In the latter part of 2002 and early 2003 British monster-hunter Jon Downes recalls that with respect to both him and the staff of his Centre for Fortean Zoology “…there occurred a huge ‘flap’ of Big Hairy Men (BHM) sightings throughout the British Isles that we could not afford to ignore and that required our immediate attention. Indeed, such was the scale of this extraordinary wave of encounters that even as we made firm plans for an expedition in March, a handful of new sightings of large man-beasts from the Bolam Lake area of Northumberland, England, arrived in our e-mail inbox in January that prompted us to undertake an immediate study of the evidence.”
On a cold, wintry morning shortly afterwards, Jon and his team from the CFZ hit the road, headed north, and the adventure duly began. When the creature craze was at its absolute height, and while he was personally onsite, Jon prepared careful and copious reports, written in an in-depth style that expertly detailed the significant role played by the Centre for Fortean Zoology in the bizarre affair of the Beast of Bolam.
In Jon’s very own words: “We liaised very closely with Geoff Lincoln, an absolutely invaluable researcher based in the area. We gave him our planned arrival time, and asked if any of the eye-witnesses would be prepared to speak to us. Much to our ever-lasting delight, five out of the six were.”
Geoff also showed Jon no less than three locations where sightings of the beast-man had occurred: “We carried out a thorough series of photographic mapping exercises, and did our best to fend off the incessant inquiries from the press. Just after lunchtime, a TV crew from a local television company arrived and filmed interviews with our investigation team. It was only after they had gone that we realized something very strange was happening.”
Jon was not wrong. After arriving on-site, a veritable wave of Fortean chaos erupted in the direct vicinity of Bolam Lake, as Jon graphically recalls: “Although we had tested all of our electronic equipment the night before, had charged up batteries where necessary, and had even put new batteries in all of our equipment that needed them, practically without exception all of our new equipment failed.
“The laptop, for example, has a battery, which usually lasts between 20 and 35 minutes. It lasted just three minutes before failing. Admittedly, we received an enormous number of telephone calls during our stay at the lake, but not anywhere near enough to justify the fact that we had to change handsets four times in as many hours. The batteries in both Geoff’s and our tape-recorders also failed. It seems certain that there was some strange electromagnetic phenomenon at work here.”
It was on that next day that undeniable high-strangeness affected the CFZ crew yet again, as Jon’s notes clearly and carefully serve to demonstrate: “We had a wake-up call at 5.30 a.m. the next morning, followed by a taxi-ride to a rest area five-hundred yards along the road from the Bolam Lake car-park, where we did a two-and-a-half minute interview for the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. One thing of great importance happened during the half-hour or so spent shivering by the side of the road waiting to speak to the BBC.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment