UFOs in Newbury, UK
Starting this September just gone, residents in Newbury, Berkshire, England have been reporting anomalous lights in the local sky. According to Newbury News 'triangular lights' were seen by the the local Greenham Common by a spate of people. And now a new set of sightings, this week just gone, over the M4 road have left locals puzzled and generated a rash of calls to the media. Apparently, the Met office and the Police can't explain it. But, if the truth be told, the UFO sightings are only the beginning of the story for an area rich in Fortean history: a quick perusal of the archives reveals an area abundant in spectres, ghosts and unexplained phenomena. Robert Rowlands of the Newbury News reports: 'In late September, Newbury residents claimed to have witnessed triangular formations of lights hovering over Greenham Common and other parts of the district. So far, the MOD and...
To Hell or Howth: The Hostel of the Red God
Halloween Special: This is an expanded version of an article I had published recently, as part of the programme for Conor McPherson's play The Seafarer, currently being staged at the National Theatre in London. I was asked to write a piece dealing with the mythology of Howth and places in the Dublin landscape. I soon discovered a sinister relationship between some of these places... It's a dark winter's night in the Dublin Mountains. The wind and rain howl around a skull-faced building overlooking the city. In the womb-like warmth inside, members of the Hellfire Club play cards, betting recklessly money, horses, land, and women. They are all prominent members of the ruling class - MPs, Lords and even the City Sheriff. A knock comes on the door - a well dressed, but saturated traveller is ushered in, bade to warm himself by the turf fire. He joins the card game,...
UFO YouTube
In addition to whacky music videos, horse porn, mind-bendingly dull video blogs, Chuck Norris fight-scenes and flesh-crawlingly cute kittens on record turntables, YouTube is also a portal for all class of UFO shenanigans, allowing as it does, for the easy sharing of 'UFO movies' from around the world. Theoretically, this should be a goldmine of Forteana: the very cream of what the UFOlogical community has to offer. However, YouTube's strength is also it's weakness: the ease with which you can upload a file means that many people don't bother to explain the provenance of the footage. The result is a mixed bag. No matter, it's been far too long since we had any hot UFO action around these parts, so I decided to strap-on my bullshit detector and wade in to the thick of it. Frankfurt The following is a vieo clip filmed over Frankfurt, which at first glance seems...
Robert Anton Wilson Needs Your Help (updated 6th October 2006)
If I was to name two writers who have inspired me to keep blather.net running over the last nine and a half years, it's been Flann O'Brien, and Robert Anton Wilson. For the last decade or so that I've been reading them, Wilson's books have awed and inspired me. They've also made me guffaw with a deep belly laugh that few other writers have drawn from me. now, Bob, or as he's also known, RAW, needs our help. They say (who the fuck are they?) that you should never meet your heroes, as you'll only be disappointed. I've met the man called Robert Anton Wilson twice, and had a whale of a time. He's one of the funniest and most gentle people I've ever had the chance to encounter. Mind you, Bob seems to have been reading blather.net for a long time, before I knew that he knew that I...
Waking the Dead: Necrophiliacs arrested in Mississippi
Reading like the plot of a low-budget horror movie, the press was awash with the ghoulish story of the twins Nicholas and Alexander Grunke today, who were arrested after illegally excavating the corpse of Laura Tennesen: for the express purpose of sexually violating her remains. Waking the Dead has been running for about a year now and in that time we've covered some pretty horrible stuff: body-snatching, death in all its gruesome facets, murder and the dark history of surgical science. But all of this pales into insignificance in the face of an almost unbelievable story which made the press today. From the London Metro: 'Twin brothers and an accomplice have been arrested Wisconsin, America after they tried to dig up a girl's corpse and have sex with it. Police received an anonymous tip-off that the three men were on their way to the cemetary to dig up a grave...
