My Life in the Fort Sort Cohort

This artilce first appeared in Fortean Times, FT471;June 2026.

Since the beginning of 2025 I have taken part in monthly Fort Sorts, I even hosted the Fort Sorts at the family home in Islington throughout that year. This has allowed me to monitor recent trends in background cosmic weirdness.

The Fort Sort involves a small band of volunteers sorting newspaper cuttings sent in by FT readers into the “sort engines” – towers of labelled pigeonholes for the various categories of weirdness. One of the original cardboard “sort engines” were showing their age and has recently been replaced with some much smarter and more user-friendly plastic ones. After a lunch break usually featuring a leisurely walk or drive to the chip shop, at the end of the day the piles of clippings in their pigeonholes are carefully sorted into labelled cardboard envelope files and eventually make their way to FT co-founder Bob Rickard. Bob in turn arranges their collection and shipping to an archive for anomalous phenomena in Sweden.

There is a lag of at least six months between the articles appearing and them turning up as cuttings in an intimidatingly large, full box, while there were seams of cuttings that went back all the way to 2020. (Some cuttings have already passed through the hands of FT’s editors and found their way into “Strange Days” summaries.) Some readers seem to be clearing out their old cuttings libraries – the “folklore” category is heavy with neatly sourced photocopied articles from 1940s Country Life. The self-imposed work ethic of us Fort Sorters means I give each cut-out article only the most cursory glance as I speedily file it by category in its correct pigeonhole, so in most examples below I can’t give a source or date.

One extraordinary phenomenon revealed by the Fort Sort is the surprisingly rude health of physical print newspapers – still widely read by FT readers, with sometimes half a dozen duplicates of the same sweary parrot story sent in. It’s a shame, though, that 21st century print media still insist on referring to scientists and researchers with the cringeworthy term “boffins” in headlines, or if it’s the Daily Star, “boffs”.

Anecdotal evidence from the Fort Sort suggests that some strange phenomena are in decline. Spontaneous human combustion seems to have fizzled out almost completely, as have crop circles now that we know how they’re done.

Other categories of forteana are now being reported so frequently as to be almost at the point of being so mundane as to be no longer fortean. Once extraordinary skateboarding dogs are becoming increasingly pedestrian. In the field of inept crime, burglars arrested after falling asleep in the house they were burgling has now become so commonplace it’s not fortean anymore, except in one 2025 case in which a repeat offender burglar was back in court after falling asleep on the job multiple times.

Dumped sex dolls – especially those floating in rivers or the sea – being mistaken for corpses has become so routine that they now also fall into the not-fortean-anymore category. A resuscitation training dummy floating at sea leading to a call out of air sea rescue still makes the grade, though.

The “animal behaviour” pigeonhole has been particularly full of late. Sweary parrots are increasing in frequency. Reports of cats making epic journeys of hundreds of miles while napping in the engine housings and wheel arches of cars, vans and trucks is becoming much more common too. Killer whales are escalating their attacks on boats, bears are stealing sausages and luggage and crashing swimming pools and ice cream parlours, while symbiosis between ocelots and opossums has been caught on camera.

The “animal deaths” category is also a busy one, featuring mystery mass die-offs of crabs in Tyneside in August 2025 and seagull die-offs in Yorkshire in February of that year. There was also more coverage of celebrity animal deaths – “world’s oldest wombat dies”, “world’s oldest penguin dies” and so on.

The beginning of 2025 also saw a global odd crime wave involving fake whales and fake sharks used to smuggle drugs ashore, with controversy on whether there was a human inside the fake whale, piloting it ashore with a motor.

Two new Fort Sort categories were created this year with files of their own. Men up in court for a roadside set act with a traffic cone or sex with a pile of leaves made it into the Fort Sort’s new “sexual oddities” category. A new “AI” category split off from the “technology” category as most tech stories are now about AI. Such AI stories are generally along the lines of “we’re all doomed”, with a cheesy library picture of a skeletal T2 Terminator from the film cycle of the same name. More cerebral articles on AI, especially via the New York Times, dwelt mostly on the stupidity of humans trusting ChatGPT as a life coach.

There has been a surge in new animal species being described to science of late – mostly invertebrates but also tiny, fly-sized species of frogs. Out-of-place animal stories for 2025 included many well-documented wallaby sightings in Nottinghamshire, with the county’s Wildlife Trust on the case cataloguing these. Meanwhile, drones revealed a healthy population of wild wallabies on the Isle of Man.

