Kallana reconnaissance – Kerala, India, March-April 2011

Interim report










Sali Palode (left) and his "tribal" forest tracker Mallan Kani at the spot where they saw in 2010 what they describe as an adult male kallana (pygmy elephant) with tusks

I recently returned from my investigation into alleged “kallana” pygmy elephants in and around Neyyar-Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary in Kerala, South India. These elephants are supposed to have a height of 5ft (1.5m) at the shoulder – or less – in adulthood, and are particularly nimble, scrambling over rocks at great speed. (Conventionally-sized adult Asian elephants on the Indian sub-continent start at around 7ft at the shoulder and up.)

A full write-up of my kallana reconnaissance will appear in my forthcoming book, Pgymy Elephants, to be published by CFZ Press later this year. Meanwhile, I will have to be a bit vague, and refrain from publishing some of my photos, as I’m in talks with BBC Wildlife Magazine about a possible travel piece for their August issue, and they want first dibs on pictures and the story.

My talk on kallana is also part of the programme for the Centre for Fortean Zoology’s Weird Weekend 2011 in Woolfardishworthy, Devon on 19-21 August. I’m provisionally booked for Saturday 20th.

No, I didn’t find any pygmy elephants, nor did I see any conventionally-sized wild elephants. I didn’t expect to see any kallana. I did interview art teacher and multiple award-winning amateur photographer Sali Palode and his “tribal” guide Mallan Kani, of the forest-dwelling Kani people. They have been tracking “kallana” for over a decade, and have had three sightings in that time. They were able to photograph kallana on two of these occasions, in 2005 and 2010. (Sali speaks Mallayalam only, and his agent Balan Madhavan interpreted for me. I hope to have an extract of the interview linked to this blog shortly.)

Sali and Mallan also took me into the Neyyar-Peppara Sanctuary to show me the places where they encountered kallana. It’s thick forest with steep, single-file paths up and down the hills. The paths are elephant tracks, as evidenced by the dung piles with mushrooms growing out of them. The places where Sali and Mallan made their sightings were all on the edge of a small lake at the edge of the forest.









Art teacher, award-winning wildlife photographer and kallana witness Sali Palode, being interviewed in the Trivandrum Press Club



We did have a close encounter with a herd of about 20 gaur (wild forest bison) that Mallan found for us. Mallan’s forestry skills are impressive – he suddenly said, “Gaur! Guar!” although Sali and I saw and heard nothing, and he then disappeared into the forest. Ten minutes later a herd of gaur came stampeding straight at us. Some say that “kallana” are just young elephants playing a short distance from a herd that’s unseen and close by, but if the herd was close by, Mallan would know about it. I had the rare privilege of coconuts for lunch in one of the Kani hamlets in the forest after our trip. Access to “tribal” areas is normally restricted, we had cleared it with Sharma, the Trivandrum Division Chief Wildlife Warden, who knows Sali well.




Sali and Mallan enter the forest









Sali and Mallan on a steep elephant trail in the deep forest of Neyyar-Peppara

I am currently negotiating with Sali’s agent to purchase licenses to use a couple of Sali’s photographs, including one never published of a dead female he found by the lake in 2005. The local wildlife warden certified it as dead, stating it was a young elephant, and it was quickly cremated in line with Forest Department practice. Regional newspaper reports at the time saying a DNA sample had first been taken were incorrect.

I also had a chance to see some young captive elephants having a bath at Kodonad Elephant Camp, and it was good to get up close to them, and to compare young conventionally-sized elephants with the photos of “kallana.”






Up close and personal with young (conventionally-sized) captive elephants at Kodonad, on the Periyar River

I also interviewed two elephant experts. Prof Sukumar Raman is the expert on Asian elephants for the whole world, and I flew to Bangalore to talk to him on the huge Indian Institute of Science campus. I met and interviewed Prof Joseph Cheeran, a vet and an expert on captive elephants, in the Keralan city of Thrissur.

