"Our Friends from Out of Town"

       The M1 tank is "crown jewel of the American field arsenal", designed to take a direct hit from a missile, and the front and sides are the most heavily armoured sections. In 2003 they were lined up in the desert of Kuwait in units of 100: ten rows of ten tanks, preparatory to the invasion of Iraq. Then one night Luis Elizondo, in his capacity of Special Agent in Charge, received the call: "Sir, you need to get out here now. There's something you need to see."  So, having driven an hour into the desert to see for himself, Elizondo was shown a remarkable sight. A small hole, perfectly round, without rough edges, heat ablation or metal vitrification had been punched into the side of the tank. Not only that, but shining a light through it revealed an identical hole on the other side. It was just like a cookie cutter had taken a core sample of the armour - and the same holes existed in the adjacent tank. Nothing on earth could have done such a thing. The only clue to causation was that a Bedouin goatherd had seen a brilliant green flash in the night sky, directly over the tanks. But several years later Elizondo started to think it might have been produced by what his colleagues called "our friends from out of town"

Some Devilish Videos You May Have Missed

      I note that the largest number of my (admittedly small) set of readers come from the United States. It is therefore likely that most are unfamiliar with Australian YouTube influencers. One of these is the pretty commentator, Daisy Cousens. Then, one day in 2024 she paused from vlogging on social and political matters and produced a 15 minute clip entitled, "Is Mental Illness Caused by Demons?"  Part two of her story is here.  I note that the two clips are now "private" and unavailable, so I shall summarise them.

A Canadian Indian Levitation

     I began this blog with the intention of rescuing "lost" or "forgotten" reports of the paranormal: accounts, apparently genuine, squirreled away in old books or magazines which the rest of the world has passed by. This story certainly fits that category. It has also been my philosophy that, although you should never accept anything until it has been bolstered by a second report, you should not reject anything just because it is fantastic or unbelievable. There is always the slight possibility that it is part of a rare but genuine phenomenon, and one day a second example will arrive. But it you have rejected the first, then the evidence will not accumulate. This story also fits that category. I don't know what to make of it, except that it should be recorded for posterity's sake.

"Paranormal Planet"

     If you keep your eyes and mind open, you will find that the paranormal, the miraculous, the simply inexplicable not only happen, but are not even uncommon. If you haven't had an experience which defies the paradigm of modern science, which appears to violate the laws of nature that we know, then you know somebody who has. Four years ago I published a book entitled, Apparitions: tulpas, ghosts, fairies, and even stranger things, which goes further than simple ghost stories, but explores a parallel world of non-material beings which is only occasionally perceptible to us. Now I have produced a companion volume entitled simply, Paranormal Planet in which I seek to document and explore more than a dozen aspects of the paranormal which do not involve apparitions

Bless This House

     Put yourself in these shoes: you are just about to be ordained, your wife is expecting your first child, and you have been assigned to your first parish as a curate, or assistant priest. And the house the church provides for you is haunted!

The Naked and the Numb

      It is amazing how one can read a strange story, then forget all about it. Likewise, it is interesting how such stories can turn up in the most obscure places. Thus, I have been going back over my old issues of the MUFON UFO Journal (MUFON is the Mutual UFO Network in the US), and on page 12 of issue no. 436 (August 2004) was a story from Alaska by an analytical scientist, P. A. Budinger concerning a naked couple, numbness, and a mysterious salve. Let me now quote his introduction. 

A Frenchman Vanishes

      4.30 am 26 November 1979, Cergy-Pontoise, northwest of Paris, France: Frank Fontaine, 19 is loading a station wagon with clothes for an open market at Gisors. He is accompanied by Jean-Pierre Prevost, 25 and Salomon N'Diaye, 25 who I presume is of African descent. Just then they saw a long, opaque trail of white lights similar to stars, and watched it for three or four minutes, when Fontaine made a prophetic remark: "I'm going there; I want to know." The other two rushed home to find a camera. When they returned, they found the car 200 metres down the road surrounded by a halo of light like a thick fog, with three or four small spheres moving around inside it. Their friend was nowhere to be seen. Then the luminous mist shot up towards the sky, but as for Fontaine, it appeared he had vanished literally off the face of the earth.

Why You Should Follow Your Dream

       I'm getting addicted to the game show, Deal or No Deal (Australia) on Channel 10, and have only just watched Episode 34, which aired on Wednesday 13 March 2024. For those unfamiliar with the game, there are 22 boxes, each of which denotes a prize ranging from 50c to $100,000. First of all, you will be asked to pick a box, which you hope will denote the $100,000. It remains unopened until the end of the show. If you make no deals, you get the prize. You then get to pick one box after another, and you see various prizes disappear from the screen. At intervals, the banker will offer you a "deal" ie an amount of money less than the maximum. Most people eventually accept a deal, because the choice is between money in the hand, and the possibility of winning a lot or winning very little. For example, last week there were only two boxes left on the screen. One denoted 50c and the other $100,000. The contestant accepted a deal of $50,001. He would have been a fool not to.

