2013 marks the festival’s 20th anniversary and many of the movers and shakers from the industry will be gathering at venues in the city centre, based in The Showroom & Workstation complex.

The four day event (12-16 June 2013) is sponsored by Sheffield Hallam University and many of the volunteers are students on the university’s Film & Media and journalism courses.

Top of my “must see” list is MIRAGE MEN, the long-awaited film version of the 2010 book of the same name by my colleague and fellow Fortean, Mark Pilkington.

The film, co-directed by Mark and John Lundberg, Roland Denning and Kipros Kiprianou, reveals “how the US government created a myth that took over the world”, the myth being belief in UFOs and aliens.

The book is subtitled ‘a journey into disinformation, paranoia and UFOs’ and the film continues the theme in a 89-minute tour-de-force.

It puts some of the foundation stones of the myth under withering scrutiny, from the great-grandaddy of them all – the Roswell ‘crashed saucer’ – to animal mutilations and the MJ-12 controversy.

But the lynchpin of the documentary is the Paul Bennewitz saga and Special Agent Richard Doty’s mercurial role in spreading UFO legendary to what one of the characters describes as “the gullible people in UFOlogy”:

Bennewitz’s troubles began when he spotted strange lights above a secret US Air Force base near his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This kicked off a journey which destroyed his family and eventually landed him in an insane asylum. Bennewitz unluckily came up against a bizarre US intelligence operations: a deliberate disinformation campaign which encouraged belief in UFOs – and threw Russians off the scent of defense development

You can read more about the film and its creators on the Mirage Men website here. It will be screened in the Library Theatre at 1pm on  Thursday 13 June or at 3.30 pm on Saturday 15 June in Showroom 1.

Other festival documentaries include a film about the secret life of celebrity spoon-bender Uri Geller as a psychic spy; another about the internal wars in Scientology and Mark Kermode’s examination of classic horror flick The Exorcist.

Musical highlights include Greg Camalier’s film about legendary recording studio Mussel Shoals and a live performance by British Sea Power of their sublime soundtrack, From The Sea to the Land Beyond. In The Big Melt Sheffield’s finest Jarvis Cocker’s journeys through the soul of the nation, described as “a new kind of heavy metal music with pictures.”

Full details of registration and the festival passes can be found on the official website here.

Margaret Thatcher, who was Britain’s Prime Minister during at the time of the Rendlesham incident in 1980 (credit: BBC.co.uk)

Thatcher, who died on 8 April aged 87, was 19 months into her first term as Prime Minister in 1980 when US airmen at the nuclear-armed twin airbase RAF Bentwaters-Woodbridge reported ‘unexplained lights’ (UFOs) hovering above Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk.

The ‘Rendlesham Forest’ incident happened at the height of the Cold War when tensions in Poland – then behind the Iron Curtain -were reaching crisis point. In the years that followed, the Ministry of Defence drew up secret plans to base US cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common and US airbases in eastern England and was keen to avoid drawing attention to a persistent story about a UFO landing near one of them.

MoD always claimed the UFO incident was ‘of no defence significance’ but until I obtained a copy of their closed file on the case in 2001 – using a precursor to the Freedom of Information Act – the results of their inquiries into the strange sightings remained shrouded in secrecy.

The file revealed their conclusion that ‘it was highly unlikely that any violation of UK airspace would be heralded by such a display of lights…[we] think it equally likely that any [Soviet] reconnaissance or spying activity would be announced in this way.‘

But before these plain facts entered the public domain UFOlogist and internet gossip columnist Georgina Bruni revealed that she had quizzed Thatcher face-to-face about her knowledge of UFOs and Rendlesham.

The bizarre conversation took place in London at a charity cocktail party during 1997, shortly after the former Prime Minister had returned from an engagement in Washington DC. At the time Bruni was working on a book that she hoped would expose ‘the truth’ about Britain’s Roswell.

Seizing the opportunity,  Bruni asked her opinion on UFOs and claims that world leaders knew about the existence of alien technology. She received this response:

‘You can’t tell the people’

As Special Branch guards and husband Dennis listened, Bruni asked if she was referring to UFOs. According to her account published in 2001, the following exchange then took place:

‘Determined to pursue the questioning I stood facing her and, almost in a whisper, I said, “UFOs and alien technology, Lady Thatcher.”

