EDITORIAL
THE FATE OF THE FTMB Some of you will be aware that the Fortean Times Message Board, our online forum, which has acted as a meeting place for forteans for nearly 20 years, is no more. By the time you read this, the FTMB will have closed down (as if by some cruel irony, on midnight on Hallowe’en). Dennis Publishing took the decision to shut the forum in reponse to the legal problems it posed in relation to the new General Data Protection Regulations and the EU Copyright Directive. Obviously, we were saddened by the decision, even while we could see the rationale behind it; after all, the FTMB has remained a true community, an island of friendly discussion in a sea of online shoutyness, and a repository of valuable fortean material.
Despite initital fears that this was the end of the line, we can now tell you that all is not lost. Thanks to the hard work and quick thinking of the forum mods, and the co-operation of our publishers, it looks as if the FTMB will rise again. If all goes according to plan, this will be sooner rather than later, and we hope to bring you full details next issue: watch this space. CURIOUS CRADLE SNATCHERS As Joshua Cutchin points out in his new book, Thieves in the Night, two themes that run disturbingly through centuries of forteana are the supernatural abduction of children and the interest shown by denizens of the otherworld in all aspects of human sexuality and reproduction. That chronicler of high strangeness, John Keel, certainly noted both of these phenomena in his work. “Children vanish more frequently than any other group,” he wrote in 1971’s
Our Haunted Planet. And WestVirginia’s Mothman – the perplexing entity at the centre of Keel’s best-known work, displayed “a penchant for scaring females who were menstruating” during its 1966-1967 reign of terror. From the biblical Nephilim to the fairies of the British Isles, the duendes of South America or the duppies of Jamaica, there is a very long line of supernatural beings who appear fixated on interbreeding with humans and/or stealing their offspring; and it’s a theme that has continued to haunt modern accounts of anomalous encounters in the form of alien abduction lore, with its emphasis on reproductive experimentation and hybridisation.
Cutchin’s lengthy survey is dense and exhaustive – we’ll be bringing you a full review next issue, but it’s recommended reading – and in this issue you’ll find a taster in our cover feature (p30), a survey of the folklore of changelings, those bad tempered, insatiably hungry and frequently hideous fairy children left by the little people to replace human infants snatched from the cradle. As if to illustrate the centrality of these themes to fortean enquiry, echoes of them appear elsewhere in this issue: Richard Freeman goes in search of the over-sexed guls of Tajikistan, yeti-like creatures whose main aim seems to be to mate with humans (p38); and Nigel Watson visits one of Dublin’s odder attractions, the National Leprechaun Museum (p76). In other odd abduction news, we bring you the story of a gay penguin couple who kidnapped a chick to raise as their own; penguin changelings appear not to have been involved. HUNT EMERSON HONOURED We’d like to congratulate our resident cartoonist Hunt Emerson, whose inimitable work has been a mainstay of this magazine for over 40 years, on an award he recently picked up. At this year’s Lakes International Comic Art Festival in Kendal, Cumbria, Hunt was announced the 2018 winner of the Sergio Aragonés International Award for Excellence in Comic Art, presented annually to an exceptional comic artist or cartoonist. Hunt, who has numerous other cartooning trophies on his mantelpiece, was the second winner of the award, which was established in 2017 by the National Cartoonist’s Society. The legendary Sergio Aragonés congratulated Hunt by video message from California, saying: “Hunt is probably one of the great cartoonists of our generation... I’m so proud he’s getting this Award – it is so, so well deserved.” A sentiment with which all of us at Fortean Towers concur wholeheartedly.