "Cut it out."

Actually, there was a bit in Better Call Saul like that, might be resolved in the new series.

I loved the Mythconceptions! Some of the buttons really don't do anything eh? I'd actually never even heard that myth before but it was interesting to find out about it.
 
I'm interested in finding out more about the guy who managed to truck enough old car tyres up the side of an extinct volcano, dump them in the crater and set fire to enough of them to convince people down below that the volcano wasn't as extinct as they thought. It must have caused serious brown trousers, especially among seismologists and so on who must have wondered "how the F did we miss THAT?" (I can see brown trousers at many universities among scientists who went "oh shit - there goes our funding! We've been assuring people for years we're worth the money 'cos we can spot these things and give out advance warnings... how am I going to pay the mortgage now?")

That must have taken serious organisation and lots of helpers. i mean, getting that number of old tyres several thousand feet up a mountain... even dropping them in from an aircraft would take accurate bombing and somebody must have noticed. Which adds a dimension to those who automatically dismiss conspiracy theories, citing the proposition that the more organisation is involved and the higher the number of people involved, something is going to go wrong somewhere or the secret is inevitably going to leak. Here, it appears a lot of people managed it - and did what they set out to achieve.

Unless it's an April Fools' gag at a higher level - the whole plausible-sounding story was faked and there wasn't even an extinct volcano of that name, let alone a guy of that name who masterminded the prank. (depending on people accepting a vague photo of a smouldering volcanic crater at face value - might have been a shot of a real volcano nowhere near Alaska that was repurposed for a higher-order gag...)
 
the whole plausible-sounding story was faked

I have read a very detailed story somewhere about this hoax. Probably in an earlier FT.

Meanwhile it is in the Museum of Hoaxes.

Reading that article, however, I see the only cited source is an Alaskan Airlines advertisement, which explicitly boasts of the scam. Reports of the volcano's activity at the time need to be found! :rolleyes:
 
Last edited:
Fortean Times Marmite contributor S D Tucker's book gets a bit of a spanking in the reviews. Good.
 
They gave it 6/10 when it sounded more like a 3!
 
I'm interested in finding out more about the guy who managed to truck enough old car tyres up the side of an extinct volcano, dump them in the crater and set fire to enough of them to convince people down below that the volcano wasn't as extinct as they thought.

I just read that one yesterday - didn't it say he flew them up? I imagined it must have been a helicopter, and maybe it's just a small volcano.
 
I just read that one yesterday - didn't it say he flew them up? I imagined it must have been a helicopter, and maybe it's just a small volcano.

Even for a smallish volcano, I'm thinking it would have been more than one flight. Somebody must have needed to be on the ground to build a bonfire of them (and do the igniting?). And even (or especially?) in America, a lot of helicopter activity in a small area focused on one otherwise unremarkable mountain - well, that's capable of firing up fortean speculation in its own right...
 
Even for a smallish volcano, I'm thinking it would have been more than one flight. Somebody must have needed to be on the ground to build a bonfire of them (and do the igniting?). And even (or especially?) in America, a lot of helicopter activity in a small area focused on one otherwise unremarkable mountain - well, that's capable of firing up fortean speculation in its own right...
When you see where it is, you realise it's remote enough for something "Porky" Bickar had apparently been planning for four years not to have been likely to arouse that much speculation. Sitka, a "city" of fewer than 10,000, is ten miles away. https://www.google.com/maps/place/5...1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d57.051389!4d-135.758611?hl=en
And it's explained here http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_eruption_of_mount_edgecumbe
 
I've noticed a glaring error (ahem) in this issue - in the Fortean Follow Ups, the first piece about issue 345 (about missing plane MH370), it refers to the FT issue 438 page 69 - is this just a basic typo made by some tired person on too much coffee, or is it an actual issue of the mag that has slipped back through time?
 
My copy came quite a while ago, but I was stricken with such a nasty bout of flu I couldn't read it. It was pretty torturous seeing it sitting on my shelf because I was too sick to read :(

Finally finished it though, and I have to say it's the best issue we've had in ages. I loved the corpse factory and the lost location of the Crucifixion article, and they really should have been the mag cover. The Hierophant's Apprentice ripping apart the whole Sirius thing was hilarious, and I've never heard of the Red Baron shooting down a UFO. The only weak points were the April Fools article (pretty sure it was bashed out in 10 minutes to cash in on April Fools Day) and Fortean Traveller (which was about coffin bells instead of the actual museum).

Also can we appreciate the irony of Jenny Randles talking about how the most UFO cases are people mistaking common things for alien spacecraft, when the majority of her articles are about how Rendelsham was totally not a case of people mistaking common things for alien spacecraft.

They gave it 6/10 when it sounded more like a 3!

I've suspected for a long time now that FT gets paid to shill certain things. Like a while ago we had an article about an upcoming poltergeist film that got raved about, then the next issue it was savaged in a review. Also the guy who wrote Being A Beast had an article in the same issue his book got an excellent review, despite it (and his article) being a badly written mess. I don't really blame FT, it does need to earn money and all, but some of the reviews do make me a bit suspicious.
 
I've suspected for a long time now that FT gets paid to shill certain things. Like a while ago we had an article about an upcoming poltergeist film that got raved about, then the next issue it was savaged in a review. Also the guy who wrote Being A Beast had an article in the same issue his book got an excellent review, despite it (and his article) being a badly written mess. I don't really blame FT, it does need to earn money and all, but some of the reviews do make me a bit suspicious.

I think in the above case it was because the writer penning the negative review was not the same as the editor giving the summary and score out of 10 at the end. I know Empire critics don't get to decide how many stars a film gets on their reviews.
 
Wow, that's strange-- have they admitted this, or did an ex-reviewer say it?

I think it was a current reviewer (at the time, anyway), but true to my fading memory, I can't recall where I read it or from whom. Sorry.
 
some of the reviews do make me a bit suspicious.

I know what you mean. Over the years we've all come to recognise names of regular contributors to FT and whenever one of them has a book reviewed my eyes skip to the rating. It's invariably a 9 or 10.
Now I'm not saying there's any funny business going on, if they're good enough to write articles for FT there's no reason their books shouldn't be excellent.
But it is so predictable it always makes me just a little bit suspicious! :p
 
I've suspected for a long time now that FT gets paid to shill certain things.
Oh, if only. Then FT might actually get rich beyond their wildest dreams... rich, rich, I tell you. Some hope.

The case first cited here was actually of an article in one issue and a review in another - by a different writer. Different writers are allowed to have different opinions, I'd have thought. FT has always insisted (see Reader Info page) that it holds no overall editorial position and that opinions expressed by individual contributors do not reflect those of the journal itself. Occasionally you will find points ratings that don't seem to match up with the review - but usually it's because someone in an editorial chair kinda forgot to change the rating in the page template or the old pages copied to start the new issue.

I can remember instances where a regular contributor's latest book got a pretty weak or even a bad review - and I don't think it's necessarily because of internecine rivalries - one man's meat is another man's fall of poisson...
 
An excellent explanation made all the better by fine punning. Thanks for that.
 
One of the best issues in a while.

The corpse factory as propaganda to demonise the enemy was very interesting and sets the mind thinking what else might we take as fact in history that in fact has come from, or been elaborated by, a propagandist.
 
Back
Top