Wierd News: Fortean Times

 

Fortean Times (1990s) Back in the days when drugstores still had magazine racks, the regional distributor placed Fortean Times on ours. I bought every copy I found, accumulating about two dozen issues. The magazine, published in England (where else?), printed a mix of strange news, commentary ranging from the simplistically credulous to the shrewdly analytical, and reviews of books and other media dealing with UFOs, lake monsters, ghosts, and other such phenomena that people wish were facts but almost never are. The editors took a determinedly anti-debunking stand, which led them to accept eyewitness reports as evidence. A more sceptical stance would have served them better, but  I suspect that then the circulation among the credulous would have suffered.
     We see what we expect to see, which includes not seeing what we don’t expect to see. We identify objects based on past experience and current expectations, which means that the unexpected and unfamiliar are usually misidentified. Even trained observers suffer from this failing, and perhaps more so, because they are, after all, trained to identify certain objects. The misidentification becomes seriously problematic when we mistake people’s intentions and attitudes because we are unfamiliar with their idiosyncrasies, or psychological differences, or culturally shaped behaviours.
     The attached cover image of issue 100 accurately represents the style, tone and stance of the magazine in its artwork, typefaces, and headlines. It tried to emulate Charles Fort’s attitude to science, which was generally dismissive, on the grounds that scientists too often refused to acknowledge the existence of phenomena they couldn’t classify, and that therefore their explanations were generally bunkum.
     Yet most of Fort’s objections were the result of his ignorance or misunderstanding of basic science. If he didn’t understand some scientific explanation, it must be nonsense. Unfortunately, this attitude is shared by too many of the contributors to this magazine. Their naive acceptance of eye-witness accounts and memory as reliable data is especially sad. A more accurate knowledge of how our perceptions and memories fail to report reality accurately would have made many of their articles better. They would also have lacked anything resembling solutions to the puzzles, and it was those solutions that the magazine often purported to offer. The fact is that most of the evidence that isn’t fraud is evidence only of someone’s experience of something they did not or could not understand. The proper response in most of these cases is, “There’s not enough factual detail, so we will never know.”
     Still, an entertaining read every time. It’s still available. I visited their website, and on the blog found the same mix of fascination with weirdness and credulous acceptance of the standard explanations. To subscribers it promises a menu of “the most fantastic phenomena on earth”. No hint that many of these phenomena exist only in the minds and imaginations of the witnesses who didn’t (and often couldn’t) know what they were looking at. But there is the occasional more common sense attitude to “reports” of what “seems to have happened”, which I guess is an improvement. **