Fortean Who (Part 1)

As well as Doctor Who Magazine, another publication I buy every month is Fortean Times. It occasionally features Doctor Who - such as the cover piece in June 2006 above. Throughout its long life, Doctor Who has often touched on matters of a Fortean nature. For those not in the know, Charles Fort (1874 - 1932) was an American writer who became quite obsessed with strange phenomena. He was an open minded sort of person, of a "more things in heaven and earth" philosophical bent. He studied odd happenings, and scoured libraries to find news items of bizarre events. He soon set up a network of correspondents, who sent him clippings from local papers all over the globe, compiling his studies in the form of four books - The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932). He was extremely cruitical of mainstream science, believing that scientists' minds were closed to their own prejudices rather than looking at evidence objectively, and that they ignored or discarded anything which didn't fit with their preconceived views.
Fort was the first person to claim that unexplained aerial phenomena might be visitors from another world - aliens travelling in spaceships - and he also coined the word teleportation.
Fortean Times was founded in 1973, and it covers many of the subjects which Fort was interested in. A typical issue these days has two regular UFO columns and a ghost one, as well as regular items on conspiracy theories, cryptozoology, and forteana from the classical world. There are book and film reviews, and the inside back page always covers bizarre deaths. The rest of the magazine covers a wide range of topics. The latest issue, for instance, has an article about myths surrounding the Beatles (e.g. the Paul is Dead conspiracy theory).
Here are a few instances when Doctor Who has delved into Fortean territory, starting with the most common subject coverd by the magazine...

UFOs:
The first flying suacer to appear in the porgramme was the one belonging to the Daleks, in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964). Doctor Who has never really gone down the X-Files route when it comes to aliens visiting our planet. No-one gets abducted for a good probing, and no cattle get mysteriously mutilated. As a science-fiction series, it is a given that the universe is chock full of aliens, many of whom have come to Earth (usually to invade). Star Trek is the same, although Star Wars is set a long time ago, in agalaxy far, far away.
As mentioned above, Fort was the first to hypothesise that the various sightings of strange objects in the sky - going back to Biblical times - might, at least in part, actually be extraterrestrial in nature. Modern Ufology began in 1947, when the USAAF said they had a bit of crashed spaceship, and then they said they didn't. Then the person who first said they did said it again when he retired. The modern conspiracy theory would appear to have started around the same time then. 1947 was also when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing a strange spaceship which moved like a saucer flying through the sky. He never actually described the vessel itself as a flying saucer - he was describing its movement - but you know how jouranlists are.
As well as the abductions, probings and cattle mutilations, two elements of UFO lore which appear often in film, TV and literature are the Men in Black, and the aliens themselves are often described as being tall, thin and grey, with big black eyes - usually referred to as "Greys". The Men in Black are men, obviously, who dress in black suits and drive in black cars, and they turn up after people have reported a UFO sighting. They try to convince the witness that they were mistaken and are often described as passively threatening. It has also been claimed that they may be alien themselves, rather than secret service operatives, as they can exhibit strange hypnotic powers. Witnesses have later claimed they have been spied on and had their phones tapped after a visit from them.
Doctor Who finally got round to covering both the Greys and the Men in Black in Series 6, with the introduction of the Silents.

They are aliens, working very deep undercover, who have the power to make you forget ever having seen them, and they look a bit like the traditional image of a Grey. We also saw them haging around in Area 52 in The Wedding of River Song. As they have been influencing the human race for millennia, all conspiracies could probably be laid at their door.
Closely associated with UFOs are...

Ancient Astronauts:
There are two schools of thought when it comes to long-extinct civilisations who possessed seemingly advanced technology. One is that they were human, but who had super powers like telepathy and access to all sorts of science. They lived in Atlantis, so got wiped out when it sank. Except some of them might have gone underground and might be around still. Their subterranean cities can be accessed via openings at the North Pole, and this is where UFOs come from - not aliens at all. The Atlanteans come out every so often to abduct, prod and mutilate.
The other school of thought is that our ancestors were visited by aliens, who gave them the means to build pyramids etc. It must have been aliens, because, let's face it, early human beings wouldn't be able to group together and construct the pyramids or Stonehenge themselves, using mass labour, and ropes and pulleys, would they? (Actually, we all know that it was a renegade Time Lord who helped build Stonehenge, but we'll let that pass...).
The champion of the ancient astronaut theories is that well known convicted fraudster and embezzler Erich Von Daniken - so what he says must be true. Millions of people bought his Chariots of the Gods book and believed every word of it, and unfortunately it also found its way into Doctor Who in the first half of the 1970's. Azal, a Daemon from the planet Daemos, came to Earth in prehistoric times and mucked about with human evolution before nodding off for thousands of years. The Master wanted his powers and so woke him up. Turns out the Earth was merely an experiment, and Azal would have destroyed it if he deemed it a failure. Later, the Doctor thinks that the Exxilons might have been the ones who visited the Earth and gave us our fancy building skills.

They weren't our only visitors. As well as Silents and Exxilons, the whole of ancient Egyptian society was based on a visit by the Osirans. Horus was an alien, who came to Earth with a host of his animal headed kin to put a stop to Sutekh, who wanted to bring the gift of death to just about everybody and everything. (I've never understood those villains who want to destroy everything except for themselves and their followers. What do you do if you ever succeeded? It would be boring as hell).
Other aliens - parallel universe ones this time - gave Britain its King Arthur mythos.
We've mentioned it already, but let's take a closer look at...

Atlantis:
Until 2015, Doctor Who had a problem with Atlantis. It seems to have been destroyed three times, in three different ways. First up was The Underwater Menace, which is set in the modern day but sees the Doctor and his companions arrive on a volcanic island which conceals the remnants of Atlantis deep underground. There is no mention of alien intervention - simply that the city sank beneath the seas due to some natural catastrophe, just as Plato would have it. Jump forward to 1971 and The Daemons (again) and we find out that it was another experiment by Azal, and he was the one who destroyed it. This story was written by Barry Letts and Robert Sloman, as the final adventure of Season 8. The pair reunited for the Season 9 finale and came up with The Time Monster. One year later, and the same two writers come up with a totally different version of what happened to Atlantis. This time it was the Master's fault, as he unleashed the captive Chronovore Kronos and it took revenge on its captors by destroying the city by flapping its wings for a bit.
Steven Moffat finally tackled this discontinuity issue by having all three events be equally true. In searching for the missing Doctor in The Magician's Apprentice, UNIT uses a computer program to identify where and when in history the Doctor might be due to the impact he has on the timelines. Atlantis is shown to be very busy, with a triple paradox evident.
Another paradox might have been noticed - a double one this time - had they looked at a well known Scottish loch...

The Loch Ness Monster (and other aquatic mysteries):
It has recently been stated that the Loch Ness Monster (Nessie from now on) is really a number of big eels. Their DNA has been found, but there is no trace of any prehistoric marine creature. Nessie is far too smart to have survived in the loch for all these years to get caught out by some biologists. She'll have been paddling down the other end of the loch when they did their tests. The earliest sighting of a creature in the vicinity was recorded by a fan of St Columba, who wrote his biography. This claims that a monster had been terrorising the area for some time - eating sheep mostly. A boat Columba wanted to use to cross the River Ness had come adrift and one of his followers jumped in to swim out and retrieve it. he was attacked by the monster, but Columba had a really good pray, and the creature withdrew. Of course, this was the River Ness, and not the loch itself. Interest in the loch and its monster really began in the early 1930's, when a new road was built alongside it. There have been dozens of sightings of something large, serpentine and moving in the loch every year since, and I don't think they can all be put down to eels somehow.
We all know that what people have really been spotting is the Skarasen, cyborg dinosaur pet of the Zygons, whose spaceship crashed into the loch centuries ago.
Unless, of course, they are mistaking it for the Borad. He was a scientist from the planet Karfel who turned himself into a half-man / half reptile following an experiment. he fell into a time tunnel and ended up in the Loch Ness area in Victorian times.
Personally, I don't think he would have survived. If the weather and the midgies didn't get him, he would probably have been eaten by the Skarasen.

For those who believe in Nessie, the popular thought is that it is some kind of plesiosaur. One of these turned up in the Indian Ocean in 1926 and threatened the SS Bernice. It's never properly explained if this was simply another exhibit in Vorg's miniscope, which he put in with the merchant ship, or if it had really been patroling the Indian Ocean, still alive in 1926, and got scooped up along with the Bernice.
Sightings of sea serpents since the year 1812 might be down to the huge serpentine creature which the Doctor freed from the Thames in Thin Ice.
In The Fury from the Deep, the Doctor digs out an old volume of myths and legends and finds one from the 16th Century about the intelligent seaweed creatures which have been threatening a natural gas complex. It normally lies dormant deep under the sea, but the gas rigs have disturbed it - but sailors through the years have sometimes spotted it.
On a couple of occasions, maritime mysteries have been found to be down to alien intervention. There is no real Fang Rock off England's Channel coast, but The Horror of Fang Rock was based in part on the real life mystery of Flannan Isle's lighthouse. The first hint that something was wrong was when a passing ship reported that the light was not lit, despite poor weather, on December 15th, 1900.
A ship wasn't able to get to the isle until December 26th, when it was found that the lighthouse was empty. Three men were missing. One of their oilskins was still hanging up - meaning one of the men had gone out into stormy weather unprotected. The only sign anything untoward might have happened was a single upturned chair. The last log entry was at 9am on the 15th. No bodies were ever found... Did a Rutan get them?
The most famous martime mystery is that of the Mary Celeste, when the ship was found adrift and abandoned off the Azores on December 5th, 1872. Perhaps everyone had jumped overboard when a party of Daleks appeared on deck, as The Chase would have us believe.
I wonder if Flannan Isle is haunted...?

Ghosts:
In Doctor Who, the supernatural doesn't exist. Everything has a rational explanation - usually aliens again. Whenever ghosts have appeared, it has generally been something to do wth time. The UNIT soldiers who glimpsed a figure in armour in The Time Warrior probably thought they were seeing a ghost on the landing, but it was really a Sontaran officer travelling forward in time from medieval times. The Caliburn Ghast in Hide was really a vision of another time traveller - her image appearing in the same spot throughout history, as she was trapped in a pocket universe where time went very, very slowly indeed.
The Sarah Jane Adventures, however, suggested that ghosts might be real. In The Eternity Trap, the ghosts haunting an abandoned country house are once again due to alien intervention and people being dislocated in time. However, once the villain of the piece has been destroyed and the "ghosts" can be laid to rest, Sarah glimpses the 17th Century owner of the house and his children at an upstairs window.
I have my own theory about ghosts, and it also has to do with time. I recall the story of the Roman soldiers seen in a cellar in York, who could only be seen from the knees up. The Roman road which ran through the place was knee deep beneatht he modern flooring. Ghosts also are often said to pass through walls - walls which might once have had doors in them. They can be seen to float (perhaps an earlier floor level). They also have a habit of appearing on anniversaries, and repeating their actions, like clockwork. I think that what people are seeing is a glimpse into another time. Perhaps 100 years from now the future owner of my flat will hear the tapping of a keyboard coming from the living room in the middle of the night and come to investigate - only to find there is no-one there...
More Fortean Who coming soon.