Revisiting Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World
Just over 40 years ago, unsuspecting ITV viewers were taken on a sometimes terrifying tour of the planet’s anomalies – from “the missing apeman” to “the Skull of Doom”. RYAN SHIRLOW hits the rewind button and reappraises a classic of fortean television.
Over the course of 13 short episodes first broadcast in 1980, The Mysterious World of Arthur C Clarke took teatime viewers of ITV through the case files of the celebrated science fiction writer – also solemnly identified as the “inventor of the communications satellite” in case we doubted his authority. 1
With only 25 minutes for each instalment, Clarke – “now in retreat in Sri Lanka after a lifetime of science, space and writing, he ponders the riddles of this and other worlds” – flitted from subject to subject in a brief, distracted, almost jarring fashion. The feeling was of leafing through a fortean scrapbook or a collage of nightmares: “Does an ape man walk the uncharted forests of America’s Northwest? What unknown monster of the sea grappled with this US Navy Frigate in South American waters? Why did people raise up this enormous circle of stones on Orkney 4,000 years ago? Who drew this giant, the largest figure in the world, on Chile’s loneliest mountain? And whose hands fashioned the Skull of Doom? Does it bring death?”
The programme was scheduled in an early evening slot guaranteed to traumatise children; my mother quickly learnt to switch off the TV as soon as the glowing MitchellHedges skull appeared in the title sequence. Her swift action only added to my sense of the forbidden, and of a world much vaster and stranger than any I had yet experienced.
Viewing Mysterious World again after all these years, it’s easy to appreciate the show’s original appeal: Gordon Honeycombe’s ominous voice-over; the grainy archive footage; Alan Hawkshaw’s sinister synthetic soundtrack. But that mysterious world now feels hemmed in by the claustrophobic, boxlike aspect ratio of early Eighties television, and many of the so-called ‘mysteries’ have
THE FEELING WAS OF LEAFING THROUGH A FORTEAN SCRAPBOOK OR A COLLAGE OF NIGHTMARES
not fared well over time.
Here, then, is my episodeby-episode reappraisal of this seminal series and the subjects it explored, including what – if anything – we have managed to learn since then.
Episode 1: The Journey Begins
We start our adventure with a ludicrously fast kaleidoscopic overview of the coming series, over which Clarke introduces his clunky ‘Orders of Mystery’. It’s fair to say that these, with their obvious debt to Hynek’s system of ‘Close Encounters’, haven’t caught on as a useful approach for fortean research.
Mysteries of the first kind, Clarke tells us, were inexplicable to our ancestors, but are no longer mysteries to us. He illustrates this category with an atmospheric live commentary of an Indian solar eclipse.
Mysteries of the second kind are those for which we don’t yet have definitive explanations, but do at least possess some ‘clues’ – so they might remain in this category forever if no new evidence is forthcoming. As examples, Clarke teases a range of mysterious animals and relics from the episodes to come.
With mysteries of the third and final kind, we have nothing to go on: these are the “completely unaccountable” enigmas among which Clarke places psychic phenomena and that fortean favourite, fish falls.
I must say that Clarke does not come across at first as a particularly confident or polished presenter, with the heavy lifting left to Honeycombe in the connecting segments. But we do get a taste of the period-perfect vox pops we’ll quickly come
to expect when two Scottish ladies describe their brief encounter with ball lightning: “The beach attendant – he had a wooden leg… well, you never saw him move so quick in your life…”
Episode 2: Monsters of the Deep
Some sense of focus kicks in as we start the series proper with a look at sea monsters. Professor John Cloudsley-Thompson, giving every impression of having escaped from the imagination of Scarfolk creator Richard Littler, gleefully describes a giant squid attack on the survivors of a WWII naval battle. Interesting, yes; gruesome, certainly – but mysterious? We are shown some footage of a giant squid found in 1979, near Newfoundland, to underline the biological reality of these fearsome beasts.