I have to say my initial conclusion is I am more sceptical about kallana then when I first arrived in Kerala. Prof Sukumar and Prof Cheeran said that many of the unique characteristics Sali says distinguish kallana from conventionally-sized Asian elephants are perfectly consistent with young Asian elephants, and there is a big range of size, tusk development and behaviour in young Asian elephants. All the kallana sightings were in the dry season – Kerala misses out on one of the monsoons and has a longer dry season – giving the elephants an emaciated appearance, which could be what Sali and Mallan were seeing.

It turns out that kallana doesn’t go back all that far in time either. Sali said Mallan first drew his attention to kallana “twenty-five years ago” on the summit of Agasthya Mala, south Kerala’s tallest peak, when he saw piles of smaller-sized dung. Prof Sukumar pointed out that younger elephants produce smaller balls of dung. Sukumar is also from South India, and said that “twenty-five years ago” in South India doesn’t necessarily mean 1986, but “a very long time ago,” so long that you can’t remember.

Sukumar also told me that the stories of kallana first arrived in Kerala around the same time, with reports coming over the border with the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu to the East. I wasn’t able to communicate directly beyond single English nouns with Sali and Mallan on our trip into Neyyar-Peppara, as we didn’t really have a language in common, but it’s no longer clear to me whether kallana is an ancient tradition of the Kani, or a secondhand report acquired via local media by the Kani and others in recent times from Tamil Nadu. There are some Kani settlements (and a lot of other forest-dwelling “tribal” settlements) in Tamil Nadu, but the Kani in Kerala seem to be isolated from and unaware of the Kani in Tamil Nadu, who speak a different language. More study of the transmission of kallana reports is needed.

Sukumar was more open to the idea of kallana, and said that, as a scientist, “I wouldn’t rule it out.” He suggested that kallana is an example of “phenotypic plasticity”, variations within any given population, and felt the most likely explanation is that there’s a family group of slightly smaller than usual individuals in the sanctuary. Sukumar pointed out that being smaller would be a good adaptation in negotiating the thick forest slopes of Neyyar-Peppara. Sukumar has studied the elephants of Burma, that also live in thick forests, and they are smaller than Indian elephants, but definitely the same species. While Balan Madhavan, Sali’s agent, was emphasising to him the need to gather dung, hair and other discarded bits of kallana for DNA analysis, Sukumar said not to bother, as any variations unique to the alleged “kallana” family of smaller elephants probably wouldn’t show up in the DNA, as they’re well within the range of what you’d expect in conventional-sized elephants. Sukumar’s team planned to join in the Kerala Forest Department’s elephant survey of Neyyar-Peppara, looking for evidence of kallana, a couple of years ago, but it was rained off by unexpectedly early and heavy rains. He hopes to do it again sometime, considerable academic commitments permitting.








Prof Sukumar Raman in his office at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, at the Bangalore campus of the Indian Institute of Science

Sali also claims to have seen a mystery tree crab in the Neyyar-Peppara reserve, living in gaps in trees that are not particularly anywhere near water. There’s a photo of a tree crab on his website, erroneously filed on the “insects” page. (I’ve yet to get in contact with the naturalist who runs Sali’s website.) Sali drew me a sketch of the tree crab, which looked very different, more like a spider. He also said he’d seen exotic tarantulas in the sanctuary, although it’s not clear whether he was saying they were unknown species. I hope to delve more deeply into the Neyyar-Peppara tree crab mystery.

Balan Madhavan, who’s a well-known wildlife photographer, said he hoped to get a photo of another Keralan cryptid, pogeyan, the grey clouded leopard. He’s spoken to foresters who’ve seen it, and is convinced it’s for real. Pogeyan’s alleged range is in the far north of Kerala, in the tea plantations of Malabar.

