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

Other articles you may be interested in: