FT455

[Tempest63]

The closest encounters - classic alien encounters
Marsupial attacks
The green children of Woolpit

Edit. And another bloody article on Cannock Chase…that has really been done to death now!

 

[AgProv]

After Classical Corner, I've just seen the connection: Judas Iscariot - Judas of the Sicarii. Obvious. There was also Simon the Zealot in the gang, of course, and St Peter himself carried a shiv under his robes (Gethsemane). So was Simon Peter the same as Simon the Zealot?

Also... wondering if Judas was the Sicarii in the entourage of Jesus who got "turned" by Roman Intelligence, and was allowed to walk free provided he reported back to his handler frequently, to report on what that seditious preacher was up to now. That Thursday night after dinner, was the thing with the thirty pieces of silver just a routine informant's fee (or Judas might have thought it was...). so when it led to a bust, and Jesus being lifted in the Garden of Gethsemane by the Romans, followed by the events of Friday - well, you can see Judas might have been a bit shocked!

 

[Mrs Melmoth]

The theory about Judas being affiliated to the Sicarii has been around for a while- one take I particularly like is that he was drawn to Jesus as a Messiah figure promising an end to Roman rule, but was less enamoured of his love and peace approach to changing the situation. His betrayal could have been an attempt to provoke Jesus, and the crowds who had flocked around him a few days earlier, into more direct, violent action.

 

[Steven]

AgProv's made it sound like a Noir plot. 'The world-weary laughter of that two-bit dame Mary...'

 

[AgProv]

AgProv's made it sound like a Noir plot. 'The world-weary laughter of that two-bit dame Mary...'

Now there's an idea.

Somebody like Jo Nesbo or Leif G.W. Persson re-writing the Gospels and setting the action in Stockholm or Oslo. I'm now imagining Harry Hole as a cynical but competent maverick centurion, maybe with too much of a reliance on the issue wine ration, who is conflicted by finding this immigrant from the Middle East, Joshua something, to be a sympathetic guy and personally likable, but surrounded by shady characters, including those fanatical types Security want me to keep an eye on. This Judas guy has a profile that lights all the red bulbs.

Centurion Hole then notes a junior copper who is paralysed in hospital suddenly makes a miraculous remission. He is also impressed that booze appears in his bar where previously there was only water.

At the end, Hole plays the Longinus role at the death of the immigrant; afterwards, he maybe glimpses him around Oslo a few times when the guy is at least three days dead, and puts it down to the akavit.

As for the Persson version set in Stockholm... this involves the loathsome copper Evert Bäckström, a man who isn't so much racist as utterly misanthropic and certainly xenophobic towards immigrants. Given the brief by Security to organise surveillance of this group of religiously-motivated fanatics who are preaching in Stockholm and gathering support, Bäckström takes the route of pulling in a close comrade known to have terrorist leanings (or more so, by the standards of those bloody immigrants Sweden's letting in from the Middle East, everybody knows they're all terrorists and fanatics) , and beating up this Judas guy until he agrees to act as the mole in the organisation; thirty krone a time becomes the agreed informant fee for regular reports....

After a junior copper gets his ear sliced off in a confrontation by night in a public park, Bäckström then goes mediaeval on this other associate, who repeatedly denies he knows the Person of Interest.

The Danish version might have Mary Magdalene in a big shapeless woolly jumper, a woman with personality issues...

The Bible as Scandi Noir. This has potential!

​

 

[Night_Watch]

Hey all! I've had my issue of latest mag a few days. I'm really looking forward to reading the Woolpit article. Like many I'm sure I've read about the green children previously but this new article looks interesting. I was in Woolpit around '97 for the Pratchett / Discworld meet - oh the meories!

From these posts it looks like CC this time round is a must read - I look forward to it.

 

[eziofan]

I don't know how everyone else feels but I find Alien Zoo is a bit of a misleading title. It generally seems to be a run of the mill Zoology page. Interesting if you are into Zoology but seems to be drifting away from Forteana.

 

[AgProv]

I don't know how everyone else feels but I find Alien Zoo is a bit of a misleading title. It generally seems to be a run of the mill Zoology page. Interesting if you are into Zoology but seems to be drifting away from Forteana.

I get that, but there's got to be a fine (well, blurred) line between "conventional" zoology and the Crypto sort. This grey area at the fringe is where the Fortean interest lies? After all, Vietnam, after that long destructive war with lots of people stomping all over the place who were not there to curate the wildlife - was probably the very last place on Earth where you might discover a previously un-known species - at least three, in fact - and not just insect-or-sub-insect sized, these were mammals including a very distinctive deer-like critter never seen before.

So there's a lot out there that's still unknown. There's that tiny little corner of Antarctica, for instance, that's free of permanent ice. Apparently that has its own native flora and fauna not to be found anywhere else. There's the tardigrave thing, for instance, and the tantalising possibility that these hardy little critters might not have originated on Earth at all.

Fairly recently I had my own run-in with a mystery thingy that ticked some of the boxes for an ABC. If nothing else, this sparked slightly more than a passing casual interest in cryptozoology. (And I'm happy to accept that a moving shape some distance away, glimpsed in indifferent light for three or four seconds from a moving train, might have a far more everyday mundane explanation).

This is the grey area, the Edge where Forteana resides. But to know it's an Edge at all where something unusual may be happening - you need to have at least a passing layman's understanding of "normal" known zoology, so as to be able to recognise "Now this is out of the ordinary".

Cryptozoology does need to outline the accepted "normal" before it can move on to those possible glimpses into the unknown and the mysterious.

 

[SimonBurchell]

I picked this issue up in WHSmith on Tuesday. The Pascagoula article was great. I am disappointed that ufologists still resort to hypnosis though, in spite of it being shown to be a gateway to fantasy. Introducing hypnosis produces nothing useful and just muddies the waters. The sub-article writer wrote "we know there are good arguments against the use of regressive hypnosis", yet it was done anyway. Nevertheless, the account of additional witnesses was interesting. As the writer said, "even if we remove the hypnosis testimony from this story, there is still a story. "

I now want those books from the competition! I suppose that was the idea...

 

[AgProv]

FT456 is imminent? If we can open a sweepstake on this - my bet is perhaps on Saturday 15th I will hear the thump of mail on doormat?

 

[oxo66]

FT456 is imminent? ... my bet is perhaps on Saturday 15th I will hear the thump of mail on doormat?

Looks a good bet: Saturday 15th is 28 days since FT455, and 364 days since FT443 (April 2024).