In Kerala’s capital, Trivandrum, I encountered several carvings and statues of what were described as “unicorns” or “elephant dragons” – horse-bodied, eagle-clawed beasts with elephant’s heads. Some grasped their trunks in their talons, some had trunks reaching down towards considerably smaller “baby elephants” whose trunks reached up to theirs. Some had small crests or tufts on their heads. Some had multiple tusks growing out of thes sides of their mouth where their teeth should be, like the mouth parts of a monster prawn. They had a Chinese or even Indonesian look to them, and the elephant bits were anatomically very accurate.











Makara ("elephant dragon") at the Maharaja of Travancore's palace, Trivandrum

These “elephant dragons” were in the Maharaja of Travancore’s 18th century palace, in the huge temple nextdoor, and guarding other temples nearby. I talked to the palace and temple guides, who told me the “elephant dragons” were carved by wood and stone carvers from Tamil Nadu in the late eighteenth century, during Travancore’s zenith. The stone dragons were added to the temple at that time. When I went to Bangalore, I saw that the coat of arms of the surrounding state of Karnataka also has “elephant dragons.”

Sukumar told me these are makara, and they’re not exclusive to India. They seem to be an architectural flourish or heraldic beast, at a time when Travancore (South Kerala and bits of Tamil Nadu) were establishing diplomatic relations with European powers. I don’t know how the existence of makara – a mythical elephant dragon often associated with a small elephant – fits in with the tradition of kallana. Sukumar says there’s been little by way of research into the origins of makara. I invite any art historians who don’t mind getting up really early to make calls to India to investigate further.

Strange Stories in a World of Wonder part 1

This first appeared in Fortean Times FT 271 (February 2011) and part 2 in FT 272.

In common with a lot of fellow fortysomething forteans, my interest in strange phenomena was first kindled at a very tender age by a weekly magazine called World of Wonder. Branding itself as “the magazine for every boy and girl”, World of Wonder opened for business in the groovy cool fab bellbottomed days of 1970, when I was still just a bit too young for a chopper bicycle. WoW came through our letterbox every Saturday, and was an essential grounding for kids in interesting facts and “world knowledge” in the days before Wikipedia, and – decades before Facebook – its international penplas page was popular. The WoW of the early 1970s allowed itself occasional flights of futurology – giant walking cities on telescopic legs, and an illustration of what was then a fantasy– the proposed “Channel Tunnel”, its entrance spiraling into the ground like a helter-skelter.

IPC Publications’ World of Wonder (WoW) (not to be confused with an earlier, American World of Wonder magazine from the 1930s) was published by Fleetway, a division of magazines giant IPC. Although it would appear somewhat worthy in tone by today’s standards – its pages often ended up being cut up for school geography projects – what made WoW really cool was a regular feature called ‘Strange Stories’. The editors may have been a little embarrassed by ‘Strange Stories’ – it only even had two cover stories in its entire 258-issue, five-year run. Possibly they were worried that parents would disapprove of any in-your-face delinquent areas of study like yetis, lighthouse-threatening giant octopi, the Oak Island Money Pit or other degeneracy on the cover.

The regular ‘Strange Stories’ feature galloped through all the fortean old chestnuts – and some less well known forteana that since been forgotten – in three sumptuously illustrated pages or less, and packaged anomalous phenomena and high strangeness in easily digestible portions to the children of Britain, the Commonwealth and (in translation) Holland. ‘Strange Stories’ was the crucial factor setting some latter-day forteans onto the path of being rather interested in something a little bit odd.

Canadian Nick Van der Graaf, for example, reminiscing on the 26pigs.com website, said, ‘In WoW, I first heard of Kaspar Hauser, I first read about Spring Heeled Jack, all kinds of exciting and mysterious phenomena. To this day (I'm 38 now) I regret losing those marvellous magazines. I think they were a great influence on me.’

