EDITORIAL

Forty-one years ago, in September 1980, what must rank as one of the classics of fortean television was first broadcast to an astonished nation. Its unforgettable opening credits featured the MitchellHedges crystal skull, ominous synth music and the promise of perplexing and terrifying mysteries guaranteed to lodge in impressionable young minds: “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? And whose hands fashioned the Skull of Doom? Does it bring death?”

Pondering these and other mysteries was British SF legend Arthur C Clarke, whose presence gave ITV’s groundbreaking series a gravitas that its numerous progeny – cable TV shows such as Ancient Aliens, covered in this month’s TV reviews – have tended to lack. In this issue, Ryan Shirlow faces his childhood fears and reassesses Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, episode by episode, asking whether its various “mysteries” have stood the test of time or been largely explained by advances in our knowledge in the intervening decades.

Elsewhere, Noel Rooney marks another, less happy, September anniversary: 20 years since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. As Noel suggests, while the terrible events of that day resulted in all kinds of geopolitical real-world fallout, it was perhaps the shift in our relationship to ‘official narratives’ that changed the most: ‘conspiracy theories’ had begun to circulate before the fires in Lower Manhattan had even been extinguished, and they have continued to circulate ever since, providing an uncomfortable counterpoint to whatever mood music the US Government of the day decides to play. We may never know the complete truth about what happened on 11 September 2001; some mysteries really might be with us forever.

CALVINE UFO PHOTOS UPDATE

New information has reached David Clarke following the publication of his update on the UFO photograph taken at Calvine in Scotland just before the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1990 ( FT409:52-3). Two senior MoD officials who saw the photographs in 1992 after they were sent by the CIA to the Pentagon have come forward to state they were later assessed as fakes. Air Commodore Simon Baldwin, who was the British Air Attaché in Washington DC at the time described the image, that shows a diamond-shaped object shadowed by a RAF Harrier jet, as “an aerial version of the Loch Ness Monster”. For the latest updates see David’s blogpost here: https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/2021/07/31/theufo-that-never-was-the-calvine-photographs/

ERRATA

406:35: Nidge Solly spotted a captioning cock-up in Merrily Harpur’s piece on Anomalous Big Cats. The photo of Wes Germer describes him as the host of the “Sasquatch Encounters” podcast. He is, in fact, the host of “Sasquatch Chronicles” – as, we must admit, is clearly evidenced by the words emblazoned on his hat.

FT409:75: John Harris emailed to point out that the phantom children beside an upturned boat, seen by Stephen Roberts in 1977, cannot have been at Wrexham, which is on the tidal part of the Dee estuary, about 20km (12 miles) due south of the North Wales coast. Rob Gandy, too, was puzzled by the reference to Wrexham’s “sand and shingle” and the quayside “looking out on to a wide expanse of sand and sea” as the town is “over 20 miles from the nearest beach!” The confusion was the result of an editorial mistake. Mr Roberts tells us that his sighting actually occurred in the area between Connahs Quay and Mostyn where the sea comes in.