        Well, on Episode 34 a woman called Kim Boucher picked box 17, because she said she had dreamed about that number. Eventually, when there were still four boxes in play, she accepted a deal of $11,890. Guess what! No 17 denoted $100,000. She should have followed her dream.

        Update 9 April 2024. It happened again. The contestant chose box 14 because his adult daughter had dreamed of it, although she could not remember how the dream ended. Remember, people put their names down as contestants, and it is only on the night that one of them is chosen. She must have dreamed of the game when her father told her he had entered the draw. Anyhow, on the night it came down to the wire, with only two prizes left in play: $75 and $100,000. He accepted the deal of $47,277 as a compromise; he would have been a fool not to. Just the same, it turned out box 14 denoted $100,000. His daughter's dream was correct.

        Update 5 July 2024. It happened yet again. The contestant also chose box 17, this time because her husband had dreamed it. And although she accepted a deal for $33,333, it turned out box 17 really did denote $100,000.

         Update 16 September 2024. This time the contestant's mother announced that she had had a premonition that the contest would come down to a final choice between $50 and $100,000 and that is exactly how it turned out. This show is becoming a real time natural experiment in clairvoyance.

Balloons of the Fairies?

       In 2017 the new fairy census was published containing 500 alleged encounters with these remarkable entities. Five years have passed, and now a second fairy census is available, also containing 500 entries, starting from number 501. Although I haven't performed a statistical analysis, my impression is that the second census contains more dubious material. It seems that the site has been brought to the attention of more people who are uncritical, who see things out of the corner of their eyes, or in the penumbra surrounding sleep, or in altered states of awareness, or who have strange, visionary, New Age type ideas. And I am still puzzled that so many adults remember encounters when they were children as genuine. I'm not saying that children may not be more psychically aware than adults. It is just that, if I had seen a real fairy when I was a little boy, I'm sure that by now I would have convinced myself that I had been mistaken, or had imagined it.

      Unless, of course, the experience was as vivid as these.

In the Jungle: Serpents, Sorcery, and Salvation

     The drunk throws away the empty bottle, the smoker discards the empty packet, but a book addict never throws away anything. Thus it is that I still have many of the books I read and enjoyed fifty years ago, and since my backlog of reading material is almost finished, I have had the chance to read and enjoy them once again. One of these was Mitsinari, twenty-one years among the Papuans by André Dupeyrat (translated by Erik and Denyse deMauny for Beacon Books, 1957). A version was published in the US as Savage Papua. Some of the events he recorded were quite unforgettable, and ten years ago I shared with you his story of the man who apparently turned himself into a cassowary. However, on rereading it, I came across other very strange happenings.

An Advantage in Being Struck by Lightning

      Edwin E. Robinson, 62 of Falmouth, Maine was bald, blind, and deaf. His baldness, I presume, was natural, but his other disabilities were the result of a brain injury in 1971, when the truck he was driving jacknifed on an icy bridge. He wore a hearing aid and learned Braille. Then, on 4 June 1980, something happened. He was looking for a pet chicken in his back yard during a thunderstorm, and was struck by lightning.

The Little Boy and the Little Visitor

      Do you remember having a weird experience - I mean a really weird experience - when you were young - and I mean really young? If you do, how do you remember it now? Do you remember it as a real event, or have you convinced yourself that it must have been a dream, an hallucination, or a misinterpretation of something you didn't understand at the time? It would be comforting if you could so convince yourself. The reason I am asking this is that I am increasingly coming upon people who claim to have encountered as adults what, for lack of a better name, can be called "fairies". But the striking thing is that many others claim to have had such encounters as small children, and yet believe they really did happen.

      Such is the case of a man who calls himself only "John". Most of us can remember hardly anything before the age of three, and possess only fragmentary memories of our lives before school. However, John remembers that, when he was three years old, he was plagued by a tiny, terrifying bedtime visitor. To his incomplete memories he has added what his parents told him he had told them at the time, and the fact that they themselves used to hear voices emanating from his room at night. Whether all this was a strange pychological phenomenon or - perish the thought! - something paranormal, it deserves wider distribution. This article originally appeared in the Fairy Investigation Newsletter 16, New Series (June 2022), and is republished with the permission of the author, John and the editor, Simon Young.

The Turtle and the Shark

      Once upon a time, on the West Samoan island of Tutuila, by the village of Vaitogi, lived a woman called Fonoea, old and blind, with her little granddaughter. One day, having been neglected during a famine, she announced that she was going to commit suicide. But, she added, if they ever wanted to see her again, they should go to the cliffs and call for her. Of course, they took no notice. However, she got her granddaughter to lead her to the cliff, whence they both jumped in. At that point, she was turned into a large turtle, and the little girl into a small shark. The villagers were horrified, of course, but they remembered her promise, and so they called upon her in song to came back. And she did. Even since then, whenever they summon her, the turtle and shark will return.

      That is a famous Samoan legend. You will easily find it if you do a web search, even on the Wikipedia. It was first recorded by a missionary in 1884, who treated it as a pagan superstition. But is it?

The Unholy Alliance

      "If this is 'all in the mind', then all I can say is the mind is a very fertile field." That was a comment made to me by a missionary in Papua New Guinea about some of the bizarre effects of sorcery and folk religions he had noticed in his work. Well, the mind is a very fertile field, and outside the western world it often manifests in strange culture bound syndromes. Koro, for example, is a mental disorder which causes Chinese and Southeast Asian men to imagine that their penises are retracting into their bodies. Malays run amok. In much of the Muslim world women find themselves possessed by what they call zar spirits, but the syndrome in not necessarily seen as pathological, because many of them make quite a bit of money out of it, just like spiritualists over here. Just the same, one wonders how far the 'fertile field' theory can be stretched before we wonder whether something alien has sprouted there.

Interview re "Apparitions"

       Recently, I was approached by Wendy Garrett in Kansas, who interviewedme  for 40 minutes by telephone about my recent book, Apparitions. You can now access the podcast at https://audioboom.com/posts/7960496-malcolm-smith-10-17-21-aussie-fortean-blogger-writer-researcher-apparitions-paranormal. I hope you find it interesting, if only to listen to the two quite different accents. (I might add, it was a little disturbing to hear myself talking, because you never hear your own voice the way other people do.)

       One thing I found interesting was Wendy's account of her own experience at 11.57. She was weeding the garden when she heard an invisible choir chanting something like, "Mother, bring us rain". Then a cloud passed over, there was a short sprinkle of rain, and the voices stopped. I have no explanation for that.

A New Book on Apparitions

      I started this blog with the aim of collecting reports which were in danger of being forgotten, in the hope that, in the aggregate, they might form a pattern. Well, I have now managed to see some sort of pattern - one of which I wasn't aware initially - so I have now collected it into a book. It is called Apparitions: tulpas, ghosts, fairies, and even stranger things, and it is available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle e-book form. Much of it has already been published, but a whole lot more is new: collated from both nineteenth and twentieth century sources. With 213 endnotes, it is fully documented.

The Dream That Led to Murder

      There are so many anecdotes of accurate premonitions of danger, either waking or dreaming, that we must accept this form of ESP as one of our evolved survival strategies. A strong premonition of this sort commonly induces the percipient to alter his behaviour in order to avoid the danger. But what if there are serious consequences of such an action? What if cancelling your plane flight at the last moment means losing both the fare and the cost of your holiday? What if your boss insists you make the journey? Worse still, how do you know that attempting to avoid the danger won't make it come true?

"Just One of Those Things"

      Here's something I'm sure we're all familiar with: an item, usually a small one, inexplicably goes missing. Some time later it turns up in a place where it has no right to be or, even more puzzling, appears staring you in the face in an area which had already been thoroughly searched. Mostly we can put it down to absent mindedness, or some such "rational" explanation, but sometimes it is harder to explain. When we bought a second hand car, I purchased a logbook, which stayed in the glove box when I wasn't writing in it. Two weeks later it disappeared. I bought a replacement, and that one also vanished after six weeks. I wasn't game to tempt fate a third time but, six or seven years later, we collected the car from its twice yearly service, and discovered that the mechanics had left both logbooks, not obviously dirty or damaged, on the front seat. Obviously, they had been discovered in some nook of the car. How did they get there from the glove box? How come it happened twice? And why weren't they found earlier? Just the same, I am not (yet) prepared to invoke a paranormal explanation. It was "just one of those things". (And, in fact, I eventually solved the mystery.) However, some other incidents are more difficult to dismiss.

A Famous Family's Fairies

       A wonderful thing, the internet! So many old books and documents are now online. I first read this story in one of Janet Bord's books, and even she had to rely on a secondary source. However, it took me just an hour one night to run the original source to earth. The information this times comes from a highly respectable source: the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834 - 1924), clergyman, archaeologist, folklorist, novelist, short story writer, and father of fifteen. These days he is remembered mostly as the author of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, but in his time he was up there with Andrew Lang, Thomas Carlyle, and other prominent Victorian men of letters. And in 1890 he wrote In Troubadour-Land, a ramble in Provence and Languedoc. The relevant pages are 65 and 66 because he had travelled there both as an adult and as a child, so after describing an area known as the Crau, he introduced a childhood anecdote.

The Pixie on the Plane

     If you have been following this blog from its inception, you will probably be aware that, over the decade, I have gradually come to the conclusion that there really is something to sightings of the "little people", even if it is not possible to accept the whole of the fairy mythology. (If you want further information, see here.) However, there is one place I never expected to find them.

     In 1995 a then British police officer, John Hanson got interested in UFOs. After being joined by Dawn Holloway, they began a project of producing a comprehensive history of the the phenomenon. It is an indication of the immensity of the subject that they ended up with a series of ten (yes, ten) volumes entitled, Haunted Skies. And it must have been sometime in 2008 or 2009 that they received a communication from a retired headteacher on the Isle of Wight, who had an incredible story to tell.