January – 2009 – Paranormal Magazine

Why toddle when you can fly?

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

Last month I owned up to the peculiar extraterrestrial fantasies of my childhood. A new article has now stirred up another half-forgotten early memory.

New writer to Paranormal, Mark Salmon, got in touch with several ideas for features, one of which really hit home with me. Mark told me he had discovered that large numbers of people shared a similar, inexplicable memory: of having floated down the stairs when they were children. And he’s one of them: he can recall drifting down stairs that had been secured by a child-gate when he was an infant barely able to stand up.

My younger brother shared this talent. I remember seeing him float down stairs when he was a toddler, his little pink feet never touching a single step. I guess I would have been five or six at the time. Reminding Stuart of this extraordinary incident, he surprised me by saying he was sure it was no isolated occurrence; indeed he went further.

‘I don’t think I needed to actually walk down the stairs until I was about five or six,’ he said. Ulp!

So, is this a new phenomenon Mark has uncovered? Are there many more people who can recall being able to defy gravity as infants? Can anyone recall floating upstairs – surely that bit more difficult? (What am I saying? This job is giving me a really skewed perspective on things!) Anyway, if any reader can shed more light on this remarkable subject, do please get in touch.

Flight is something of a theme this issue. ‘Eye-opener’ showcases photographs of levitating people and objects. Ten pages are devoted to horrible half-human winged things, thanks to Jon Downes and Janet Bord. Dr Karl Shuker discusses the intriguing idea that UFOs might be luminous creatures floating in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Back down to earth – kind of – Nick Redfern completes his two-part article on ‘shape-shifters’ by focussing on were-cats and spirits which take on animal form after death. And don’t miss Jerry Glover’s informative article on Spontaneous Human Combustion, in which he successfully argues that the cause of this most gruesome of phenomena is far from solved.

My own contribution is a short one on a scarce category of spook, the ghost bird. In this I mention the fact that certain birds were once seen as bad omens: for example, it was considered very unlucky if a crow came down your chimney. Which brings me to another anecdote (sorry).

When I lived in a rustic cottage a few miles from the Paranormal offices some years ago, I heard quite a lot of scraping and scratching coming down my chimney, but I assumed it was just soot. The chimney ended in a metal pipe which connected to a closed, pot-bellied wood-burning stove. Several hours after the ‘soot’ had ceased to fall, I opened the flap on the stove and gave it a good prod inside with a poker, assuming that it was full of rubbish. But nope, it seemed completely clean. I rattled the poker around inside just to make sure, then removed it.

Seconds later, a dusty jackdaw emerged from the darkness. It squeezed through the aperture and perched blinking on the rim. How I missed it with the poker I do not know but the bird’s sudden appearance was so uncanny that I dropped it on my foot in surprise. Fortunately, the crow didn’t croak out ‘Nevermore’, or I might not be here today to tell you the story. In fact, the only ‘unlucky’ result of the adventure was getting loads of sooty claw marks all over my walls while attempting to shoo it outside.

Richard Holland, Editor

Tell the editor about your own experience with the paranormal. Email editor@paranormalmagazine.co.uk or write to Richard Holland, The Editor Paranormal Magazine, Jazz Publishing, The Old School, Higher Kinnerton, Chester CH4 9AJ. Or submit your story through the EXPERIENCES section on our website: www.paranormalmagazone.co.uk

Something to think about

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

Are ghosts, UFOs, sea serpents, fairies etcetera etcetera all created by the human mind?

Well, of course they are, say the sceptics. They’re hallucinations, products of over-fertile imaginations. They are – they say – all in the mind.

There is, however, another view that paranormal entities are not ‘all in the mind’ but out of it. That they are indeed the products of the fertile human imagination, but of millions upon millions of people across the world and throughout history (and indeed prehistory): archetypes formed in the human subconscious and projected outwards to take on a kind of half-life of their own.

This is the concept of the ‘thought-form’, a hypothesis finding solid ground among paranormal researchers and one ably explained in two companion articles this month by Nick Redfern and Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe.

The idea is this: if early settlers feared what might lurk in the unexplored forests a few yards from their cottage door, might the hairy wild men their imaginations conjured up be actually brought into being? If our primitive ancestors dreaded being pursued and eaten be monstrous predators, might those fears be transformed into the unearthly Black Dogs still occasionally known to follow night-bound travellers today? And might those Black Dogs become Big Black Cats if enough people believe they can exist in the rather less wild places of the 21^st century?

Our rustic ancestors swapped tales of people being abducted by Fairies. Today we hear of people being abducted by Aliens. As Janet Bord explains in a fascinating article this issue, Fairies and Aliens share many characteristics. Are they the same beings – thought-forms perhaps? – which have adapted over the centuries to meet our expectations?

If all this wasn’t mind-boggling enough, there’s plenty more to intrigue you in Paranormal 30. Dr Karl Shuker takes us down the savage garden path with some wild accounts of carnivorous trees, while newcomer to Paranormal, Emma McNiel, introduces the bizarre concept of Reverse Speech, in which we allegedly give away our true thoughts with a kind of unconscious double talk. In addition, the Fortean Picture Library presents ten more startling pictures, this time of religious phenomena.

One article that particularly got me thinking is ‘All The Best Tunes’, in which another new name in the magazine, Jimmy Lee Shreeve, explores the background to the legends of blues guitarists selling their souls to the Devil. The deal was always done at a crossroads, as dictated by a magical tradition that originated in Africa. And yet, as I discuss in an accompanying piece, crossroads were considered just as eerie in Britain. The more I looked into it, the more apparent it became that this superstition – if it is a superstition – is worldwide and of great antiquity.

What is the origin of such a common belief, what is its cause? Is it an artefact of the belief system of some ancient ancestral race? Does it represent some archetypal belief shared by all humanity as a quirk of evolution, due to the way our brains are wired? Or is it universal simply because it’s true – that crossroads really are gateways to the Unknown?

As usual, there are too many questions and not enough answers. But of course that’s the reason paranormal research remains endlessly interesting.

Richard Holland, Editor

Believe what you really see

Friday, January 9th, 2009

by John Stoker

In 1975 I was working for a radio station in the North-East which decided to broadcast a live Hallowe’en show. Jim, a local psychic investigator, was recommended to me so I rang him up and asked him to appear in the programme with me.

When I met Jim, he turned out to be a rather pleasant middle-aged headmaster from a nearby school. The idea was to take him to a wood just outside Newcastle which was reputed to be haunted. Jim was all for it but said that we had to regard this as a serious investigation, which was exactly what we wanted.

On the night, we set out for the wood in the radio van with an engineer. It was cold and damp as Jim and I walked slowly down an avenue of trees with only a microphone for company. We did our first insert into the studio programme and explained what we were up to and assured the radio audience that they would join us if we encountered anything strange.

After about 50 minutes Jim grabbed my arm and pointed towards a clump of trees.

‘There’s something materialising over there,’ he said. Our engineer dropped his flask of tea and told the studio what was happening and they took us on air. Jim was beside himself with excitement and gave an absolutely hair-raising commentary. The shape was forming and he could see it moving towards us. But most fearful of all was the sense of evil he described. Jim’s description became even more graphic until finally the entity retreated.

It was wonderful radio – and thank God it was radio, because the engineer and I couldn’t see a damn thing. As we drove back Jim told me he’d had a very exciting night.

‘It’s nights like this that make it all worthwhile,’ he told me. The next week large groups of ghost hunters tramped through the woods in the hope of seeing the spectre. I doubt whether they saw anything, but then they didn’t have Jim with them.

Twenty years later I filmed a documentary at Glastonbury Abbey and when we came to view the tapes back in the editing suite, one member of our team said he could see the outline of a monk in one of the shots. He was so convinced that he rang the press office while we examined the tape. On a small monitor it did look like a monk but on a larger one it turned out to be merely a shadow. Then I got a call from a very excited press officer asking for a picture from the tape. I told him the truth, but the truth didn’t provide a story.

‘If it looks like a monk it is a monk,’ he said. I told him to drop it. ‘You don’t make my job any easier,’ were his last words.

I fear that that some of us are so desperate to see a supernatural event that we inadvertently create our own phantoms. In so doing, our objectivity, and therefore our credibility, vanishes. My grandmother, a devoted spiritualist, used to say that it wasn’t the dead you should fear, it was the living. In the world of paranormal investigation that phrase is more than apt. Trust your own experience – not what people tell you you’re experiencing.