And then there were the pictures! The technology of the time meant it was easier and cheaper to pay illustrators (there were a lot more of them around) to paint illustrations by hand than to source and clear rights for photos from photo libraries. WoW even had an occasional series called “Up and about with our colour camera” in which they showcased the groovy cool fab but still rather fiddly technology of colour photographic printing. All ‘Strange Stories’ illustrations were painted by hand. For some reason probably also to do with the printing processes of the time, ‘Strange Stories’ illustrations were usually in a strange strange two-colour mix of blues and greys. Sea serpents and giant squid and octopi seemed a firm favourite for the WoW illustrators, sometimes rendered in spectacular colour, deep green seas and all. (The illustrators of the time were often either colour or black-and-white specialists.)

Some ‘Strange Stories’ illustrations, it is fair to say, scared the living daylights out of me. I am still haunted by a traumatic formative experience, turning the pages of WoW164 and being confronted with a graphic rendering of one of the many hallucinations that afflicted the inhabitants of the town of Point Saint Esprit, France, in 1951. The illustration showed a resident opening to door to a doctor on a house call, except that in place of the doctor’s face there was a skull beneath his hat. ‘Strange Stories’ identified ergotism, possibly caused by mould on the local flour, as th cause of the hallucinations, rather than any alleged CIA plot to lace the water supply with LSD (FT262;20-21) – further noting that villagers saw ‘processions of historical ghosts,’ that pets went ‘beserk,’ and that it all started after the priest noticed the arm on the village’s statue of the Virgin Mary was missing.

Some ‘Strange Stories’ illustrations were downright baffling. No explanation was given for why (in WoW61) Alexander Selkirk – the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe – was illustrated depicted surrounded by cats on his discovery by sailors on a Pacific Island. Elsewhere in the pages of WoW, the series on Greek mythology and the series on the history of dance provided excuses for the occasional bare nipple on Greek goddesses, sirens and Indian temple dancers – very exciting in those innocent days before the current torrent of filth that is the internet.

The illustrators brought in to ‘do’ WoW were among the best of the best. Many had come from IPC’s more established sister publication, Look & Learn. Dozens of illustrators worked on the magazine, often (like some of its editors) deliberately recruited from the world of comics, in an attempt to give often quite dry history and science features a look that would engage the kids. Some illustrators were imported from Spain and Italy. Among the home-grown British WoW illustration talent was Leslie C. Caswell, a Royal Academy member and World War Two war artist who served in Burma, and who illustrated Women’s Own in the 1950s and became well-known as a medical illustrator, before depicting for WoW Father Dominic Dechaux levitating over a King Philip II of Spain’s startled court for a feature on levitators, part of Strange Stories’ occasionally fortean sister series ‘Talking Point.’

Other WoW illustrators included Angus McBride and Richard Hook, who later went on to illustrate numerous Osprey Men at Arms books on uniforms from obscure ancient and medieval armies and wars. For assignments illustrating eighteenth century feats of derring-do, preferably involving three-corned hats, dashing highwaymen and chases on horseback, Cecil Lane Doughty, veteran of Eagle comic, was the illustrator of choice. For the numerous WoW stories on Spitfires, Concorde and other cool planes, there was aviation specialist Wilfred Hardy, who went on to design the 2009 series of Icelandic ‘legendary animal’ cryptozoology stamps.

Fantastic though the images accompanying ‘Strange Stories’ and ‘Talking Point’ may have been, the accompanying texts were brutally sceptical for a readership of such a tender age.

‘Strange Stories’ scepticism ran to (WoW 61) dismissing UFOs as weather balloons, unusual clouds and, - four decades before they were fashionable explanation – Chinese lanterns. WoW 5 asked, “Was there a King Arthur?” and WoW119 asked “Rope trick or tall story?” WoW 124 speculated that the Cottingley Fairies photos might be fakes at a time when many were still giving them the benefit of the doubt. WoW105 announced “The end of the world is cancelled” – written in 1972, it jokingly identified 1977 as the next predicted Armageddon.