Accounts of sea serpents, on the other hand, remain far more controversial. The photographs of a hideous corpse found off the coast of New Zealand by a Japanese trawler are compared convincingly with the results of marine decomposition. The suspected process, by which parts of a shark or whale’s body decay and fall away, leaving the cadaver with the serpentine appearance of a small head and a long neck, has also been laid out in FT (see, for example, FT175:58-59). But other credible witnesses are brought forward to contest this analysis, describing fresh cadavers washed up on beaches – and, of course, encounters with entities that are still very much alive, inquisitive and aggressive.
Whatever they are, we can only delight that the remains of one such monster are apparently buried under the football pitch at St Ninian’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Goruch. Scraps of a “seaman’s jersey” and a tablecloth were found in its stomach.
In conclusion, a sympathetic Clarke holds out much hope for the deployment of advanced sonar technology across the submarines operated by the Cold War superpowers. Forty years later, we know how little positive evidence this has revealed (assuming secret naval discoveries leak as readily as anything from air force archives concerning UFOs).
Episode 3: Ancient Wisdom
Clarke begins this episode with a thinlyveiled swipe at fellow author Erich von Däniken, citing the amount of rubbish written by ‘ancient astronaut’ theorists about the people of the past. According to Clarke, our ancestors didn’t need any “help from outer space”. 2
The first ancient artefact up for examination is that iconic Mitchell-Hedges skull (see FT237:28-35), described as the largest worked gemstone in the world. The “flawless” surface makes it “impossible to date”, but there is no suggestion that it was impossible to make, merely that its creation would have been very time consuming. The programme concludes the skull is probably a couple of hundred years old, despite local insistence in Honduras that it was linked with Mayan legends from 3,600 years ago.
Tests carried out in 2007 revealed the skull had in fact been worked with a “high speed, hard metal rotary tool coated with a hard abrasive, such as diamond” 3 and was most likely of 20th century origin, which is when it was ‘discovered’. It does remain a fantastic feat of sculpture, and its place in the opening credits is at least æsthetically justified (and, for forteans of a certain age, means it will be forever linked with Mysterious World).
The next item was new to me: an investigation into vitrified forts in Scotland, including one at Tap O’Noth. Did ancient builders melt the rock walls, and for what purpose? Dr Ian Ralston and a large team of helpers set a massive bonfire, but with great difficulty they succeed in transforming only a small handful of rocks. Researchers in 2018 concluded the vitrification, evident at sites across northern Europe, was actually caused by the fiery destruction of an original timber superstructure. Blocks of molten stone can be formed in the anærobic conditions caused by the tremendous heat from above. 4
Next, Dr Arne Eggebrecht discusses his analysis of the ‘Baghdad battery’, filling a replica of this mysterious ceramic pot, copper cylinder and iron rod with grape juice to generate a measurable voltage. Although this unusual object is intriguing, the archæological consensus is that it was never intended for use as a battery, is probably nowhere near as old as presented here, and that scant evidence exists from any contemporaneous finds for its proposed use in electroplating. It was more probably a simple ritual container for scrolls (a possibility Clarke acknowledges). Unfortunately, the object was among thousands looted from national museums during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 5 A sad loss, but one that cements the object’s fortean status for posterity.
Finally, we get an overview of the Antikythera mechanism, also well known to FT readers (see FT250:51-53). This block of corroded bronze from “the time of Christ” was dredged up off the coast of the Greek island from which it takes its name. We learn that “…my good colleague Dr Caracolas has been experimenting with gamma rays” and that his analysis has revealed differential gears buried deep inside the artefact. The programme concludes with a reconstructed copy of the device operating as a primitive analogue
“MY COLLEAGUE DR CAROCOLAS HAS BEEN EXPERIMENTING WITH GAMMA RAYS”
computer, tracking the celestial cycles of the Moon and Sun. In 2008, a team from Cardiff University used high resolution scans to reveal faint inscriptions on the outer casing, confirming this purpose. Officially no longer a mystery, the Antikythera mechanism is indeed a piece of ancient technology that challenges our preconceptions about the distant past. 6
Episode 4: The Missing Apeman
We start with a close-up shot of a rifle being cocked: this is a literal hunt for the missing apeman, wanted dead or alive.
