LOSE YOURSELF IN 1966

NOT SO FAB

A full-size replica of Lady Penelope’s pink six-wheeled Rolls-royce was commissioned to transport Thunderbirds creators Gerry and Sylvia Anderson to the London Pavilion for the December première of the Thunderbirds Are Go movie. The ‘Rolls-royce’ was actually a Bedford VAL coach chassis, powered by a Bedford six-cylinder engine, with a glassfibre body on top. It had a forward-leaning radiator surround (something Rolls-royce’s own Camargue would sport a decade later) and featured gadgets such as an imitation machine gun behind the grille and revolving numberplates. It cost a whopping £10k (almost £200k today) to build, but still managed to break down just a few hundred yards into its journey. Rollsroyce reputedly hated the replica so much that it repeatedly tried to buy it so that it could destroy it.

MOTH SPOTTING

Two young couples claimed to have seen a ‘large flying man with ten-foot wings’ and eyes that ‘glowed red’ while travelling through the site of a massive former WW2 armaments plant near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the US in November. Others reported similar sightings, including two firemen. Experts considered that they had actually glimpsed a large sandhill crane that had got lost while migrating but the legend soon became established that there was something very weird living in what was known as the TNT Area. Local papers dubbed the creature ‘Mothman’. Although the strange entity hasn’t been seen much since December 1967, Point Pleasant now holds an annual Mothman Festival and a 12ft-high statue was unveiled in 2003. Thousands of tourists still visit the area hoping to prove it’s not all a load of mothballs.