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"The Unexplained" Magazine

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Great find. First thing I did was go to the winged creatures but alas, no picture of a giant bird in a barn. I guess it was removed when the Mandela Effect occurred. Also noted for future reading are the spooky Clapham Woods stories. Maybe Nicola’s old stomping ground.
 
Lovely!

I well remember my joy in finding a complete, bound, indexed set*, after years of having a few random volumes. It was in Sale, where I made the silly decision to lug the whole set back to my car. Back-breaking! For years, they lived next to my bed, as a handy source of unsettling bedtime reading.

I see the archive.org files give us the option to download pdfs. Has anyone done this? I would be interested to know if the pdfs allow searches of the text. I suspect they are comprised of page-images, which will not. I ask because the part-work's own Index was not the best. It would be interesting to have a fully-searchable text, though one issue at a time is going to be time-consuming . . . :thought:

*Access to this mother-lode of strangeness was behind a lot of my early activity on this board. At least half the topics which arose seemed to have their roots in those Orbis pages!
 
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JamesWhitehead said:
*Access to this mother-lode of strangeness was behind a lot of my early activity on this board. At least half the topics which arose seemed to have their roots in those Orbis pages!
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How very dare you? ‘The News’, precursor to the FT was going in the early 70’s.
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Analogue Boy said:
‘The News’, precursor to the FT was going in the early 70’s.
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Of course it was - many of the same crew did work for The Unexplained*.

The latter was a mass-market part-work, following in the footsteps of Man Myth & Magic, which got tv promotion.

I'm uncertain if The Unexplained had such a boost but it was very popular, back in the day.

Many who flocked to the FT Message Board, then as now, had half-remembered stories from The Unexplained to blame. :oops:

*I think they must have done it for a one-off fee as their content has been churned for decades!
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Of course it was - many of the same crew did work for The Unexplained*.

The latter was a mass-market part-work, following in the footsteps of Man Myth & Magic, which got tv promotion.

I'm uncertain if The Unexplained had such a boost but it was very popular, back in the day.

Many who flocked to the FT Message Board, then as now, had half-remembered stories from The Unexplained to blame. :oops:

*I think they must have done it for a one-off fee as their content has been churned for decades!
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The Unexplained did indeed get tv promotion and also free gifts. It was published a couple of times and the free gifts varied, a flexi disc of Raudive evp and a set of Zenner cards were part of them.
 
gordonrutter said:
The Unexplained did indeed get tv promotion and also free gifts. It was published a couple of times and the free gifts varied, a flexi disc of Raudive evp and a set of Zenner cards were part of them.
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And surely, surely, it must be well-past time for the series to be republished? How else are an entire new generation of Forteans going to get their start?

Maybe this time, with a wash-and-brush-up in the layout and design, and a digital subscription available too?
 
Steev(still) said:
a wash-and-brush-up in the layout and design
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Already, in the 1990s, there was a highly-visible part-work named after the X-Files, which used the panoply of desktop publishing features newly available. Horribly busy pages, full of pull-outs, boxed texts, side-bars etc. It was a headache to navigate whatever content it had.

The Unexplained was the calm before that storm. :pipe:
 
gordonrutter said:
The Unexplained did indeed get tv promotion and also free gifts. It was published a couple of times and the free gifts varied, a flexi disc of Raudive evp and a set of Zenner cards were part of them.
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I still have the Zener cards and the magazine they came with in a box somewhere. I'm pretty sure that I bought the first two or maybe three issues together, in some sort of promotional glossy folder. I'm going to have to hunt them out now, aren't I?
 
Spookdaddy said:
I still have the Zener cards and the magazine they came with in a box somewhere. I'm pretty sure that I bought the first two or maybe three issues together, in some sort of promotional glossy folder. I'm going to have to hunt them out now, aren't I?
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I remember those cards...!
 
I tried downloading one of the copies from the Internet Archive. It does come up nicely on the screen, but there's a couple of points worth making. Firstly, the text is indeed rendered as graphics, so they are not text-searchable. This is a bit of a restriction.

Secondly, they are not small files. The one I downloaded came to just under 100megabytes. With 70 of them on offer, downloading the lot would take up 7gigs on your hard drive, a not insignificant amount, and perhaps more than some people with older computers could spare.

But they do look pretty on the screen and they're very readable.
 
All the posters here who are commenting on how reading 'The Unexplained' got them into Forteana in the first place has set me thinking. Could we see magazines like this as a sort of gateway drug? "Have a taste of this and soon you'll progress to the real hard stuff - you'll be completely addicted and posting on the CFI Forum before you know it..."

My own gateway drug to Forteana was old copies of Fate Magazine. My father had quite a collection, many of them from the 1950's. Long since disposed of, alas, but I fondly remember reading them when I was in primary school. Other kids were still wrestling with the mysteries of Bob and Jane throwing the ball to the dog Spot, and I was going home and reading about reincarnation and telepathy. No wonder I ended up the way I did...

In fact I recall that the article that really inspired me as a kid was the account of the Iris Farczady case. This appeared in Fate in the June 1953 edition. I remember thinking 'Wow, that's a cool idea! When you die you don't have to die. You can just nip out and pinch someone else's body and keep living on! Fabulous!' (A for Imagination, not so great for Morality.)

'Man, Myth and Magic' was another early inspiration. I was old enough to buy those for myself when they came out. Luckily many of them were remaindered and could be bought quite cheaply, so affordable to a school kid limited to pocket money. I still have quite a stack of the old MMM's, and I have vague thoughts about getting them bound one day.

What were other people's gateway drugs?
 
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Also, can a mod please put the magazine name in the thread title inside inverted commas? It reminds me uncomfortably of the fast talking I had to do when the memsahib found that issue of Busty Asian Babes in my shopping basket.

maximus otter
 
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