London’s Fortean Times, Journal of Weird and Wonderful, Sets Sights on Big Time

Lesbian vampires, talking tortoises and levitating nuns are nothing special to the editors of the Fortean Times.

The latest issue of their magazine, subtitled the Journal of Strange Phenomena, also includes an interview with a woman who drilled a hole in her head to stimulate mental activity.

She later ran unsuccessfully for Parliament to try to have the technique made available free in British hospitals.

Once bought by only 1,800 mail-order subscribers, the Fortean Times now has a new publisher, who now distributes 45,000 copies to newsstands around Britain.

Editors Bob Rickard and Paul Sieveking, who produce the Fortean Times from a small house in east London, have thrown in their lot with John Brown, who made his name as a publisher when he boosted sales of the cult comic “Viz” to 1 million.

“We’ve always known we had a wider appeal,” Rickard said in an interview. “What everybody is interested in is a sensible discussion of these odd phenomena--not simply dismissive.”

Their magazine is named after Charles Fort, an iconoclastic American philosopher who believed that mainstream scientists simply ignored things they could not explain.

Since the Fortean Times was founded 18 years ago, the editors have published plenty of things they cannot, and do not, seek to explain.

A woman in the Philippines claimed to have given birth to a mudfish. In China, people line up to be diagnosed by Zheng Xiangling, known as the walking X-ray machine because she can see through her patients.

California firefighters were bewildered when a parrot they were trying to rescue from a tree taunted them with the words: “I can talk. Can you fly?”

An English bull terrier puppy called Megan dialed the emergency number for police, ambulance or the fire department, with her nose while her owners were out of the house.

Elsewhere in Britain, a school was the target of UFOs: unidentified flying omelets. Children scrambled for cover as eggs fell out of the sky.

The Fortean Times quoted a mother as saying: “They must drop from high up because they make a terrific noise when they hit the ground.”

Under the headline “Mass Elk Death,” the magazine recounted how 61 of the animals met their end together after falling from a cliff in the Colorado mountains.

Behind the magazine’s penchant for the bizarre and perplexing lies a serious purpose.

“Philosophically, we feel we’re on safe ground in actually discussing the way people think about these phenomena, so we feel quite justified in publishing a completely preposterous story,” Rickard said.

“It involves all sorts of questions about the nature of reality and what we are prepared to accept in the way of evidence of unusual behavior or phenomena.”

The Fortean Times would not knowingly propagate a hoax--the editors find there are quite enough bizarre happenings without having to make them up--but Rickard is fascinated with the whole business of mass credulity.

“In a way we’re just as interested in the hoaxes as we are in the real stories. We simply don’t know enough about the way rumors propagate in society. It’s central to the question of what is real and what is not.”

Years of experience have given Rickard rare insight into the weird and wonderful.

He explains, for example, that in any year there are probably about six reported sightings worldwide of strange lake creatures similar to Scotland’s fabled Loch Ness monster.

One benefit Rickard hopes to reap from bigger sales of the Fortean Times is enough money to commission investigators to check some of the odd stories sent in by readers.