John Stoker has spent 40 years working in radio and television, for such companies as the BBC, Thames, Central and NBC. At Anglia Television he helped to launch Tales of the Unexpected for Oscar-winning producer Sir John Woolf. He became a freelance writer and director and his output includes Flesh and Blood (the story of Hammer Films), The Templar Legacy and Michael Bentine Asks Is There Anybody There? He is the author of The Illustrated Frankenstein and has contributed to magazines as diverse as Little Shoppe of Horrors and The Oldie.

Did UFO collide with wind turbine?

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

UFO enthusiasts are claiming damage to a Lincolnshire wind farm turbine was caused by a mystery aircraft.

The turbine at Conisholme lost one 66ft (20m) blade and another was badly damaged in the early hours of Sunday.

County councillor for the area Robert Palmer said he had seen a “round, white light that seemed to be hovering”.

Ecotricity, which owns the site, said while investigations continued they were not ruling anything out – but the extent of damage was “unique”.

The turbine is one of 20 at the Conisholme site, which has been only been fully operational since April 2008. The broken blade has been recovered and is being examined.

Local ufologists said they had received many reports of activity in the area and had teams searching for clues.

Mr Palmer said: “I actually saw a white light – a round, white light that seemed to be hovering.

“That is the only way I can explain it – it wasn’t a flare-like light – it was just round, white light with a slight red edge to it that seemed to be over the wind turbines.”

Dale Vince, founder of Ecotricity, said the company was keeping an open mind about the incident.

“We don’t have an explanation at the moment as to what the cause was,” he said.

“We have been crawling all over it and have sent bits off for analysis to see if we can work out what caused it.

“Until we have some idea, some plausible explanation that it was not a UFO, I don’t think we should rule it out”.

He added: “To make one of these blades fall off, or to bend it, takes a lot.”

Numerous reports

Russ Kellett, from the Flying Saucer Bureau, said witnesses had told him of activity in the area.

“One saw what they at first thought was a low-flying aircraft on the Saturday evening and another heard a loud banging in the early hours of Sunday,” he said.

“This is the second most reports of activity we have ever had – I have had over 30 phone calls and emails.

“To hit two of the blades, any object must have been about 170ft long.”

But some technical experts have suggested a more mundane explanation.

Dr Peter Schubel, from the University of Nottingham, is an expert in the design and manufacture of wind turbine blades.

‘Military activity’

He said that if the turbine blade was still, it would take the equivalent of a 10-tonne load to do that kind of damage, but if it was rotating, or hit by a moving object, the force could be a lot less.

He said of the possible cause: “It’s definitely not a bird. It could be ice thrown from a neighbouring turbine that struck it.

“Most turbines have an anti-icing system on the blades and maybe it failed to prevent the ice build-up.”

The Ministry of Defence said it was not looking into the incident.

A spokesman said: “The MoD examines reports solely to establish whether UK airspace may have been compromised by hostile or unauthorised military activity.

“Unless there’s evidence of a potential threat, there’s no attempt to identify the nature of each sighting reported.”

Ecotricity said it hoped to have the turbine back in action within a week.

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God gave us the spirit of inquiry

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

lionelfanthorpe By Lionel Fanthorpe

Many religious people – especially those who describe themselves as conservative traditionalists and fundamentalists – seem to be very nervous when anything paranormal or supernatural comes along. They suspect that anything appertaining to ghosts, poltergeists, UFOs and the like is somehow connected with Satan, demons, evil spirits or imps. Consequently, they feel they must have nothing to do with it.

Unfortunately, this irrational prejudice against paranormal phenomena prevents them from taking part in the kind of open-minded, objective research which is both fascinating to carry out and informative to conclude.

I’m an ordained Anglican Priest, and a liberal, modernist theologian. The God I believe in is the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving ruler of as many universes as exist. I also believe in the unique mission of Jesus of Nazareth, and in another life that follows this one, where we shall be happily reunited forever with those who have gone ahead of us.

I deplore the ecclesiastical rules, regulations, church hierarchies, creeds, liturgies and rituals that ruin spiritual life. Love, kindness and generosity are the best forms of worship.

However strange certain paranormal phenomena may seem to us, however far outside the limits of our 21^st century natural sciences they may go, they are all well within such a God’s control.

