The new plastic Sort Engine
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.
The old school cardboard Sort Engine in situ in the former Salusbury family home in London N1. It's still seeing action in a new Fort Sort location.
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.
An intimidatingly big box of cuttings, in which there are considerably fewer at the end of the Fort Sort day. Contributor's names blurred for reasons of data protection.
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”.
The Daily Star's extensive coverage of astronomy includes the latest discoveries by "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.
Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust are on the case re: British wallabies.
“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.
Chip-snatching gulls, like these ones in Littlehampton, are now so commonplace they no longer make the grade these days - unless they're "drunk" after eating poisonous ants, or snatching people's phones.
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.
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