WoW 163 bluntly concluded that one sighting of the bunyip – Australia’s large mystery animal – was just a misidentified musk duck. WoW142 examined the Cheyenne chief Roman Nose's magical invulnerability to bullets, as long as he observed the taboo of starving himself before battle. He survived several horses being shot from under him, before finally being succumbing to a bullet fired by the US Army at a raid at Republican River, Colorado, having forgotten to forgo food that day. ‘Strange Stories’ was of the starkly rational opinion that the sudden contemporary introduction of repeater rifles may have been the real cause of the failure of Roman Nose's magic.

For a publication that set itself the mission of introducing kinds to what was supposed to be a world of “wonder,’ such brutal scepticism aimed at such a young and innocent audience seems almost cruel. Although I suspect that the powers behind “Strange Stories” counted on the nine-year olds ignoring the perfectly rational explanation at the end, and be convinced the whole thing about giant skeletons in Mexico and UFOs was gospel truth. I know I did at the time.

Hoaxes were a common theme, especially hoaxes and scams pulled by professed alchemists. ‘Strange Stories’ told you all a child needs to know about history’s great hoaxes. The very first of ‘Strange Stories’ from WoW issue 1 was Piltdown Man. WoW 68 featured Monsieur Lenoine, 'the man who made diamonds' and who swindled diamond magnate Julius De Beers, who hired a conjurer to expose him. WoW 70 had the fake Shakespeare play Vortigen and Rowena, written by William Henry at the age of 18, and sold to producer Samuel Ireland. Their illustration showed the play being booed off the London stage on its first performance in 1795.

History’s great scam artists – like Perkin Warbeck, who led a rebellion against Henry VII of England after convincing many that he was the elder of the Princes in the Tower – rubbed shoulders on the pages of ‘Strange Stories’ with altogether more curious narratives of hoaxers and forgers. The German Otto Wacher (WoW252) was imprisoned in the 1920s for forging Van Goghs. Except that some experts pointed out that Wacher couldn’t paint, and these experts came to the conclusion that Wacher had obtained ‘real’ Van Goths which the artist had painted in a new, later style.

“Complex fraud” doesn’t get much more complex than Alves Reis, the hoaxer featured in WoW53’s Strange Stories. How nine- and ten-year olds were supposed to be able to follow even a summary of Reis’ byzantine plot is unclear. Reis faked an authorization to banknote printers Waterlow in London to print a special issue of £1 million-worth of high-denomination Portuguese escudo notes for him, for some reason overprinted with the word ‘Angola’ – then a Portuguese colony – and introduced these notes into circulation in Portugal. He started his own bank and was doing well until people spotted there were “too many” such notes circulated. After riots, bank runs and all the governors of the Bank of Portugal being imprisoned, Reis himself got 20 years in 1925.

Then there was archaeology, ‘Strange Stories’ style – WoW21 asked “Who were the yellow long armed giants?” When the Dutch “discovered” Easter Island in 1722, this was how the islanders described to them the builders of the statutes, whom they referred to only as “the others.” Then there was the discovery of lost Nestorian scriptures found shredded in a mouse’s nest in a cave in Mongolia in the 1940s, as the Communists closed in. WoW163 covered 13ft-tall human skeleton discovered in Peru and buildings apparently constructed by giants in Mexico. (And see FT256;58-59 for ‘Strange Stories’ take on the archaeological mystery of ‘Dorak Treasure’ allegedly dug up from Turkey, only to then disappear, if it had ever existed.)

The perpetrators featured in FT’s own occasional round-ups from the annals of inept crime would have been put to shame by ‘Strange Stories’ spectacular narratives of criminal derring-do. These included in WoW45 James Andrews, a Union officer in the American Civil War, who specialised in stealing trains from behind Confederate lines. WoW 206 covered Robert Redru, the French detective who (allegedly) shopped himself after discovering that he himself was a somnambulist murderer, and was sentenced to spending nights in prison until his death in 1939. American gangster Robert James Pitts, (WoW 235,) had his fingerprints surgically removed, only to find that after fingerprinting following a random police stop in Texas, the smudges where there should have been fingerprints fingered him more than ever, making him "the most marked man in America."

