Saddled with a name

An interesting read about St Aldhelm [‘Fortean Traveller’, FT417:74-76]. I was particularly intrigued by the name of Aldhelm’s sister – Bugga – and wondered about its origins. Searching online, I found a village in Punjab named Bugga, and in Norway they have Ugga Bugga as a derogatory term. Also it seems there is someone called Bugha on YouTube.

James Wilkins

Southampton, Hampshire

I recently came upon this mounted ‘Rat King’ in the Maastricht Museum of Natural History. It was found in Limburg (south Holland) in 1955. The biggest Rat King, consisting of 32 rats, was found in 1828 in a miller’s fireplace in Buchheim and is now exhibited in Altenburg, Thuringia.

Julian Butler, By email

may have influenced Laurence Hammond’s lyric on Mad River’s 1969 record Paradise Bar And Grill: “The mice they all got drunk, and died / in the Paradise Bar and Grill”. Brautigan was a mentor of theirs, and recites one of his poems, Love’s Not The Way To Treat A Friend, to acoustic guitar accompaniment on the same album. Both tracks are wonderful.

Richard George

St. Albans, Hertfordshire

past cases have been satisfactorily explained when areas of doubt still exist. For instance, I have often heard it said that the Rendlesham incident was entirely down to either the Orford Ness lighthouse or a nearby light ship (or both), when in fact Colonel Halt, a key witness and former senior USAF officer, continues to dispute this. Other, inconvenient witness testimony that contradicts the lighthouse hypothesis is similarly ignored – surely something of which Fort would not have approved.

Finally, may I suggest that a possible reason for the more aggressive forms of scepticism, as identified by John Spencer in an article in his UFO Encyclopaedia (1991), is a fear that aliens (or whatever the object of one’s scepticism is) might actually exist. I can identify with that. I have no problem with aliens, but ghosts scare the bejesus out of me and so, consequently, when it comes to haunted houses, I am the biggest sceptic around. Sorry, Mr Murdie!

Geoff Clifton

Solihull, West Midlands