With this issue, The Anomalist
seeks to provide sudden jolts of illumination to spark the imagination.
"Electricity of the Mind" is instant CPR for the head.
Theo
Paijmans mines the rich seam of digital newspaper archives to look at
anomalies in a new way, by mapping the geographical distribution and
dispersion of the account of the anomaly event through time and through
various newspapers, tracking the mutations and elaborations that set in
as the story spreads.
Researcher Ulrich Magin ventures into a previously neglected corner of
Earth Mysteries, taking us on a tour of out-of-place volcanoes across
Europe, and the wonderful and diverse tales of their origins.
What happened in Hetlerville? Dwight Whalen explores a forgotten tale
of bizarre visions that brought vivid omens of the First
World War to the skies of Pennsylvania in 1914.
Cameron Blount examines the implications of archaeological relics of
Peru's mysterious Moche culture , what they might tell us about their
relationship with the neighboring Nazca culture and about the perils of
prematurely classifying objects and images as 'mythological'.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was more than just a Romantic Poet – he had a
lasting and deep interest in the supernatural and long promised, but
never actually wrote, a definitive tome on the subject. Mike Jay
explores Coleridge's fragmentary writings in this area and some of the
ideas this volume might have eventually contained.
Paranormal enthusiasts are becoming increasingly technological, with
all kinds of sensors being employed to help detect anomalous phenomena,
but no amount of gadgetry will help if you don't know how to use it.
Bryan Williams, Annalisa Ventola and Mike Wilson provide a basic primer
for exploring temperature and magnetic fields in cases of haunting.
Patrick Gyger runs the Swiss science fiction museum, but is an expert
on European witchcraft, and uses the 'Black Books' of Fribourg to
understand the mindset behind witch trials in the late 15th Century.
Aeolus Kephas takes a look at the similarities between two of the 20th
Century's most popular and charismatic 'literary shamen' Carlos
Castaneda and Whitley Strieber, who, while seeming very different on
the surface, share more than just chequered reputations.
Many esoteric knowledge systems rely on biological energies not known
to science. John Caddy attempts to find a common root to all these
energies and speculates on how they might have originated and evolved.
Are there still Thylacines out there? Chris Payne takes a new
mathematical approach to trying to determine whether this is at all
likely, and if it is, when we might expect to get a definitive answer
to the question.
Publisher of the Journal Strange Attractor, Mark Pilkington
has had a long association with the makers of Crop Circles, and here he
takes a look back into the prehistory of crop art and reveals a thought
provoking precursor from the movies.
Politics and the Occult go back a long way together and writer Gary
Lachman has done more than most to explore this hidden linkage with his
book Politcs and the Occult: The Left, the Right and the Radically
Unseen and shares his notes that expand on key themes from that volume.
Parapsychologist Richard Wiseman has an abiding interest in stage magic
and recounts some tales from his extensive research and experience in
this area, including his discovery of the first ever film of a magic
trick.
Tim Cridland is best known for his startling human blockhead act for
the Jim Rose Sideshow Circus, but here he takes a long, hard, critical
look at the career of leading skeptic James Randi and some of the
inconsistencies it seems to contain.
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About
the editor...
Ian Simmons is a science communicator and regular contributor to the Fortean Times, for whom he has also written several books and edited Fortean Studies 7. He lives near Newcastle Upon Tyne in the United Kingdom.
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