“Foreign” tropical ticks are showing up in the United States. Coyotes are turning up in Chicago and New York City – they’re moving east due to deforestation, and growing in numbers due to slump in the fur trade. (Economist 19 June 2020.) Obama nungara, a three-inch long multi-eyed slug-eating and snail-eating flatworm, has become a threat to garden ecosystems on the continent of Europe, where it had established itself by 2020.

In simulacra and spontaneous images news, simulacra of celebrities are pushing out the now much rarer gods and messiahs. Jesus appearing in an orange in August 2025 was a rare exception, you’re now much more likely to see Elvis than Jesus in toast, or the profile of Welsh crooner Tom Jones in a huge shadow near Talgarth in the Brecon Beacons (Daily Mail, 29 March 2020).

UFO reports coming into Fort Sort are increasingly mystery drones, burning up space debris from satellites or Chinese spy balloons. The Daily Star uncritically reports the latest theories on “Rendlesham”, probably not peer reviewed. CETI projects, the approaching 31_ATLAS object and the discovery of markers in a rock suggesting “life on Mars” also dominated coverage of UFOs and “aliens”. The lag between reporting and cuttings ending up in that big box means that with frustrating frequency I come across cuttings about a spectacular astronomical conjunction that I’ve just missed.

A depressing Fort Sort trend is a deluge of lame ghost stories with a wafer-thin celebrity connection. This seems to have started with claims around pop star Adele’s house being haunted. Such celebrity ghost stories are along the lines of Cher seeing a ghostly face in some curtains, Friends actor Courtney Cox telling the Daily Star (21 May 2024) that co-star Matthew Perry visits her from beyond the grave and – according to the Daily Mail (2 August 2025), Nadine Dorries “called in a priest” after “sinister encounters” in her home.

The late summer of 2025 saw an uptick in mummified bodies kept by families. There were a lot of witchcraft stories in this period too – mostly involving witches taking each other to court.

But the most striking among Fort Sort trends was the rise and rise of stories about animal swarms – “swarms” having a pigeonhole of its own in the Fort Sort “sort engines.” Some such swarms are apparently fuelled by climate change – or at least by temporary heatwaves (which could of course be part of climate change). Warmer weather was sending swarms of Asian wasps and bees into the UK, and swarms of small octopi into UK coastal waters, even the occasional locust was being blown to the UK by thermals. European praying mantises are establishing themselves in Cornwall and are surviving its warmer winters, having either arrived “in luggage” or been blown over from the continent.

The now well-established “gulls gone bad” phenomenon was taking a sinister new turn as well, with seagulls “drunk” after feasting on a “toxic” species of flying ants that had become suddenly abundant due to a heatwave across the British Isles (Daily Express August 12 2025.) While chip-snatching and pasty-snatching gulls hardly warrant reporting anymore, gulls have now reportedly graduated to snatching and smashing phones – although whether this is exacerbated by intoxication on poisonous flying ants is unclear. Meanwhile, China had mobilised an “army of 100,000 ducks” on standby to gobble up an expected locust plagues in Pakistan, driven by record-breaking temperatures. (Daily Telegraph, 28 February 2020.) “Swarms” of grey-headed flying foxes were turning in Adelaide, also due to a heatwave, according to the Adelaide Advertiser of 7 March 2024, while more rain than usual predicted in South Queensland was expected to lead to an influx of bats there too.

There was even a “swarm” of blue whales around South Georgia, with a 2020 British Antarctic Survey count finding 55 of them instead of the usual one or two. (Climate change doesn’t seem to have been a factor here, though.)

Climate change is also causing sharks and other large fish to move around in the waters surrounding Australia as ocean temperatures rise. Bull Sharks are migrating north when it’s cold and south when it’s warmer, so recently they’ve been staying longer around Sydney due to global warming, with an inevitable increase in those “Shark Attack!” headlines in the healthy Australian regional print media. Tiger sharks, zebra sharks and manta rays also are showing up outside their usual range and are now found as far south as Tasmania. (“Sharks seek sea change as ocean temperature rises with climate change”, ABC News, 18 January 2026,).

With thanks to the Fort Sorters.

The trouble with reporting spycops

This first appeared in the June 2026 issue of the Freelance, magazine of NUJ London Freelance Branch, ahead of "Tranche 3, Phase 3" of the Undercover Policing Inquiry. Tranche 3, Phase 3 deals with the managers who ran the Met's Special Demontstration Squad unit of undercover police officers. It's still possible at the time of writing to turn up on the day to follow Inquiry hearings from the public gallery in person, or to negotiate being able to follow it online via the Live Link.

REPORTING THE Undercover Policing Inquiry is complicated, not least by secrecy orders that are themselves secret. The UCPI is the public inquiry into undercover police officers who infiltrated over a thousand political campaigns and groups from 1968 onwards. It resumes on 15 June, with another “tranche” of hearings - this one questioning and cross-examining the managers who ran the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) unit of “undercovers”. Read more...

A likely big cat kill from Dunwich, Suffolk

I was sent this photo of a muntjac carcass – possible big cat kill(?) – found in Dunwich, Suffolk on 01/03/2026. Read more...

Suffolk big cat sightings update – November 2025 to March 2026

Above is another of my hand-drawn maps with an update on big cat sightings and kill signs in and around Suffolk. It covers the period November 2025 (when I last did an update map) up to March 2026, so just four months, which were averagely busy. Most of the big cat activity of late has been in Suffolk Coastal District near the coast or in the area around Woodbridge and in the nearby Bawdsey Peninsula. Read more...

Zwarte Piet update

This first appeared in "Fortean Follow-ups" in Fortean Times, FT470, May 2026.

A window display featuring Zwarte Piets in a random bakery in Amsterdam in November 2018, when such scenes were still fairly typical. By 2025, such displays had become vanishingly rare.

Zwarte Piet, “Black Pete”, Saint Nicholas’s controversial blackface helper, seems to be disappearing from the Netherlands. St Nicholas’s Day, 5 December, has long been the day when St Nicholas – Santa Claus but thinner and he’s a bishop on a white horse – brings Dutch children presents. For generations, he’s been accompanied by a gang of Black Petes – mischivious helpers in blackface. Black Pete wears the elaborate livery of a Renaissance servant boy and until recently sported large fake gold earrings, a curly black wig and spoke in a "silly" voice. (While St Nicholas has been in business for at least 1500 years, Black Pete was invented by schoolteacher and children’s book author Jan Schenkman in 1850.)

Mid-November sees the “arrival of St Nicholas” in a boat, from Spain. Towns and villages have their own local “arrivals of St Nicholas” parades with a national, televised “arrival of St Nicholas” as well. It is during these parades that trouble usually kicks off. Since 2015, peaceful protests against “Zwarte Piet” have occured, usually organised by pressure group Kick Out Zwarte Piet (KOZP). Trouble would usually start when KOZP protesters were attacked by crowds that often included “firms” of football fans.

Starting in the late 2010s, Black Pete has gradually been replaced with Rootveeg Piet, Sooty Pete. While retaining the Renaissance costume, Sooty Pete’s face has only a light dusting of soot, as if he'd just come down the chimney. Dutch parade organisers gradually switched from Black Pete to Sooty Pete. In 2022 Instagram and Facebook banned images of Zwarte Piet.

In 2025, though... nothing. KOZP had planned a protest at the “national” arrival of St Nicholas on the island of Texel, as there had been Black Petes in blackface on the parades there previously. The national St Nicholas parade was briefly cancelled as its organisers couldn’t guarantee security, then there were talks between KOZP and Texel Council, and between KOZP and ten other local councils whose parades had Black Petes on show in recent years.

The result was that KOZP called off its protest after Texel’s assurances it would prevent any Black Petes appearing. The national St Nicholas parade at the time of writing was set to go ahead. A similar outcome was achieved in the town of Middelharnis in South Holland, which had also seen trouble in its 2024 parade, with four arrests.

In 2024, the village of Yeserke in Zeeland held a parade with Black Petes, some 20 people attending a KOZP protest there were pelted with stones, apples, eggs and fireworks until many police officers intervened. Yeserke Council said it would still allow blackface in its 2025 parade, so KOZP announced it would proceed with its protests. The parade was cancelled due to security concerns over “risks to children,” although an unofficial parade reportedly took place through the village on 15 November with some 100 Black Petes in attendance – without the Council’s knowledge and apparently arranged by word of mouth.

KOZP announced that it was celebrating St Nicholas’s Day 2025 by winding itself up, with a farewell party, as all its “aims had been achieved,” one of which was that Black Pete has “disappeared.” Jerry Afriyie, KOZP’s founder, appealed to Dutch people to “continue our work.” A columnist in the broadsheet newspaper De Volkskrant noted on 18 November 2025 that “Black Pete has become an obscurity, a clandestine phenomenon.”

©️ Matt Salusbury 2025



2021 Zwarte Piet update from the Freelance.

An even earlier Zwarte Piet update from 2020.

A big cat kill sign from Ufford, Suffolk - and recent lynx sightings in the area

I was sent this photo apparently of a muntjac carcass found in Ufford, Suffolk, showing signs of predation by a big cat. The copyright-holder is known to me. There were also several sightings of a lynx-like cat locally in the weeks before and after the discovery. There's an update on bigcatsofsuffolk.com.