In the first part of the programme we learn that Lord Hunt, of Everest fame, 7 became a believer in the Himalayan Yeti. Villagers present a Yeti scalp (see
FT277:17) in a box, and chief Khunjon Chumbi wears this on his head while he imitates the creature’s cry for the credulous cameramen. More convincing is the testimony of the frightened young Sherpa, Lakhpa Domani. We are shown various photographs of footprints in the snow, none of which look very much like each other (a problem noted by Clarke) and many barely resemble biologically plausible feet. Clarke warns us that “melting snow can play strange tricks.” Meanwhile, Squadron Leader Lester Davis reminds us how the British should dress when abroad and mountaineer Don Whillans demonstrates how a Lancashire man retains his northern composure in the face of a Yeti attack.
Despite the intervening decades, conclusive proof still eludes us. In 2017, National Geographic traced DNA from hair, teeth, fur and fæces recovered in the region to Himalyan brown and black bears. 8 ( FT362:23) More recently, in Russia, the former governor of Kemerovo province has admitted hoaxing sightings of the Russian Yeti or Almasty to boost the local tourist industry 9 (see FT407:9).
In the second half of this episode, we travel to the other side of the world to consider Bigfoot. Dr Grover Krantz (the man with the rifle) cites hundreds if not thousands of sightings, many from reputable citizens. He speculates that around 200 Sasquatch may live in the isolated and sparsely inhabited north west of the United States, with a similar number just across the border in Canada. Any less would fail to represent a viable breeding population. We hear from some of the aforementioned reputable citizens, including police officers and native Americans. Some sightings involve more than one observer. There are shades of Anchorman Ron Burgundy’s period misogyny as we learn that Bigfoot is attracted to menstruating women. Astonishing footage follows of “used feminine articles” prepared for bait and hung on a telegraph pole. A purported recording of vocalisations is genuinely terrifying; if a creative work of sound production, it is worthy of Stuart Maconie’s Freakzone.
The infamous Patterson-Gimlin footage is aired next. This has been dissected thoroughly in FT over the years (for a recent overview, see FT360:32-39) and is widely believed by scientists to be a gorillasuited hoax – one that doesn’t even match the descriptions given by other witnesses. Participants in the charade have since come forward, but their testimony is itself disputed by other believers (see FT192:3439). 10 Clarke has relevant experience here as he reminds us of the convincing special effects and costumes at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The “father of cryptozoology”, Bernard Heuvelmans, is on record as agreeing with the fancy dress hypothesis. 11
In his conclusion, Clarke is even more sceptical of Bigfoot than he is of the Yeti. In 2019, the FBI released its research into Bigfoot: hair samples they had analysed came from wild deer. 12 But again, all those eye witness accounts from so many individuals with little to gain are hard to dismiss. What exactly did they see? Was it something more mysterious, perhaps supernatural in origin, than a flesh-andblood missing link?
Episode 5: Giants for the Gods
We begin this episode with a gallery of inaccessible frescos hundreds of feet up a sheer cliff in Sigirya, Sri Lanka. Why were they painted in a spot where they could not be easily admired? The current theory is that the paintings once covered the whole cliff face, 13 but only those in this difficultto-reach section have survived. A couple of years later, Duran Duran filmed the music video for their hit single “Save a Prayer” at Sigirya, effectively denuding the site of any mystery for future generations.
Then it’s on to the famous Nazca lines of Peru. Jim Woodman’s hot air Heath Robinson gondola recreates the alleged aeronautical capabilities of the South American Indians (mainstream archæology remains unconvinced). Honeycombe trots out the speculation this “fantastic picture book” of animal shapes and abstract designs was once an airport for ancient astronauts. Clarke counters that the perfectly straight lines can be laid out easily enough using a team of Peruvian schoolboys armed with “ranging poles”. The drawings would have been harder, but not impossible to “scale up”. Many more lines have, of course, been discovered since, some as recently as October 2020, when a 120ft (36m) geoglyph of a cartoon cat was found and substantially renovated (see FT400:14). 14
Were the lines an astronomical calendar? We are treated to footage of vintage computers whirring away in consideration. The results: associations vary – to the heavens, to mountains and to other geographical features, representing pathways to potential god ‘objects’. Needless to say, debate continues.
