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The Review - FEATURE
 
Fortean Times Editor, Paul Sievking


A crop circle near Silbury Hill, Avebury,Wiltshire which appeared in June 2005.


The 30th anniversary edition of the Fortean Times
Tales of the unexplained

Weird and wonderful happenings will be the subject of a conference organsied by cult magazine the Fortean Times.
Dan Carrier talks to its editor


ALIENS and unidentified flying objects. The Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot. Bizarre earthworks and oddly-shaped rocks.

Such is the daily life of Paul Sieveking, the editor of cult mystery magazine the Fortean Times.
Sieveking, who lives in Queen’s Crescent, has been involved in the Fortean Times in Kentish Town for more than 30 years.
And this weekend the magazine’s annual conference – the Uncon, as in Unconvention – brings together some of the leading proponents and sceptics of weird and wonderful happenings to the Friends Meeting House in Euston.
It is a weekend that encapsulates the thinking behind the man who the magazine is named after: Charles Fort, the New York philosopher who wrote in 1919 The Book Of The Damned. It’s subject matter includes the staple fare of Victorian/ Edwardian mysteries – fish and other objects falling from the skies; strange weather, fairy sightings, spontaneous human combustion and the like.
Fortean thought is based on a rational approach to the unexplained. As Paul explains: “It goes against the school that says if you can’t explain how something happens, it doesn’t happen.”
Fort believed that scientists were akin to religious fundamentalists – sure they are right, and therefore blinkered to the possibilities provided by other points of views.
Sieveking believes there is more to the stories he prints each month than just wacky tales: rather than dismiss people who believe they were kidnapped by aliens, he is interested in the sociological reasons, be it what creates such delusions in the minds of people, for these stories to affect so many.
Examples can be found in the way different cultures have consistent reports of weird, supposedly unexplainable happenings.
Sieveking continues: “Bleeding statues or appearances of the Virgin Mary happen in Catholic countries, which leads you to an cultural reason behind such sightings.
His interest stems partly from his academic background. Sieveking graduated from Cambridge University, where he studied anthropology and archaeology – the perfect grounding, it seems, for editing magazine of this type.
The magazine has been variously described as ‘the old Curiosity Shop of Journalism’ (Keith Waterhouse, the Spectator), and ‘a magazine that inspires intense joy in its readers,” (The Independent) and ‘Britain’s most astounding magazine’, (Time Out).
After graduating in 1971, Paul set up a base in a squat in Haverstock Hill, from which he published books and edited the Biographical Archive of Great Britain.
But it was a general disillusionment he felt at the failure of the promise shown by the 1960s generation to change the world that drew him towards the Fortean Times.
He explains: “There was the hope created by sixties movements, of Paris, 1968.
“It became very quickly the ‘me generation’, and The Fortean Times presented a way to confront orthodoxy, confront conservative thinking and above all, it is full of irreverent humour.”
The readership has slowly expanded, as has the size of the magazine.
“Our readers tend to be information junkies who read lots of books and have a thing about data,” he says. “And lots of scientists read us surreptiously,” he adds with a grin.
They rely on the readers who send in quirky stories from around the world. “We seldom get things that are made up,” Sieveking continues. “You can tell the ones that are outright liars – they are so unrestrained, it gives them away. I got a letter about a ‘jackalope’, – rabbit with antlers, which someone said they had seen in the wilds of Winsconsin. The world is a strange enough place as it is. There is no need to make things up.”
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