Wait a minute…were there no seamonsters in the FT this month? No! August’s Fortean Times was packed full of UFO’s, Planet X and meteors, all of which I totally love.
My favourite snippet in this issue is from a story on meteor sightings in medieval times, when people thought they might be “magnetic effluvia” or any number of weird phenomenon (except, y’know…rocks from space). The article talks about some of the ancient folk tales that mentioned what must have been meteors. I quote:
“The statue of the goddess Diana at Ephesus (probably carved from a meteorite) “fell from the sky”.
I went to Ephesus a few weeks ago so this really piqued my interest. The Temple of Artemis where the statue would have been housed isn’t actually in the ‘ancient city’ itself (it’s nearby but not on my tour unfortunately). The statue itself is long gone, but I found a pretty snazzy engraving of her depicted with fruit and hunting dogs and all kind of weird stuff.
Now, if it really was made from a meteor that would be awesome, but Wikipedia says it was “carved of wood”. The only real reference I can find on the interweb is this page, which says it’s a “common myth”. Hmm. I wonder why the FT said it was “probably” true?
Another slip of the pen is an “upcoming event” taking place in June 2010 on the shores of Loch Ness, where psychics, witches etc will get together to try to summon the spirit of Nessie. This event will be streamed live online…oh wait, June was last month. Oops!