“You must get your facts right,” she answered.

“What facts?” I wanted to know. In a worried tone of voice, but with her usual composure, she repeated,

“You must have the facts and you can’t tell the people.”

That was the end of the conversation. Bruni – who died in 2008 – shook Thatcher’s hand, thanked her and the Prime Minister was escorted out of the room, followed by her bodyguards.

Bruni was so impressed by this ‘admission’ that she used the phrase You Can’t Tell the People, despite its ambiguous status, as the title of her 2000 book that publishers Macmillan promoted as ‘the definitive account of the Rendlesham Forest incident’.

As a believer in UFOs and conspiracy theories, Bruni’s gut instinct was Thatcher, like Winston Churchill and other world leaders, had been briefed on the defence threat posed by UFOs and aliens. She mused: ‘If Britain was under threat…Thatcher would want to know all the intricate details…What were the facts she was referring to and, even more importantly, why should she insist that the people should not be told about UFOs?’

In the second edition of the book Bruni revealed she was, as a result of her research into the mystery:

‘…convinced that they [UFOnauts] are time travellers from our future or another dimension…that would account for why there is a reluctance from our governments to reveal the truth about these encounters. How would you tell the people that there is an intelligence far more advanced than we are, who are capable of creating such incredible technology?’ (p406, paperback edition)

Several attempts were made to obtain an explanation of the phrase ‘you can’t tell the people’ from Baroness Thatcher’s office, without success. But a persistent UFOlogist, the late Eric Morris, extracted one plausible explanation from the former PM’s personal assistant Mary Wakeley.

In a letter dated 12 November 2001, that Morris later donated to my archive, Wakeley insisted that the comment ‘you must first get your facts right’ was one ‘that Lady Thatcher regularly uses in almost all circumstances and therefore it would be no surprise that she might have said the same on this occasion.’

Extract from a letter sent by Margaret Thatcher’s PA to UFOlogist Eric Morris in 2001 (author’s collection)

She adds:

‘However, I do not think one should read too much into it – as the author [Bruni] obviously has  done.’

Wakeley reveals she was familiar with the UFO story as she notes that ‘you will not be surprised that this matter has been raised before.’

Although this anecdote appears to have impressed Bruni’s publishers, like many UFO-related yarns, it does not stand up to critical scrutiny.

It could, for instance, be argued the ‘facts’ referred to by Thatcher were those contained in the MoD’s policy assessment – used to justify the closure of their UFO desk in 2009 – that UFOs as alien craft did not exist but those who believed in them would never accept that disappointing conclusion.

So this was more a case of ‘don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story’ rather than a clue to the puzzle of Britain’s Roswell incident.

Postcript: A number of readers have asked for my opinion of Georgina Bruni’s reliability as an investigator of the Rendlesham incident. Interested visitors should read my August 2009 blogpost, ‘Why Can’t You Tell the People?‘ for background information.

And the public fascination with UFOs simply feeds the ongoing myth of extraterrestrial visitations, as the recent OnePoll survey for ITV’s This Morning in the UK demonstrated.

The impact of what The Guardian called ‘The Will Smith effect’ is neatly summed up by journalist – and former Sheffield Hallam University student – Mark Lankester in a feature published by Yahoo News (29 March 2013).

The Will Smith Effect – a scene from Men In Black (1997) – credit: http://www.businessinsider.com

Mark quizzed me on the link between UFO sightings, Hollywood movies and popular culture in the run-up to the release of a new sci-fi thriller produced and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, After Earth, starring Will Smith, in June.

In the interview I said:

“Popular culture informs what we see in the sky and then how we interpret [what we see]…you can’t help but absorb it.

“We have grown up with science fiction movies like Independence Day [released in 1996] and no one can divorce themselves from it. Not that people were seeing that one movie, and then going out to look for UFOs. It simply raised their awareness, and they became more likely to report things.

“It’s the power of popular culture.  It’s not mass hysteria, and it’s not just movies – TV, books and comics contribute also – it’s just a zeitgeist. When UFOs are popular, people see them.

“And people’s descriptions alter with time. In the 50s it was all flying saucers, and right now it’s big black triangles. There are two explanations for this. Either the aliens are very fashion conscious and move with the times, or people interpret their experience through what’s going on around them.

“Quite often we see what we believe, and not believe what we see.”

[Read the full interview here]

April 2013 marks the 10^th anniversary of the Flying Saucery gossip column I co-write with sidekick Andy Roberts for our favourite monthly ‘zine, Fortean Times, that celebrates its 300th issue this month.

Since 2003 we have provided FT readers with an eclectic round-up of news and gossip from the bizarre world of UFOlogy. During that time we have penned a total of 92 regular columns and spawned a number of special features such as ‘Britain’s X-Files’  which has so far run to 20 instalments.

UFO Silly Season story par excellence – Flying Saucery’s bread and butter

But our personal highlights include the discovery of the British government’s secret Condign report in 2006 as a result of our Freedom of Information campaign and the release of the MoD’s entire UFO archive. It’s been a long, strange trip.

During the noughties fads and fashions from alien abductions to exopolitics came and went. And we watched with amusement as attempts were made to breathe life back into UFO legends such as Rendlesham, Berwyn and the great grand-daddy of them all, Roswell.

Along the way we noted the passing of some of UFOlogy’s key movers and shakers such as John Mack, Graham Birdsall and Gordon Creighton.

And as UFO communities decamped to the web, the UFO magazines that once acted as the subject’s talking shops have faded away, replaced by badly researched web sites and the often inane information-lite chatter on Facebook.

In the UK the last significant flap, in 2007-8, was created by the media obsession with UFOs that followed the release of the MoD files by The National Archives. And that fire was fanned by one tabloid’s determination to turn the  new craze for liberating ‘Sky Lanterns’ into alien invasion fleets that menaced our towns and windfarms.

But the lack of good quality recent reports has obliged leaders of the UFO industry to delve deeper into the subject’s back catalogue in search of that elusive ‘evidence’ for extraterrestrial visitations.

Perhaps Magonia’s indefatigable John Rimmer was right when he said that UFOlogy had “deteriorated into an endless scrutiny of issues that that were once considered settled.” His solution was to “make UFOlogy history.” In our view, that’s what it largely is today: a modern myth that should one day take its rightful place in the social history of our demon-haunted world.

To catch up on the latest UFOlogical fads and gossip get your monthly dose of Flying Saucery and subscribe to Fortean Times, Britain’s oldest tried and tested journal of strange phenomena.

Aliens won’t be reaching for a pint of the dark stuff – they appear to steer clear of the Emerald Isle (image credit: http://share2aware.com/archives/5906)

And if the findings are to be believed, the extra-terrestrials much prefer to pick up punters in Birmingham, leaving folk in Northern Ireland well alone.

The phone poll for This Morning’s Paranormal Week asked 2000 people if they believed in a range of weird stuff including ghosts, angels and the obligatory aliens/UFOs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, around one third of the responses collected by OnePoll said they believed aliens existed and almost one fifth said they had visited Earth. Similar responses were obtained for questions on belief in ghosts and angels.

But the surprising result wasn’t the 7% who had seen a UFO; this is what we would expect from previous surveys (for example IPSOS Mori for The Sun, 1998). It was the 2.8% (56 people) who responded ‘yes’ to the question ‘…have you ever been abducted by an alien?’

Even more significant is that 7% of 18-24 year olds responded ‘yes’ to the abduction question.  This compares with just 1% of the over-55’s.

Is this because aliens are more interested in probing teenagers than their more cynical elders ?

Or is it more likely that some of the younger respondents were the type of student wag who might indicate Jedi Knight as their religion on the census form?

Surveys of this size might be accurate gauges of present attitudes (with +/- 2%) but they don’t require their subjects to take lie-detector tests. And the construction of the survey is very important, particularly if leading questions are asked.

For example, ‘Have you ever seen a UFO?’ might be simply interpreted by some as ‘….have you ever seen something odd in the sky?’. Others may interpret the question as ‘have you seen a flying saucer from outer space?’

But there’s no way of telling which it was from the results.

Nevertheless, equally intriguing was the breakdown of results by gender and region.  Women, it seems, are more likely to accept paranormal beliefs than men, but while women are more likely to believe in ghosts and angels they are less likely to believe in aliens and UFOs than men.

And if you live in Northern Ireland it seems you’re less likely to believe in or claim to have experienced UFO or alien phenomena. As the pollsters did not include the Republic of Ireland in the poll we don’t know if this ambivalence is particular to Ulster folk, or just reflective of the fact that Irish people don’t need to believe in aliens because they have their own traditions of little folk who take people away in the night

On the other hand, aliens appear to love Brummies. According to the OnePoll survey, if you live in the West Midlands you are far more likely to believe aliens have visited Earth – and eight times more likely to have been abducted by them – than if you live in Belfast.

Photographer Anita Skinner captured two dramatic images of a ‘large matte grey plane’ as it swooped dangerously low over Wharfedale towards Buckden Pike, site of a WW2 plane crash tragedy.

Hedge-hopping ‘ghostplane’ photographed near Buckden Pike in North Yorkshire (copyright Anita Skinner)

‘We both looked up to see [the plane] flying very low above us,’ she told me. ‘I had my camera with me ready to shoot so I managed to capture two shots…neither of us heard any sound coming from the engines, this struck us as being very strange as a plane of that size [with] four propellers should make a great deal of sound.’

It was the third time that Anita and her husband, both keen photographers, have spotted the phantom flyer in the past few years.

Anita sent her pictures to me after reading about similar unexplained sightings of weird ‘ghost fliers‘ in the Derbyshire Peak District near Ladybower dam on Journalism and Folklore (see my webpage here). I wrote about the Derbyshire mystery planes in the Sheffield Star and my 1999 book Supernatural Peak District.

But on seeing Anita’s photographs Sgt Joe Belcher, who deals with low-flying complaints at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, laid the aerial ghost story to rest.

He said the aircraft ‘is a C130-J Hercules aircraft and considering the colour and markings, or lack-thereof, it is highly likely that it belongs to one of our squadrons.’

Second shot of Yorkshire Dales ‘ghostplane’ – identified as a C130 J Hercules from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire (copyright Anita Skinner)

Sgt Belcher said it was impossible, given the lack of a time and date, to confirm the precise identity of the aircraft ‘but at the time the photos were taken [in August 2010] the C130 Hercules fleet were stationed at RAF Lyneham [in Wiltshire].’ He said:

‘We do fly sorties over this region and many of these will include ‘cross country low flying’. Although it may appear ‘dangerously’ low flying to someone on the ground…especially when the aircraft is flying through valleys and mountainous areas, I can assure you that our pilots are trained very regularly and to the highest possible standard.’

Sgt Belcher added that although puzzling, the lack of noise may be a result of ‘where [the witnesses] were situated relating to the aircraft’s position and distance…the noise was simply drowned out by the surrounding area. What I can guarantee…is that our C-130 J Hercules aircraft do make a noise!’

Anita’s most recent close encounter with the RAF Hercules was last month (February 2013) when she spotted the aircraft flying ‘dangerously close to the ground’ but did not have a camera ready. Several years before the couple saw a similar unmarked grey plane heading from Malham Dale towards Lancashire.

‘Again we thought that its flight path was extremely low and thought that it might crash into the hillside. We thought that these must be military aircraft on manoeuvres but how could an aircraft that big make no noise?’

Buckden Pike, near where the Hercules was caught on film, is the scene of the tragic crash of a Wellington bomber in 1942. The crew lost their way during a night training exercise during a snowstorm and struck the hill north of Kettlewell. Five Polish airmen lost their lives in the tragedy, which is marked by a memorial cross on the summit.

*Thanks to Anita Skinner for permission to use her photographs on my blog.

Tears for Fears? Sun headline which kicked off crying boy mania, 1985 (credit: News International)

I will presenting a paper on this quintessential urban legend at the Folklore Society Conference & AGM 2013 at The School of Welsh, Cardiff University, weekend of 19-21 April 2013.

The conference theme is ‘urban folklore’ and my talk will be based upon the contents of my chapter in Bob Bartholomew and Ben Radford’s recent book The Martians Have Landed: A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2012).

But for the uninitiated, here’s a summary: In 1985 a British tabloid newspaper, The Sun, edited by Kelvin McKenzie, published a report of a fire that badly damaged a terraced house in a South Yorkshire mining community.

A cheap mass-produced painting of a crying toddler was found by fire fighters among the remains, perfectly intact. The story claimed this was one of a series of blazes in suburban homes that displayed prints of what the press called the ‘the cursed painting of the Crying Boy.’

Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie, creator of the crying boy legend (Credit: BBC news)

In each case the kitsch prints – attributed to a mysterious Spanish artist known as Bragolin – were left untouched by the devastation around them. Belief in the potency of the cursed painting began life as a ‘silly season’ story but within a decade it had developed a coherent narrative.

The arrival of the internet allowed the story to reach a wider audience where it merged with other legends concerning haunted artwork. Almost three decades later it continues to titillate and terrify readers around the world.

My presentation in Cardiff will examine the origins of this urban legend and the role played by the mass media and tabloid journalists in its dissemination and evolution. Read my Fortean Times article on the legend for more details.

Research by an Australian archaeologist, using images from Google Earth’s new 1945 overlay, has found evidence of circles in English fields long before the recent craze linking them with aliens and UFOs.

The photographs were taken towards the end of WW2 by the RAF. But I have discovered that earlier in the war similar circles and other suspicious ground marks were the subject of a secret investigation by agents working for the British security service, MI5.

Photo from MI5 case file showing mysterious markings in an English farmer’s field photographed by the RAF in 1940 (Credit: The National Archives)

Greg Jefferys, who is about to embark on a PhD at the University of Tasmania, says his discovery, combined with evidence from written records, “gives the lie to the claims made by various [people] to be the originators and creators of all crop circles.”

But does it?

Unusual markings in crops – including simple swirled circles – turn up in written records dating back as far as the 17th century. Indeed it was a well-known account of circles that appeared following a gale near Guildford, published by the journal Nature in 1880, that prompted Jeffery’s research in the first place.

But none of the simple circles referred to in these accounts, or the ones identified in the WW2 aerial photographs, resemble the elaborate formations and pictograms that have become characteristic of the modern circles phenomenon.

As the Circlemakers and other circle-making groups have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, it is not necessary to invoke extra-terrestrials or spiritual forces to explain these phenomena. Human beings are quite capable of producing striking and beautiful landscape art.

The urge to attribute crop circles to mysterious or supernatural forces is nothing new and is found in the eye of the beholder. The appearance of strange markings in fields in wartime England was naturally regarded at that time as possible evidence of enemy rather than alien activity, as the former Top Secret file assembled by the British Security Service MI5 proves.

The illustrated dossier, held by The National Archives at Kew, contains details of covert investigations into activities by “suspected fifth column activities” during the invasion scare of 1940-41.

After the fall of France to the Nazis, rumours spread about the activities of German spies who were said to be active in the British countryside preparing for the invasion ordered by Hitler (Operation Sealion). Many people, including some MI5 officers, felt this was a real possibility as it was common knowledge that fifth columnists had played an important role in the invasions of France and Belgium.

Signal lights and ground markings had been used on the continent to guide Axis bombers and parachutists to their targets. So MI5 feared “such ground markings might be the cutting of cornfields into guiding marks for [German] aircraft” via coded messages that could only be seen from the air. They asked RAF and Royal Navy pilots to report  sightings of any unusual ground markings for investigation.

In May 1941 one such “unusual mark”, 33 yards long in the form of the letter “G” was spotted by the RAF in a field of growing corn in South Wales [see photograph from MI5 file, below]. From the air it appeared the tail of the marking pointed towards the Royal Ordnance Factory at Glascoed and MI5 were called in to investigate.

Page from MI5 file showing “unusual mark” photographed in a Welsh farmer’s field during 1941 (Credit: The National Archives)

When questioned the farmer, “a man of good character”, explained the marking was created by surplus barley that he had sown transversely across a field of growing corn in April, so that he could return a drilling machine to its owner. The MI5 report ended: “He agreed to plough up this part of the field [and] as a satisfactory solution had been reached, the case was carried no further.”

