In The News...

I got the inspiration to do little posts here and there from a section in the Fortean Times magazine called "Tales From The Vault"-it is a section at the end of the magazine that goes 10 years back, then 20 and finally 30 from the month of the new issue. This is just a small section in the magazine-less than a page really-with Fortean/paranormal newsclips. These won't be done here in any particular order (of course {:-)>}. They are just odds and ends for people to enjoy-hopefully!

March 1975: An actor named Neville Davies had been very enthused about playing King Richard III in an amateur production. Later he was happy to be photographed next to "King Richard's Well" at Bosworth Field, the location of Richard's fatal battle in 1485. On viewing the picture later, Neville was surprised to see a faint figure in medieval dress standing behind his right shoulder. Historians of the Richard III society identified the figure as a known portrait of the king, but Neville swears the film was new and certainly not double-exposed. A professional photographer attempt to print off the negative -on which the figure was visible-then produced a photograph in which the figure was missing. No easy answers to this one! FT10:9

December 1984: Devon, England was visited by two mysterious incidents this month. In the first, Bill Taylor, who was cycling to work saw "two huge beams of light, like searchlights, which formed a perfect cross, centered on the Moon." The arms faded over ten minutes time leaving a normal Moon. Later Mr. Taylor found a colleague who had also seen it. The crew at Fortean Times thought that perhaps it was a variation of a "moonshow" or "moondog," but couldn't find a similar case in any of their massive files of strange aerial phenomena. FT45:21 Then on Christmas Eve, Mrs. Christine Middlehurst, 36, ran screaming from her home in Newton Abbot. Neighbors noticed she was smoking-and not with a cigarette! They took her indoors and placed her in a bath of lukewarm water. To their shock and horror, Christine's skin "floated off." "It was the most terrible thing I'd ever seen," said another neighbor who had come to their aid. At first Christine's partner had come downstairs to find her aflame. He threw water over her and yelled for help. The gentleman was burned on his hands and body as he tried to put out his lover's rather unfortunate self-ignition. Mrs. Middlehurst recovered from about 50 percent of her burns. She could give no information or clues as to what had caused her body to combust. A detective who looked into the case said the house was "virtually untouched." FT44:21

January 1997: The 20th of this month saw a magnificent apparition descend upon the inhabitants of a small village in Uttar Pradesh in northern India. Some of the villagers thought it might be a bomb (perhaps launched from somewhere in Pakistan maybe given the history between the two nations). However, most who were salt-of-the-earth type people whose families had lived in the village for generations upon generations thought that it was a "flying fire temple" (agni mandir), like the ones their mythologies told of in ancient times. These used to ferry their gods around the heavens in those days. A pale creature emerged from the object. "He was dressed in red, priest-like clothes." We offered him milk, which he accepted," a shopkeeper told reporters later. The villagers couldn't understand anything the being said, but, taking the visit as an auspicious sign and blessing upon their village, some 200 of them took up sticks and made a defensive ring around the deflated balloon, to keep away the thousands of villagers who had come to take in the spectacle. The "fire temple" was in fact Solo Spirit, piloted by millionaire stockbroker Steve Fossett, who had taken off from the United States six days earlier in an attempt to circumnavigate the globe! FT98:12