Waking the Dead: Bitton Train Graveyard
Bitton Train Graveyard can be found just outside Bristol city. The rusted remains found there are a fragmentary glimpse of another age, a lost time, when the singular vision of a man called Isambard Kingdom Brunel re-shaped the very landscape and cities of England. For a chap who smoked up to 40 cigars a day, Brunel was an energetic man. He built ships, roads, bridges and, of course, he built railways. From Wikipedia: 'Though Brunel's projects were not always successful, they often contained innovative solutions to long-standing engineering problems. During his short career, Brunel achieved many engineering 'firsts', including assisting in the building of the first tunnel under a navigable river and development of the first propeller-driven ocean-going iron ship, which was at the time also the largest ship ever built.' The Bitton railway museum is part of the Avon Valley Railway line which ran from Bristol to Bath, which...
The Pyramids of Güímar, Tenerife
(Canary Islands, Spain) Dave finally gets his arse in gear, and posts photographs from his visit to the mysterious ancient Pyramids of Güímar in the Canary Islands. For most of us, Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, conjures up a dead-end zone of package-holiday hell. A place where thick-necked pale-skinned beer-swillers are carted in like cattle, to fry their sweaty, hungover bodies in the African sunshine. This is just part of the picture - the horrors of Tenerife are confined to one dreadful stretch of the south coast. The Canarians aren't crazy - they ship the undiscerning visitors off to the most barren, desolate part of the island. The rest of Tenerife is stunningly beautiful - from the cactus deserts of the lowlands, to the alpine forests on the way up to the Martian Plateau that sits below the volcano of El Teide. On the east coast, not far from the...
Waking the Dead: the Return of the Funeral Pyre
Although illegal since the 1930s a giant, beautiful funeral pyre for a British Sikh man was built and burnt this week, bringing an ancient and almost forgotten burial rite back to a country that once, like much of the rest of Europe, burnt its dead. An intriguing story has emerged in Northumberland, England this week with the extensive media coverage of an open-air funeral pyre for a Sikh man which was carried out an a secret location. That said it can't have been that secret as a BBC camera crew managed to film the whole thing. Jobsworths Of course, this being England we're speaking of, it didn't take long for a bureaucrat to come screaming out of the woodwork about violation of protocols and laws. The row began in earnest when the Department for Constitutional Affairs (who the hell are they?) went into jobsworth mode and stated that the ceremony...
Diggin’ in the Dirt: Niall (sausage the third)
Continuing with Blather.net's in-depth investigation of the infamous fifth-century thug and womaniser, our grave-robber in residence Ender digs deeper into the history of Niall of the Nine Hostages and discovers some good old-fashioned Irish skullduggery. For historical accuracy we must be very careful in giving any credence, to anything, written before the seventh century. This is when native Irish chroniclers started to write things in the margins of Easter Tables contemporarily, as was the fashion in Europe. Before this, they had to introduce and teach a foreign language like Latin, to a native ecclesial population who had no previous written form of their own spoken language, and not much experience of speaking the new written one. (Think TEFL courses, with lots of half bald men in robes, sitting around calfskin tomes. “Conail…I’ve had enough of your messin’, get to the back of the beehive hut. Ah ah…no buts.â€) Only then...
The Return of the Dalkey Baby
For several weeks in the summer of 2005, the Irish media indulged itself in a feeding frenzy of tabloid-like hysteria surounding the gruesome story of 'Niamh' (now identified as 'Cynthia Owen') who claimed that she had been the victim of abuse by an organised cabal of child-molesters. This resulted in her becoming pregnant whilst still a child herself - a crime allegedly faciliated by her parents. 'Niamh' then claimed to have watched as her new-born infant was stabbed to death with a knitting needle. In the wake of the 7/7 bombings in London, the Dalkey Baby story dropped off the main media's radar - the last we heard being that an excavation (looking for the remains of an infant) in a Dublin garden, had revealed nothing. But, one year later, the story is back. False memory syndrome The full details of Dalkey Baby story are covered in detail on blather.net...