In October 1943 a RAF aircraft spotted a circle in a field near Staplehurst in Kent, with the word ‘Marden’ incribed within it. MI5 agents discovered the field had been used before the war as an emergency landing ground for Imperial Airways.

All the cases investigated by MI5 during WW2 had innocent explanations. In one case a circular white swirl in a growing crops, photographed from the air, was found to be caused by sacks of manure laid out in the field! I suspect that many of the simple circles and other ground markings (including one in the form of a triangle) identified in the Google Earth sample could be ploughed out archaeological features, such as prehistoric round barrows.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that unusual swirled circles have appeared in fields of crops across southern England for centuries. But until the last two decades of the 20^th century no one seriously suggested they could be the work of aliens.

Before that time farmers, on whose land they appeared tended to attribute them to natural causes such as whirlwinds or trampling by animals. Naturally, the sudden and uncanny appearance of swirled rings overnight in the middle of virgin crops led some to attribute them to supernatural forces.

The Angels of Mons – painting by Marcel Gillis exhibited in the Grand Place, Mons, Belgium (credit: http://gritsandgroceries.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/angelsof-mons-by-carl-leckey.html)

So I was pleased to read a contemporary story in a review of Valery Rees’s new cultural history of angels by TV historian Tom Holland (author of In the Shadow of the Sword).

In his article for Guardian Review, Holland tells the story of an Israeli veteran of the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 who claimed to have met an angel.

“During the battle of the Golan Heights, a Syrian shell had sent him flying from his tank,” Holland writes. “As he lay wounded and immobile on the ground, he saw enemy soldiers advancing towards him. They raised their guns. Then, abruptly, a golden figure appeared. The Israeli had been chosen, so the mysterious figure informed him, for an awesome mission. God wished him to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Then all went black.”

When the soldier woke he was being treated in hospital. But shortly afterwards he was visited by United Nations staff. On telling them his story they were astonished as, a few days earlier, they had interviewed a group of Syrian soldiers.

“These had spoken of a golden figure that had miraculously appeared between them and an injured Israeli, and put them to flight.”

This story was “proof enough” for the Israeli that an angel had indeed appeared in the heat of the battle to save him that day.

Holland does not refer to the Angels of Mons, but the Israeli soldier’s story could have been written at the height of the Great War. During the crisis of 1914-15 newspapers in Britain and the Commonwealth were filled with similar accounts.

For example this story, allegedly from the lips of a Lancashire Fusilier wounded in the Battle of the Frontiers, was reported by nurse Phyllis Campbell in the London Evening News (31 July 1915):

“It’s true, sister. We all saw it. First there was a sort of a yellow mist like, sort of risin’ before the Germans as they came to the top of a hill, come on like a solid wall they did…no use fighting the whole German race, thinks I; it’s all up with us. The next minute comes this funny cloud of light, and when it clears there’s a tall man with yellow hair in golden armour, on a white horse, holding his sword up, and his mouth open as if to say, ‘Come on boys! I’ll put the kybosh on the devils.’ The minute I saw it, I knew we were going to win. It fair bucked me up – yes, sister, thank you…”

Both accounts refer to a “golden figure” that appeared in the midst of battle at the moment that defeat was imminent and annihilation was expected. So unless the Israeli soldier was familiar with the accounts of the Angels of Mons published in 1915, then here we have a good example of a personal experience that appears to reflect a legend of supernatural intervention in battle that can be traced all the way back to prehistory.

Herotodus, in The Histories (written from 450-420 BC) gives examples of Greek deities appearing in the midst of battle with the Persians, pursuing and slaying the enemy forces. There are, of course, many similar examples in The Old Testament, which the Israeli soldier in Holland’s account would have been more familiar with.

As for the soldier’s mission to rebuild the Temple, Holland notes that any such project would have to demolish the Dome of the Rock, which stands on the site where an angel spoke to Abraham.

In Muslim tradition, the prophet Muhammad was brought from Mecca to Jerusalem by the angel Jibra’il (Gabriel) in a miraculous night-flight prior to his ascension through the heavens. The Dome of the Rock was built to commemorate this event.

Ironically, my first blog post in 2011 was a report on a UFO alleged photographed and filmed by tourists at the Dome of the Rock.

