Stolen intestines, raining cattle and Friend Of A Friend legends: The wacky
world of  Fortean Times
 12/24/97
 The Guardian - London
   `Aliens Stole My Badger's Rectum' must qualify as one of the great all-
purpose headlines of the year. It appeared above an article in Fortean Times,
wrapping up stories about animal mutilations and UFOs. The theory is that
alien abductions have now reached the animal kingdom, so that your average Mr
Brock is likely to be beamed up by little green men who then chuck him
overboard in a bottomless condition.
   Momina Ahmed, from Gauhati, north-east India, was slicing a potato when
she spotted the word `Mohammed' written in orange Arabic lettering. Also the
word `Allah', which resolved any doubts - ah, that Mohammed - about the
divine origin of the coloured script. During the next two days, 10,000
Muslims, possibly summoned on their mobile phones, made an instant pilgrimage
to the site of the sacred spud.
   The word Allah turned up magically in the US, but this time Muslims were
less happy, since it was accidentally to be found, if you narrowed your eyes
and sort of looked sideways at the design, on 38,000 pairs of Nike baseball
shoes. Nike withdrew the blasphemous trainers.
   Taliban fundamentalists in Afghan-istan took the only rational approach to
the problem of inappositely sited `Allahs': they banned paper bags on the
grounds that `there might be some words from the Koran on the paper, which
might then be thrown away, and that would be an insult'.
   Months before she died, the Mother Teresa cult had a great shot in the
amulet from the Bongo Java coffee shop in Nashville, Tennessee. On sale there
was a cinnamon bun with a wrinkled surface which, according to a photograph,
looks exactly like the wrinkled surface of a cinnamon bun. But to an
imaginative customer it was the spitting image of Mother Teresa.
   The proprietor treated the sacred bun with the reverence it deserved: he
set up a website marketing NunBun T-shirts, NunBun mugs and Mother Teresa
Special Blend Coffee. All proceeds (correction, 10 per cent of all proceeds)
go to Mother T's charity.
   Not to be outdone, Clearwater, Florida, was the site of a miraculous image
of the Virgin Mary. Devout passers-by fell to their knees when they saw on
the glass front of the Seminole Finance building a 15ft sort-of-roundish
shape. While the less devout passers-by attributed the image to light
refracted from mineral deposits left by garden sprinklers, a party of
visiting nuns proclaimed this to be the mantle-covered figure of the Blessed
Virgin: `God is giving us a sign, telling us to change our ways.' Or possibly
our window cleaner.
   On the weather front, watch out for the Tumbling Cows yarn which has been
doing the rounds during 1997. As dodgy as the bogus bum-free badger story, it
has been as exposed as a `Foaf', a Friend Of A Friend legend, or, in this
case, a Friend Of A Fisherman. It goes like this.
   A Japanese fishing boat is sunk by what its crew swear was a herd of cows
which fell from the sky and crashed through the hull. Although the
shipwrecked fishermen sound in need of men in white coats, investigators
discover that on the day of the disaster a Russian army transport plane was
in the area - with an illicit cargo of stolen cattle. Worried by the
destabilising effect of cows stampeding about the loading bay, the Russian
rustlers opened the doors at 20,000 feet and - bovine bombs away - the
fishing boat had a nasty catch.
   The truth is, that story was originally used in a Russian sitcom with a
title that roughly translates as `Beasts Behaving Badly'. It was passed on as
a joke in Pravda and then via the Internet but eventually was taken very
seriously by the German embassy in Russia, after which it appeared in London
papers as a cautionary tale about Russian air safety.
   Given this sort of credulity in the world at large, it is no wonder that
Mustafa, Abdulla, and Adam of Yemen dreamed up the wheeze of filing a lawsuit
against Nasa for trespassing on Mars: `We inherited the planet from our
ancestors 3,000 years ago,' they announced, backing up their interesting
claim with `documents', which they handed in to the public prosecutor. The
Sojourner buggy released by the spacecraft Pathfinder was, they declared,
chugging around on private property.
   Instead of having the space buggy wheel-clamped, the Yemi public
prosecutor threatened to arrest Mustafa and Co - for a start, they must owe
three millennia's worth of unpaid council tax on the aforementioned planet -
and they reluctantly aborted their claim.
   Finally, it's been a good year for coincidences. Two patients at Guy's
Hospital in London realised they had been school friends 20 years ago. They
were both in for kidney transplants - with the same donor. Next, Suzi Toft
hit a hole-in-one, as did her golfing partner; and, when filmed later by ITN,
she did it again.
   Third, and saddest, was the 18-year-old Austrian killed when he crashed
his week-old BMW at 100mph on a bend. His number plate was DEAD 1. Would he
have fared any better with a different number plate - TWIT 1, perhaps? Or
would he instead have been crushed by a herd of cows when they were hurled
from a spacecraft by an alien who was a dead ringer for Mother Teresa?
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