The many gifts that God has bestowed upon us include freedom of choice and curiosity – the very healthy intellectual desire to find out as much as we can about the cosmos in which we live. Exploring and researching are among the most enjoyable things we can do, and God has given us a marvellous environment to explore. From the credible reports of many reliable and sensible witnesses, our cosmos seems to include ghosts, poltergeists, werebeasts, cryptozoological specimens, UFOs, extra-terrestrials – and a great many more inexplicable phenomena. Investigating them is just as religiously acceptable as analysing chemical compounds in a laboratory, studying the stars in an observatory, or writing exciting new programs for a computer.

Religion should be based on rational thought and logical deduction – and so should all worthwhile science. The scientific method starts with observation of the data; it then goes on to categorise what’s been observed. Next, it puts forward an explanation and tests it repeatedly. If the hypothesis stands up to every test the scientist can think of, it gets promoted to the rank of a scientific law – but that doesn’t make it immune from subsequent re-testing. Religion should use a similar process to reach spiritual conclusions.

This suggests that we would be wise to be on our guard against any religion that forbids us to explore the unknown. The unknown is there to be explored, and the more vigorously and fearlessly we explore it, the greater the sum-total of human knowledge will become. Knowledge is power, and wisdom is a very valuable treasure. Religious taboos and prohibitions do humanity a grave disservice. God gave us our minds – and the right to use them to think and explore all the wonders that surround us: including the paranormal wonders.

The Rev Lionel Fanthorpe is a man of many parts. Following an early career as a writer of sci-fi and supernatural novels, he has also been a management consultant and a head teacher at a comprehensive school, as well as an Anglican priest. He is a well-known lecturer, writer and broadcaster who, together with his wife Patricia, specialises in investigating unsolved mysteries. Lionel is president of both ASSAP (The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena) and the British UFO Association.

Right place, right time, right gadget

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

As most of you probably know, the Bigfoot-in-the-Freezer story we highlighted last month turned out to be the hoax we feared it might be. For a few short days, as we went to press, I believed it might be genuine – after all, what was said to be on offer was a whole corpse and DNA analysis. You couldn’t get away with faking that, could you? In the event, the perpetrators didn’t even try and it’s hard to see what they could have gained from such a lame stunt.

Underpinning my hope, I guess, was the belief that one day such a scenario really will happen. If a Bigfoot, or a lake monster, or a big cat is finally proved to exist, it will most likely be in this way: somebody somewhere will stumble upon a body, lying in a wood or on the shore of a lake or beside a road.

Meanwhile, in the realm of the ghost hunter, more and more gizmos are being toyed with to try and capture one on film – or rather, the modern equivalent of film. Maybe the right combination of light-wave filters will suddenly reveal to us a spirit world all around us. Such a result might be terrifying – or worse still, become instantly mundane and boring!

I know that hi-tech cameras have been set up around a jungle in Indonesia in the hope of photographing the orang pendek, probably (unlike Hallowe’en costumes in fridges) the man-beast most likely to be a genuine undiscovered species – and the subject of an in-depth feature by Dr Karl Shuker this month.

We also have the treat this issue of ten of the best ghost photos from the Fortean Picture Library to mull over. Most of these were taken on old-fashioned film, and some on plates, but they never fail to intrigue even after all these years.

Today it’s quite possible that the device most likely to record something paranormal for posterity will be the humble camera-phone. Who would have imagined 15 years ago that we’d all be walking around with Star Trek-style communicators, doubling up as video cameras?

Websites like YouTube are full of videos of weird apparitions. They are usually so indistinct that they are easily dismissed; nevertheless one cannot get around the fact that almost everyone out of doors – children included – is armed with a handy camera-cum-phone, which means the potential for capturing an anomalous event is now far higher than ever before. Not only can you take a quick snap or vid of the thing you’ve witnessed, you can phone up your friends to come and witness it, too.

It may be a UFO, or a ghost, a strange animal, or a fairy – yes, they are still being seen, as Janet Bord’s interesting article convincingly testifies – or any one of the bizarre menagerie Neil Arnold introduces us to in his article on ‘zooforms’.

And if you’re lucky enough to be the person who grabs the groundbreaking photo or video – you know where to send it to!

Richard Holland, Editor

The sound of ancient silence

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

by Tim Prevett

Megalithic sites are addictive. Megaraks (prehistoric anoraks) will tell you that without much encouragement.

It’s not just the stones’ age, geology, or situation. It’s not just the weather, company, or your mood during a visit. Astronomical, solar, lunar and landscape alignments certainly contribute. The stories of a given place can add further depth: giants, witches, devils and fairies roam the mists of time that hang over some ancient sites.