UFOs and angels may vie for position in the supernatural traditions of the modern world, but really here’s nothing new under the sun.

*Valery Rees’s book From Gabriel to Lucifer: A Cultural History of Angels, will be published by IB Tauris in March.

*A short story aimed at teenagers, Angel of Mons, based on the WW1 legend, by author Robin Bennett, was published by Monster Books in October 2012.

Some stories are just too good to be allowed to die and the Hexham Heads is another one of them (see my posts, Twilight of the Celtic Gods and Celtic Curse Tested?). I’m on record as describing the legend of the two small evil-looking stone carvings dug out of a garden in Northumberland by two children in 1971 as ‘a classic in the supernatural field that remains an unsolved mystery to this day’, so here’s why.

Paul Screeton’s Quest for the Hexham Heads

In Quest for the Hexham Heads (CFZ publications) Paul Screeton has produced an almost definitive account of the legend, pulling together three decades of lore into an entertaining romp through one of the weirdest stories in the Fortean literature.

Almost definitive because the author’s personal quest referred to in the title – to discover the current whereabouts of the heads – is ongoing. This lingering element of mystery adds to its power and longevity.

My friend, the archaeologist Dr Anne Ross, who died after a long illness this summer, played a central role. Back in 1972 she was drawn into a series of events that would not be out of place in a story by M.R. James when the two ‘Celtic style’ heads arrived at her Southampton home for examination.

During their stay Anne was tormented by the appearance of a terrifying apparition in the form of a werewolf that was seen and heard by other family members. Her youngest son, Richard Charles, gives his own account of the creature in a postscript to Screeton’s book.

In 1994 his mother told me that she was unaware at the time that similar hauntings – including the appearance of a creature half man, half sheep – had occurred near the place of their discovery.

Anne had made the mistake of going on record to say she believed the head’s baleful influence may have been absorbed from a Celtic shrine at their place of discovery in Hexham.

The joker in the pack was lorry driver Des Craigie who popped up shortly after her story was published to claim he had made the heads from artificial stone for his daughter to play with when he lived at the house in Rede Avenue, Hexham, years earlier.

I could appreciate the dilemma she faced because in 1990 I became the part-owner of a ‘haunted stone head’ from Ryshworth Hall in West Yorkshire that had been the subject of similar lurid tabloid headlines. This artefact became the centre of much attention when Andy Roberts and I put it on display following our talk on ‘cursed heads’ at the 2011 FT Unconvention.

Like the Hexham heads, our head was just a lump of stone carved with a face, according to one version in 1978, and buried by a former owner of the hall who was ‘sitting on his cloud rocking with laughter.’ So what is going on?

Are these artefacts really imbued with an ancient Celtic curse or are all these stories just creations of over-active imaginations? Well the answer to such questions is rarely cut and dried. My view is pretty much the same as that articulated by Doc Shiels in a letter quoted by Paul:

‘I really don’t think it matters too much when the heads were made, or who made them, the things worked and that’s what matters.’

The power of ‘cursed’ artefacts, whether they be ‘Celtic heads’ or Egyptian mummy cases, ultimately emanates from the enchantment generated in the minds of those who handle and write about them, as the content of this book amply testifies.  Paul’s background as a journalist and his amiable and eccentric writing style helps the reader navigate through quite a bit of padding – including diversions into speculation about ‘window areas’, wulvers, the stone tape theory, exorcism, Celtic mythology and much else – before we reach the meat, as it were.

By p172 he suggests the movement of the heads, whatever their provenance, may have ‘allowed a portal to open and release a daimonic reality hybrid.’ This simple act, he adds, may have generated ‘a warp in the time continuum whereby the carved head industry of [Celtic Britain] inspired a concrete plant worker and later a schoolboy…to follow suit via a subliminal level.’

At this point I wondered if the author was either pulling my leg or about to fall into the same elephant trap that snared Anne Ross. But then in his conclusion Paul appears to snap out of the spell woven by the heads and admits he may have failed to see ‘the larger picture.’  The larger picture being?:

‘…there’s no denying those artefacts’ provenance was essentially irrelevant to the mayhem and mystery they caused. Essentially they belong to myth.’