Closer to home and to English country
chalk figures. At Cerne Abbas in Dorset the locals speculate on the fertility powers of their priapic hill giant. A then cutting edge “resistivity survey” identifies where the ground may have been disturbed and original lines lost. An unexpected area appears beneath the left arm suggesting a lion’s pelt and a positive identification with the second century Roman portrayal of Hercules.
Unfortunately, the latest analysis by the National Trust, completed last year (see FT406:4), contradicts any such origin. “Optically stimulated luminescence” indicates the figure was cut by the late Anglo Saxons, which would make the figure contemporary with (and perhaps a protest against?) the nearby Abbey. 15 The figure presumably fell into a long period of disuse before being rediscovered and relaid at a later date.
In Uffington, Berkshire, Britain’s “strangest and oldest” white horse is dated to well before the 12th century; the design is noted as similar to pre-Roman coins. This suggestion is bang on, as a 1990 excavation by the Oxford Archæological
CERNE ABBAS LOCALS SPECULATE ON THE FERTILITY POWERS OF THEIR PRIAPIC HILL GIANT
Unit scientifically dated the site to the late Bronze Age, between 1380 and 550 BC.
We are asked to compare it to the lost Red Horse of Tysoe in Warwickshire, now hidden beneath the landscape, but rediscovered thanks to the faintest of ground traces and careful sleuthing through parish records. You will need a believer’s eye to make out the details in this footage.
Finally, we conclude in the Atacama Desert in Chile, where Jim Woodman takes to the air again, this time in a modern helicopter, to reveal more ancient writing and drawings of pumas, jaguars, reptiles, llamas and stylised humans, including a giant that crosses the crest of a mountain.
All absolutely fascinating, but only mysterious in terms of the identity of the human creators and their specific intent. Clarke expounds on “man’s desire for immortality, his urge to leave some abiding mark on the face of his planet.” Yes, this was 1980, and the female artists of the ancient past are left waiting at home in their caves and mud huts.
Episode 6: The Monsters of the Lakes
By Clarke’s reckoning, there are at least 50 lakes worldwide with their own resident monster. We start with Lake Okanagan, in British Columbia, home to the legendary Ogopogo (see FT211:52-58). Multiple seemingly credible witnesses, including local Irish Canadians, speak direct to camera, describing a huge beast with a horse’s head, horns and three humps. A film shot by Art Folden in 1968 certainly shows something in the water, but it looks suspiciously rigid and gives a very wooden performance – nothing at all like the active monster described by others.
Ogopogo-mania peaked a few years after this episode was broadcast, with the regional tourist board offering a $1milliondollar reward for proof of the creature’s existence. In response, Greenpeace named the monster an endangered species. Pat Raphael, of the Westbank First Nation, spoke to BBC travel journalist Lisa Kane last year: “It’s not really a monster; it’s a spirit of the lake and it protects this valley from one end to the other.” But others believe that the unusual waves seen on the lake are caused by “thermal stratification”. 17 Fort would have recognised this type of explanation, as calm and reasonable as it is, as utterly ridiculous in the face of extensive witness testimony.
I wonder if the indigenous beliefs of the natives were somehow taken up by the region’s Scottish and Irish settlers and mixed with their own Celtic loughlore, mutating over the decades into an altogether more modern phenomenon. As wikipedia archly puts it: “Ogopogo now plays a role in the commercial symbolism and media representation of the region.” 18
But back to the programme: Ivor Newby takes to Loch Ness in his budget-Bond amphicar, professional big game hunters show off their outsized monster-catching cages, a pig is used as bait in Sweden,
and the Japanese pour sake into a lake to appease their beast in the east. We get a short visit to Lough Re, in Ireland. I half expected narrator Gordon Honeycombe to burst into song as he begins: “Three men of the cloth in a boat, out one day in 1960…” There follows an extremely vivid description of their encounter with a serpent, although the three priests involved refrain from drawing the obvious theological parallels.
And finally, we get to Nessie, the most famous lake monster of them all, and a film clip from 1936. Again, the behaviour of the object in the water should be familiar to anyone who has ever played Pooh sticks. What we see here contrasts markedly with the witness statements that follow of live and “undulating” creatures in the loch. Clarke makes clear his own scepticism, but he believes these people are fundamentally truthful, if mistaken: he substitutes wakes in the water and shoals of fish for their dreams of giant reptiles.
Next, veteran researcher Tim Dinsdale complains about how uncomfortable his life jacket is. The footage he presents is not terribly exciting, although it does at least seem to be of an animal rather than a stick. RAF experts were satisfied it was not faked. Clarke then takes us on to the “high technology team” led by Roger Parker, equipped with underwater microphones and sonar. They claim to have tracked an animal over 43ft (13m) in length for one and a half hours; it was apparently also accompanied by a juvenile. These creatures were frightened away – or shoals of fish were dispersed – by a yacht flushing its toilet.
American lawyer Bob Rimes shows us a picture of an indistinct blob. “If Nessie had been a murder case, there would have been a hanging long since.” It makes you glad we don’t have capital punishment here in the UK.
A detailed discussion of all the research since would be too much for this review. But I note a 2018 international DNA study that found no evidence of large fish or sharks, nor anything reptilian. Instead it uncovered a huge quantity of eel DNA. Lead researcher Professor Neil Gemmell suggested Nessie could be an eel of extreme size. 19 This identification would seem consistent with some testimony and, for example, the home video shot by Gordon Holmes in 2007. 20
The story so far
So, as we near the halfway point of the series, two distinct types of episode have emerged. Parts three and five had an historical or archæological focus, presenting items that might be described as merely interesting to forteans rather than genuinely mysterious. Episodes two, four and six feature far more challenging themes of a cryptozoological nature. If relic populations of hominids, sea monsters or lake monsters had somehow survived into the modern era, they couldn’t possibly still exist today – not in a world relentlessly surveyed by Clarke’s satellites and sonar technology. Yet perfectly reasonable people around the world continue to report abnormal and inexplicable encounters with just such impossible creatures.
Is it common to experience things that simply do not exist, at least not in an objective physical sense – and for that encounter to be visceral, terrifying, and even life changing? Do Clarke, Honeycombe and another assortment of scientists, monster hunters and witnesses have any answers?
Join me next month for further analysis as we survey episodes 7 to 13 of Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World.
If you want to join in, I’d recommend buying the excellent 2008 Network DVD collection, which offers by far the best way to view this classic series. (By the way, you can find a little production Easter Egg if you wind each episode back to 0, showing how the DVD was digitised from the original broadcast footage). Available from https:// networkonair.com/
NOTES
1 A 27-year-old Clarke is credited with being one of the first to lay out the concept of a communication satellite in his 1945 article “Extraterrestrial Relays” in Wireless World.
2 An opinion not shared by the producers of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
3 https://archive.archaeology.org/online/ features/mitchell_hedges/microscope.html
4 www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/ archaeologists-solve-ancient-mystery-meltediron-age-fort-296899
5 www.sciencefriday.com/segments/ archaeologists-revisit-iraq/
6 www.theguardian.com/science/2006/ nov/30/uknews
7 Hunt was the leader of the successful 1953 British expedition to Everest, in which Edward Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached the summit.
8 www.nationalgeographic.com/science/ article/yeti-legends-real-animals-dna-bearshimalaya-science
9 https://nypost.com/2021/04/09/russianofficial-admits-to-staging-bogus-yeti-sightings/
10 www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ bigfoot-finally-proved-false-300262926.html
11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Patterson%E2%80%93Gimlin_film
12 www.history.com/news/bigfoot-fbi-fileinvestigation-discovery
13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigiriya
14 www.livescience.com/nazca-line-cat-in-peru. html
15 www.nationaltrust.org.uk/cerne-giant/news/ national-trust-archaeologists-surprised-by-likelyage-of-cerne-abbas-giant
16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffington_ White_Horse
17 https://www.bbc.com/travel/ article/20200309-ogopogo-the-monster-lurkingin-okanagan-lake
18
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogopogo
19 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotlandhighlands-islands-49495145
20 https://youtu.be/A31u_q12d9E