The British magazine takes an invitingly agnostic attitude toward the paranormal.
Credit...Illustration by Máximo Tuja
By Molly Fitzpatrick
June 22, 2016
I was 30,000 feet in the air and halfway through the November issue of Fortean Times before I considered what it must look like to the woman sitting to my left. On the cover of the magazine lurked a giant Lizard Man, with a rippling reptilian 14-pack, orange eyes with vertical-slit pupils, a forked tongue, a jaw lined with needle teeth. He was wading between lily pads in standing water, before a moonlit, misty backdrop. There was a tangle of seaweed draped over his scaly biceps. To the left of his head, in a typeface straight off a B-movie poster: “Attack of the Lizard Man! The Car-Chewing Monster of the South Carolina Swamps.” My neighbor and I had exchanged pleasantries at the beginning of the flight, but after the magazine came out, we didn’t speak again.
Let me be clear: I am not, as a rule, a believer. I’ve long since parted ways with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and most everything I learned in Catholic school. But that has only made me more attuned to the tucked-away part of my brain ruled more by instinct than by logic — the part that lights up at the creak of a footstep from an unoccupied room, the stranger on the train who looks exactly like your mother and just about anything that happens in the nebulous place where your peripheral vision ends and the unknown begins.
It’s these neurons that fire ecstatically when I read Fortean Times, a 43-year-old British magazine that describes its focus as “the world of strange phenomena.” The name refers to Charles Fort, an influential early-20th-century writer best remembered for his meticulous research into bizarre happenings that resisted, or defied, scientific explanation. He was a real-life Fox Mulder, if you subtract the bone structure of David Duchovny and add the walrus mustache of Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, the “X-Files” character even claimed to be a fan of Fort’s. Like Mulder, Fort tirelessly sought out evidence of the anomalies that obsessed him. He spent most of his days at the New York Public Library for the better part of a decade, amassing tens of thousands of notes on paper scraps, cataloging uncanny coincidences and improbable oddities. He called this his “data of the damned.”
Flip through the March issue of Fortean Times, and you’ll discover a whirling carousel of curiosities, each passing horse more disfigured than the last: mysterious animal skeletons, a puzzling uptick in false-widow-spider sightings around the U.K., Indonesian mummies and a conference on ancient and modern-day witchcraft. The May issue brought tidings of yeti footprints, portentous deathbed visions, sex with aliens (sex with ghosts was covered back in January) and tiny, mischievous Mexican sprite-like beings called chaneques. I know what that sounds like — Weekly World News in a bow tie — but Fortean Times is not mere humbug. The magazine strikes a delicate balance between belief and disbelief: Rarely is any subject dismissed outright; rarely is anything accepted at face value
Its editorial sensibility makes room for stories that simply bask in the glow of unusual customs and characters, without seeking to diminish or mock them. “The Eye-Spy Teddies of Albania” in May surveyed the modern phenomenon of Albanians’ hanging plush toys at the thresholds of their homes and businesses to ward off the “evil eye,” a manifestation of envy.
But when it investigates the paranormal, Fortean Times brings painstaking research and analysis to bear on topics that most sensible observers would dismiss immediately. Consider our mutual friend the Lizard Man. The November cover story traced the South Carolina legend’s roots to a 1988 sighting by a Lee County teenager. This young man claimed that he stopped on his way home from work to change a flat tire when he spotted the seven-foot-tall creature, which jumped atop his car, curling its long green fingers around the roof. Later, deep scratches were found in the paint. It’s a silver-screen-ready scene, recounted in seductive detail. But just when you’ve been sold on the legend, the pendulum swings back to skepticism. Yes, it’s cinematic — “suspiciously cinematic,” the writer Benjamin Radford warns, while thoroughly debunking the story. And I mean thoroughly: “Any bipedal creature running and jumping on the roof of a car would land with its head, hands and fingers toward the front of the car and its windscreen,” Radford noted. But “somehow this acrobatic Lizard Man ended up with its fingers on the rear windshield.” Yeah, right.
The magazine’s “It Happened to Me” section, which publishes first-person retellings of Fortean experiences, makes it clear that the magazine’s readers subscribe not only to the publication but also to its central philosophy. As they relate their tales of spectral hitchhikers and figures in the shadows, many tick off possible explanations as they go, keen to note the limitations of their own evidence and perception.
As a general rule, Fortean Times is more interested in raising questions than supplying explanations. The answers are beside the point — that we’re asking at all is what’s interesting. This agnosticism is what makes Fortean Times irresistible to me. It allows its readers to have their tinfoil hats and wear them too. The very last thing I want to be is gullible, fooled by parlor tricks or sleight of hand. But like Fort (and Mulder), I want to believe. The prospect of an existence utterly devoid of marvels, all fluorescent lighting and beige carpets, is one I’m unwilling to accept. As long as I have Fortean Times, there will always be a distant possibility that somewhere, in some desolate swamp, a Lizard Man is waiting for us to find him.
Molly Fitzpatrick is senior culture editor at Fusion. This is her first article for the magazine.