Something unseen affects some visitors to ancient sites. There is a primeval stillness to the stones which touches those who visit; those who have ears to hear will know they have encountered a special place.

Our environment affects our life and speaks into both our conscious and subconscious, most of the time without our realising it. Any location can affect us in unseen ways; indeed one could argue many paranormal experiences could be down to subtle influences between humanity and surroundings. Megaliths seem peculiarly powerful locations.

Over a decade ago, a personal experience at Down Tor stone row and circle on Dartmoor put these special locations firmly within my psyche as places of fascination and renewal. I believed I could learn from their stillness.

These stones are often removed from modern settings and give a sense of entrance into a space set aside for a specific use – a sacred space, where something ‘other’ meets our usual life. Somewhere people come to invest their thought, time, feeling, and to remember. Given the right time, a place where we hear the quiet noises we so easily miss.

We need to grasp the sense of place, and the relation of the stone with its environment. Recognise that the ancient site is within the context of nature. Those who built it placed it at that location for a reason, relating it to other features – such as other stones and burial monuments, hilltops near and far, or astronomical events. The whole landscape, and even the heavens, become interconnected, invested with ancient meaning. You may feel terribly small, but suddenly you feel a part of it all: participating in something local but plugged in to the universe.

Some people feel called to these ancient sites. I certainly do. When you get to one, and if the moment is right, be still and allow the feel of the place into your being. Remember it at the right time. The stillness of the stones speaks volumes; they may enrich your life and change your way of seeing the world. Try listening and see what you hear.

Tim Prevett is a lifelong lover of the paranormal. He is a founding contributor of The Megalithic Portal website (www.megalithic.info); he runs Crewe and Nantwich Ghost Walks (www.crewetours.com), and his first book, Roads and Trackways of North Wales is published by Landmark later in 2008. Tim is pictured crawling into the Cuween chambered tomb in Orkney.

Beware of the dogma

Monday, January 5th, 2009

For those of us interested in the paranormal, nothing is more frustrating than scientific dogma. Unexplained phenomena remain unexplained simply because they have been ignored by Science. Scientists have no right to sneer at what they have made no attempt to understand – but sneer they will.

There is a danger, however, that we might fall into the same trap ourselves, by creating a paranormal dogma.

Two of the absorbing articles in this issue consider Bigfoot, the hairy beast-man encountered for decades in the United States and, more recently, in Britain, too. With the recent discovery of an alleged Bigfoot body in a forest in Georgia, USA, the case for Bigfoot as a living animal may now seem assured. The press conference on this find, including DNA analysis results, was due to be held just as we were going to press, so as I write this I do not know how convincing this ‘body of evidence’ is.

Whatever the results, however, you’ll learn from Ape or apparition? by Janet Bord and Bigfoot in Britain by Nick Redfern, that many encounters with this enigmatic ‘manimal’ defy a natural explanation. Neither an ape nor an ape-man is likely to have glowing red eyes or be impervious to bullets, for example. And although the idea of such a creature living undetected in the mountainous wilds of North America may now be credible, it surely stretches credibility too far to imagine one living in the ‘milds’ of Middle England.

Many Bigfoot devotees would dismiss such accounts out of hand. They would assume anyone claiming to have been menaced by a glowing-eyed monster was making it up, and treat their story with the same scorn as a dogmatic zoologist would have treated their own belief in a North American ape.

Then there are the Black Dogs – cow-sized spectral dogs which also boast glowing eyes. They fit no modern paranormal belief system: they can’t be considered ghosts of previously living dogs nor an undiscovered species of natural animal. And yet they have been regularly reported by credible witnesses into the present day.

Many more ‘inexplicables’ appear in this issue of Paranormal Magazine. Jenny Randles introduces us to The House on Alien Moor, where a down-to-earth woman took in her stride a series of apparent ghosts, time slips and visits by aliens; Familiar spirits discusses an enigmatic entity which may have been a ghost, or a fairy or an animal that learned to speak; and Michael Hallowell asks whether children’s imaginary friends are as imaginary as we think, in Paranormal playmates.

On the other side of the coin, researchers Para.Science present a detailed and convincing argument as to why so-called ‘Orbs’ captured on digital and night vision cameras, and held by many ghost hunters as evidence of paranormal activity, are actually just tricks of the light.

