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FT400

Nice to see Stu’s excellent article detailing the trials and tribulations of the message board. While some of us have been through the dark days of nearly losing our home yet can still continue to post here, it’s a reminder of how much unpaid work and dedication goes on behind the screen to keep this board going.
 
Really enjoyed the expanded IHTM section, and also the Thunderbird article.

I am intrigued and looking forward to next month's Jenny Randles column too!
 
Oddly low-key for a significantly numbered edition. Appreciated the article about the forums. Normally I can find half a dozen remarkable points in the mag to potentially raise here, but this time around, just the one...

The bloke in Alabama who drove through a road-covering mess of entrails and meaty bits and speculated on whether a truck going to or frm an abbatoir had shed its load. he noted the physical confirmation - the sight, the smell, and the observable fact it made traction on the road surface problematical - he had to slow his car. he also noted a lorry driver witnessed this and noted the same phenomenon.

The police denied all knowledge of this and suggested he stopped bothering them; going back to the scene the road surface and surrounding fields showed evidence of damage but the road itself was clear of all gunk.

Just a thought. if the entrails, et c, on the road were interfering with the traction of his car that would have left physical evidence - rotting matter embedded in the tyre treads, caked into the wheel-wells and undersurface, splashes and stainings on the lower body? Shame he didn't say if he checked for this as this would have added an extra dimension of possible veracity to the story. The same would have happened to the lorry.
 
I introduced my son in law to FT during a recent visit to my house. I was ASTONISHED that he'd never heard of the mag, being that his post grad work is all in various aspects of Fortean writings (and he's made a special study of Lovecraft and Poe). I gave him a few back copies to read and - well, he's now a convert and daughter is buying him a subscription for Christmas.

Another convert! Mwahahahahahah <runs off rubbing hands>
 
gordonrutter said:
I must admit that neither Stu Neville nor I use our real names on this board. It is a secret long hidden but in fact my real name is Stu Neville and the online entity you know as Stu Neville actually has the real world name of Gordon Rutter.
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Nice try, lizards. Nice misdirection there. But your trickery will not work. Combining my QAnon head with my crossword brain, I have already deduced that you are actually Evil Le Nuts and Teodor R Grunt - pizza and wardrobe dealing agents of the worldwide liberal/satanic cabal.

Which reminds me - I loved the extended IHTM section in 400, but it also put me in mind of the collection of seriously nutty letters that was a major feature in a previous milestone issue, and which was possibly even more entertaining.

Oh, and did anyone else spot the ghostly face leering out of Robert Knox's top left window - just above the decorative star thingy (pg 57)? Tall chap, no body - but given the staggeringly low threshold for qualification these days, that's definitely a ghost; it probably definitely wasn't there when someone took the photograph, the image has probably definitely been studied by' experts', and I claim my five pounds.
 
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Just spotted another correspondence which is worth noting. The article about the strange death and possible murder of Fort's publisher. We have a man who was getting increasingly more paranoid, who worked in an area of publishing that was not-quite-respectable, worried that some of the strange material he has been publishing recently has attracted the unwelcome attention of Them, a man who was known to be a bit eccentric, and who prided himself on the rare and strange tropical fish kept in the tank in his office. ("Martian Fish".)

Scroll forward to the work of prankster authors Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in the middle-late 1970's. The action of the Illuminatus! trilogy begins with the strange dissapearance and possible murder of a small-time publisher. We have a man who was getting increasingly more paranoid, who worked in an area of publishing that was not-quite-respectable, worried that some of the strange material his magazine has been publishing recently has attracted the unwelcome attention of Them, who was known to be a bit eccentric, and who prided himself on the rare and strange tropical fish kept in the tank in his office. ("Egyptian Mouth-Breeders".)

It is possible the guerilla ontologist did not know of the strange events concerning the death of Fort's publisher......
 
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GNC said:
The IHTM compilation was great, I'd forgotten most of them, but I appreciated having my memory jogged about the woman whose 3yo twins screamed they saw a man falling from an aeroplane, and then she saw him later and he was really weird. It's the extended nature of the encounters (over a course of about 3 days) that make it remarkable, and a pity there's no other witnesses we know of.
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And here I was thinking they didn’t have any, as it wasn’t in its usual place which I check when I receive it after them not having it a couple of times.
 
Spookdaddy said:
Nice try, lizards. Nice misdirection there. But your trickery will not work. Combining my QAnon head with my crossword brain, I have already deduced that you are actually Evil Le Nuts and Teodor R Grunt - pizza and wardrobe dealing agents of the worldwide liberal/satanic cabal.
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I read this (it's early and my eyes aren't awake yet) as 'agents of the worldwide literal/sarcastic cabal' and I was nodding...