Stranger still was the obsessive Vicenzo Perrugia, (WoW100) who somehow seems to have stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, then tipped off a dealer that he had it in his ‘dingy flat in Florence’, from where it recovered two years later, leading to speculation that Perrugia had been paid by the Italian government for this odd art heist. In the dashing highwaymen (and women) department, there was (in WoW48) celebrated Edinburgh ‘female highwayman’ Grizel Cochran, who reached her criminal peak in 1685, while another Edinburgh resident who made it into Strange Stories’ annals of extraordinary crime was William Brodie, mild-mannered Edinburgh city councillor by day, highwayman by night, and apparently the inspiration for Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Look & Learn 698)

Eccentrics – especially Irish eccentrics – were another favourite theme to which ‘Strange Stories’ often returned. But most ‘Strange Stories’ featured eccentrics paled into insignificance compared to amateur mountaineer Maurice Wilson, who froze to death after deliberately crashing a plane into the slopes of Mount Everest as part of his solo attempt to climb it in 1933 (WoW99). Other differently-lifestyled ‘Strange Stories’ subjects were (WoW 72) Rudolph Raspe, creator of Baron Munchausen, and himself almost as weird. A scholar, geologist, compulsive fraudster and thief, Raspe fled from Germany to Cornwall, where he worked in a tin mine assay office before fleeing again to Ireland. Then there was Irishwoman Dervla Murphy’s, showcased in WoW 198. She is best known for her solo 1963 cycle ride to India, whose incidents included being stoned during a religious riot and held by Afghan bandits. Also definitely on the unusual end of the spectrum was tall, blonde Jack Metcalf, (WoW67), point-to-point racing champion of Knaresborough, horse taxi driver in Harrogate, captured by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army in 1745 whilst fiddling for the English at the battle of Culloden, surveyor and builder of the Harrogate to Boroughbridge road, and blind since the age of six.

And what would a fortean series for kids be without the curses? As well as the curse of hallucinated skull-faced doctors in Point Saint Esprit (see above), there was Valentino’s silver ring, (WoW10) which is now somewhere in a bank vault having brought misfortune to so many of its wearers. There was Archduke Ferdinand of Austria’s ‘cursed’ car (WoW 98) that killed many of its owners, and in which the Archduke was being driven for his fateful visit to Sarejevo in August, 1914. And there was the suspiciously unlucky “cursed” Hispania 9th Legion of the Roman Army (WoW25) almost wiped out by ‘Boudicea’ (Boudicca) in her rebellion of 79AD, and which then disappeared North of Hadrian’s wall 20 years later. The legion’s eagle standard top – minus its wings – was found discreetly buried under a villa in Slichester.

Although WoW styled itself as ‘the magazine for every boy and girl’, it was rather skewed in favour of ‘Strange Stories’ from the annals of war, especially World War Two, which still loomed large in the playgrounds of the 1970s. Once such military-flavoured ‘Strange Stories’ entry was that of Arthur Sandeman, who – inspired by The Charge of the Light Brigade – joined the Central Indian Light Horse in the 1930s. When this unit mechanised in 1941, he transferred to the last remaining front-line British unit that actually still used horses, the Burma Frontier Force, and fulfilled his destiny with a last cavalry charge "into the jaws of death" that ended in massacre in defence of Taungoo airfield against the Japanese (WoW 241). Other unusual soldiers in the war against Japan were the ‘Hughies’, the Hong Kong Volunteer Corps, whose spirited defence of Hong Kong's power station against the Japanese was commemorated in WoW253’s Strange Stories. Many of the ‘Hughies’ were in their seventies, some were Boer War veterans.