Personally, I find Orbs unconvincing. But I don’t wish to be dogmatic about it: one or two may be a capture of something unexplained. But I’d be more interested if the ‘ghost light’ had been seen first by an observer and then photographed.

Orb photos aside, then, I am still keen to receive reports from special interest groups and paranormal investigation teams. Please keep me updated on your activities and successes.

Readers’ own experiences with the supernatural are also very welcome. In this issue you will find many personal accounts of brushes with the paranormal to encourage you. You can feel confident I will not exercise any dogma in regards to what you tell me is true.

When the Rev St John Seymour compiled his classic True Ghost Stories in 1914, he stated: ‘For myself, I cannot guarantee the genuineness of a single incident in this book – how could I, as none of them are my own personal experience? This at least I can vouch for, that the majority of the stories were sent to me as first or second-hand experiences by ladies and gentlemen whose statement on an ordinary matter of fact would be accepted without question.’

I feel the same sense of trust in my own readers and contributors. Contact details for submitting your stories can be found at the bottom of the page. I look forward to your contributions with great interest.

Richard Holland, Editor

Tell the editor about your own experience with the paranormal. Email editor@paranormalmagazine.co.uk or write to Richard Holland, The Editor Paranormal Magazine, Jazz Publishing, The Old School, Higher Kinnerton, Chester CH4 9AJ. Or submit your story through the EXPERIENCES section on our website: www.paranormalmagazone.co.uk

It’s a club you can never leave

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

By Jon Downes

It’s my wife I feel sorry for.

Not only is she married to a manic-depressive writer who has a tendency to drink too much, and to fill her kitchen with tanks of revolting looking wriggly things from exotic locations, but she lives in a haunted house and finds herself playing hostess to an eccentric collection of paranormal researchers, ufologists and monster hunters who turn up, often unannounced, on our doorstep from all over the world.

I suppose it’s my fault. Although I am a scientist, years ago I recognised the natural world cannot be explained purely in terms of Darwin, Mendel or Linnaeus and that a lot of the scientific laws that govern the universe simply haven’t been discovered yet.

I have spent most of my adult life doing my best to push back the boundaries of human knowledge. For 18 years I have been director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, the world’s largest organisation dedicated to searching for unknown animals. Over the last 20 years I have hunted vampires on three continents, chased werewolves, investigated cattle mutilations, searched for de-evolved sub-humans, helped the police with their enquiries (in a good way) and got drunk with a star of Flash Gordon.

And knowing this, my poor darling wife still decided to marry me. We’ve only been together for 3½yrs, but in that time she has had parts of our house rearranged by a poltergeist, chased giant eels and big cats, and one night, whilst sitting under the stars with me (plus a leading UFOlogist and a famous UFO experiencer), she saw a flying triangle only 100ft above our garden. And the dear girl took it all in her stride.

The trouble is, as soon as you become a real researcher rather than someone with a scrapbook of press cuttings, you find high strangeness worms its way into every facet of your life, and, almost without knowing it, you become part of an international freemasonry of people who have decided to spend their lives delving into the unknown. And once you join that club you never leave.

It is a strange brotherhood of people from all over the world who find themselves co-operating – sometimes to a ludicrous extent – with total strangers. For example, a few years ago an Australian well-known for his lifetime’s quest for the yowie (the Antipodean Bigfoot) came to spend the evening with us – and stayed for three and a half months. Next week, I am expecting a visit from a young Russian/American whom I have never met but whose research I have admired for some years, and only this morning another Australian researcher asked whether he could visit us for a few days.

The answer of course was yes, because not only does the CFZ have one of the English speaking world’s largest archives of cryptozoological research material, which we have a commitment to share, but on a personal level I believe that as international tensions, racial intolerance, and sheer unfriendliness rise all around us, people like us have a duty to co-operate with each other and to try in our own little ways to make the world a better place.

Next weekend my poor long-suffering wife will be presiding over a barbecue for researchers from three continents, together with keepers from a local zoo helping us set up our new turtle exhibit, and my young nephews who think that this is all great fun.

I wonder if the flying triangle will return to pay us a visit?

Jon Downes is director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, which is committed to the investigation of reports of mysterious creatures around the world. The CFZ is based in Devon, UK, and paid for by public subscription. To learn more visit www.cfz.org.uk

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