Stu, Gordon, I think I might need my weekly chastise...
 
catseye said:
I read this (it's early and my eyes aren't awake yet) as 'agents of the worldwide literal/sarcastic cabal' and I was nodding...

Stu, Gordon, I think I might need my weekly chastise...
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Members of a sarcastic cabal? As if.
 
Tempest63 said:
I really enjoyed that section in 400. I always read the strange deaths first then go to IHTM straight after.
The mag printed one of my letters in IHTM once and it was later incorporated into one of the books they published.
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I love those books, I wish they’d do more.

Which was your story?

I loved the extended IHTM section. I came here I talk about the weird broken down car one. The car sounds futuristic for the time (seen very rarely even now) but the people with it seem old fashioned. It was odd in so many ways.
 
MorningAngel said:
Which was your story?
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Me and the wife married in the Caribbean on a cruise ship, returning home on 22nd December. After we got back we started to notice the smell of rolling tobacco in the bathroom each morning. Her late husband smoked rolling tobacco. Our heating thermostat also kept mysteriously being turned to full. We were waking some nights or getting back from work to a sauna.
We first noticed the smell had stopped on Valentine’s day, which was the 10th anniversary of his passing and the thermostat stopped playing up.
 
Aaaargh reading this has made me wish I'd read this edition, it sounds excellent.

I used to buy the magazine from WH Smith several years ago, I have some of them along with 2 or 3 of the separate little It Happened to Me compendiums.

But alas the shop didn't always stock it - seemed somewhat hit and miss, there was never any regularity to it, we would just look each time we were at the shop and it would either be there or it wouldn't - and we could never find it anywhere else. Therefore as a consequence I haven't been able to buy it for quite some time.
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
Aaaargh reading this has made me wish I'd read this edition, it sounds excellent.

I used to buy the magazine from WH Smith several years ago, I have some of them along with 2 or 3 of the separate little It Happened to Me compendiums.

But alas the shop didn't always stock it - seemed somewhat hit and miss, there was never any regularity to it, we would just look each time we were at the shop and it would either be there or it wouldn't - and we could never find it anywhere else. Therefore as a consequence I haven't been able to buy it for quite some time.
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Before I subscribed I used to get mine from WH Smith at Liverpool Street Station or Chelmsford High Street. Problem was it seemed to be in a different place every time I went looking for it. In the end I stopped hunting for it and just asked the staff if it was in.
 
Bad Bungle said:
I lost touch with the Mags, never see them on the Newsagent shelves anymore, didn't know the state of Dennis, heard stories on the Forum about Subscription/ distribution problems (my brother only gets 65% of Private Eye). However, I'll tell him to go ahead (so I get to read them). Thank you.
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Mine arrives regularly in this little corner of Tier 4 Essex. If you are concerned, what about giving the online issue as a subscription gift?
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
Aaaargh reading this has made me wish I'd read this edition, it sounds excellent.

I used to buy the magazine from WH Smith several years ago, I have some of them along with 2 or 3 of the separate little It Happened to Me compendiums.

But alas the shop didn't always stock it - seemed somewhat hit and miss, there was never any regularity to it, we would just look each time we were at the shop and it would either be there or it wouldn't - and we could never find it anywhere else. Therefore as a consequence I haven't been able to buy it for quite some time.
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I think they only tend to stock a few. So it probably depended who got there first.
 
Definitely the most enjoyable FT this year.
Was rather surprised though to see Jenny Randles still apparently believing that the "Cumberland Spaceman/Spacemum" was not an over-exposed image of the back of Templeton's wife, who had inadvertently crept into shot.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Was rather surprised though to see Jenny Randles still apparently believing that the "Cumberland Spaceman/Spacemum" was not an over-exposed image of the back of Templeton's wife, who had inadvertently crept into shot.
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It's possible that she hasn't read the debate we've had in here, and hasn't read the new conclusions we made.
 
Mythopoeika said:
It's possible that she hasn't read the debate we've had in here, and hasn't read the new conclusions we made.
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I thought Jenny had even contributed to the "Spaceman" thread here?
I'd be very surprised if she hasn't seen the colour-corrected version of the photo:

spacemum.JPG
 
My copy has just arrived. Strange, I received this issue a while back, sow I have two copies....
 
Today's archive read.

The Knox House in Edinburgh. (page 57).

Two questions. Back in the day it had a front garden, referenced in the article. The photo shows a shopfront opening directly onto a street. What happened to the garden where the mob gathered to menace Doctor Knox?

Secondly.. the photo of the building in 2020. Take a look at the upper left-hand window. There's an image of a six-pointed star there. What on earth is this and what might explain it? (I'd buy "some sort of decoration hung there by a resident", although it just looks odd and out of place)

And.. the Cloudfare thing installed in May 2025 is telling me "you have run into some problems" when I try to post, so I have to refresh the page... make sure to copy your text first!
 
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