NYTIMES MAGAZINE
By Molly Fitzpatrick
June 22, 2016
I was 30,000 feet in the air and halfway through the November issue of Fortean Times before I considered what it must look like to the woman sitting to my left. On the cover of the magazine lurked a giant Lizard Man, with a rippling reptilian 14-pack, orange eyes with vertical-slit pupils, a forked tongue, a jaw lined with needle teeth. He was wading between lily pads in standing water, before a moonlit, misty backdrop. There was a tangle of seaweed draped over his scaly biceps. To the left of his head, in a typeface straight off a B-movie poster: “Attack of the Lizard Man! The Car-Chewing Monster of the South Carolina Swamps.” My neighbor and I had exchanged pleasantries at the beginning of the flight, but after the magazine came out, we didn’t speak again.
Let me be clear: I am not, as a rule, a believer. I’ve long since parted ways with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and most everything I learned in Catholic school. But that has only made me more attuned to the tucked-away part of my brain ruled more by instinct than by logic — the part that lights up at the creak of a footstep from an unoccupied room, the stranger on the train who looks exactly like your mother and just about anything that happens in the nebulous place where your peripheral vision ends and the unknown begins.
It’s these neurons that fire ecstatically when I read Fortean Times, a 43-year-old British magazine that describes its focus as “the world of strange phenomena.” The name refers to Charles Fort, an influential early-20th-century writer best remembered for his meticulous research into bizarre happenings that resisted, or defied, scientific explanation. He was a real-life Fox Mulder, if you subtract the bone structure of David Duchovny and add the walrus mustache of Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, the “X-Files” character even claimed to be a fan of Fort’s. Like Mulder, Fort tirelessly sought out evidence of the anomalies that obsessed him. He spent most of his days at the New York Public Library for the better part of a decade, amassing tens of thousands of notes on paper scraps, cataloging uncanny coincidences and improbable oddities. He called this his “data of the damned.”
Flip through the March issue of Fortean Times, and you’ll discover a whirling carousel of curiosities, each passing horse more disfigured than the last: mysterious animal skeletons, a puzzling uptick in false-widow-spider sightings around the U.K., Indonesian mummies and a conference on ancient and modern-day witchcraft. The May issue brought tidings of yeti footprints, portentous deathbed visions, sex with aliens (sex with ghosts was covered back in January) and tiny, mischievous Mexican sprite-like beings called chaneques. I know what that sounds like — Weekly World News in a bow tie — but Fortean Times is not mere humbug. The magazine strikes a delicate balance between belief and disbelief: Rarely is any subject dismissed outright; rarely is anything accepted at face value
Its editorial sensibility makes room for stories that simply bask in the glow of unusual customs and characters, without seeking to diminish or mock them. “The Eye-Spy Teddies of Albania” in May surveyed the modern phenomenon of Albanians’ hanging plush toys at the thresholds of their homes and businesses to ward off the “evil eye,” a manifestation of envy.
But when it investigates the paranormal, Fortean Times brings painstaking research and analysis to bear on topics that most sensible observers would dismiss immediately. Consider our mutual friend the Lizard Man. The November cover story traced the South Carolina legend’s roots to a 1988 sighting by a Lee County teenager. This young man claimed that he stopped on his way home from work to change a flat tire when he spotted the seven-foot-tall creature, which jumped atop his car, curling its long green fingers around the roof. Later, deep scratches were found in the paint. It’s a silver-screen-ready scene, recounted in seductive detail. But just when you’ve been sold on the legend, the pendulum swings back to skepticism. Yes, it’s cinematic — “suspiciously cinematic,” the writer Benjamin Radford warns, while thoroughly debunking the story. And I mean thoroughly: “Any bipedal creature running and jumping on the roof of a car would land with its head, hands and fingers toward the front of the car and its windscreen,” Radford noted. But “somehow this acrobatic Lizard Man ended up with its fingers on the rear windshield.” Yeah, right.
The magazine’s “It Happened to Me” section, which publishes first-person retellings of Fortean experiences, makes it clear that the magazine’s readers subscribe not only to the publication but also to its central philosophy. As they relate their tales of spectral hitchhikers and figures in the shadows, many tick off possible explanations as they go, keen to note the limitations of their own evidence and perception.
As a general rule, Fortean Times is more interested in raising questions than supplying explanations. The answers are beside the point — that we’re asking at all is what’s interesting. This agnosticism is what makes Fortean Times irresistible to me. It allows its readers to have their tinfoil hats and wear them too. The very last thing I want to be is gullible, fooled by parlor tricks or sleight of hand. But like Fort (and Mulder), I want to believe. The prospect of an existence utterly devoid of marvels, all fluorescent lighting and beige carpets, is one I’m unwilling to accept. As long as I have Fortean Times, there will always be a distant possibility that somewhere, in some desolate swamp, a Lizard Man is waiting for us to find him.
Molly Fitzpatrick is senior culture editor at Fusion. This is her first article for the magazine.
NYTIMES MAGAZINE
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