Other curious Strange Stories episodes from the annals of military history were (WoW175) the USS Arakwe. The ship was patrolling the coast of South America just after the American Civil War, when it was lifted by a tidal wave two miles inland into Chilean soil. The Arakwe had run out of cannonballs so its crew fought off Chilean looters by firing hard cheeses from its cannons. (Or did it? The incident has the feel of one of those tall tales made up in the great tradition of 19th century American local newspapers to fill up space when not much was happening, and an internet search didn’t turn up any ships of that name. Can any FT readers shed light on this?)

Another of the “Strange Stories” in time of war was France’s “Black Legion” of 1,500 convicts in captured British uniforms dyed black (they actually turned out a rather nasty brown, on account of the base red colour of the British red coats they had used). They were sent by a desperate revolutionary French government in 1797 to cause panic in Britain. Commanded by Colonel William Tate, a 70-year old exiled American mercenary, they got blind drunk on their voyage to Britain and were depicted in an illustration in WoW24, on the deck of one of their warships waving bottles in the air. Landing at Fishguard, South Wales, they were beaten back by one Jemima Nichols with her pitchfork, and surrendered to the militia, mistaking the Welsh ladies’ tall hats for the headgear of the brigade of guards.

In the back of the car on the morning school run, there would be intense rivalry between WoW subscribers and those kids who took IPC’s larger format, better-seling, brasher sister publication Look & Learn, which tended to have more illustrations of speedboats and Spitfires, returned to the ‘Great Trek’ of the South African Boers with suspicious frequency, and had the beautifully illustrated Roman-Empire-in-a-parallel universe science fantasy strip ‘The Trigan Empire’, but crucially didn’t have anything like ‘Strange Stories.’ We WoW readers pitied the Look & Learn readers, who didn’t believe my reports about 13-foot high skeletons of Mexican giants, which must have been true, after all, I read it in ‘Strange Stories’. The Look & Learn readers probably ended up growing up more normal as a result. The joke was on us WoW readers, however. As we will see in Part Two next issue, Look and Learn swallowed up WoW and (as it did to seven other publications during its 20-year-reign) and eventually brought to an end the golden age of our beloved “Strange Stories.”

Strange Stories in a World of Wonder - part 2

FURTHER READING

26pigs.com World of Wonder bibliography


The Bumper Book of Look and Learn, selected by Stephen Pickles, Century/Random House, London, 2007

World of Wonder is held in the British Library serials collection, shelf mark P.993/58. The Fortean Times office holds a complete bound set of World of Wonder.

Update (2025): The bound copies of World of Wonder and Look and Learn featuring Strange Stories are now held at the Charles Fort Institute, their contact details are on their homepage.

Strange Stories in a World of Wonder part 2

As self-defined prophet and former newsreader Jeron Criswell King, aka The Amazing Criswell, notes in his bizarre prologue to the 1959 film Plan 9 From Outer Space, “ you are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable, that is why you are here.” For many forteans, there was a catalyst in their early life that first kindled their interest in the world of strange phenomena, and set them on the road to a preoccupation with high strangeness. Asked what that formative experience was, a number of today’s forteans now in their forties – at least those who grew up in the UK, Holland or the Commonwealth – would answer that what first got them hooked on “the mysterious, the unexplainable” was reading World of Wonder’s “Strange Stories”.

World of Wonder (WoW) magazine appeared every Saturday – usually dropped through the letterbox by the paper boy – into many households in the first half of the 1970s. WoW dealt with science, history, geography, technology (especially Spitfires and the latest cutting edge developments in “the mighty transistor”). But by far its strongest section was its “Strange Stories” spot. “Strange Stories” presented the kids of the 1970s with a firm grounding all the usual fortean staples - the Marie Celeste, the “abominable snowman”, sasquatch, the Cardiff giant, Kasper Hauser, Indian wolf children, the “Devil’s footprints “of 1855 Devon, the hollow earth theories of John Clere Symmes and others, Spring-Heeled Jack, the man in the iron mask, the Oak Island money pit, James Churchwald and his alleged lost continent of Mu, the Tunguska explosion. (WoW 156 carried an illustration of alarmed Transiberian Railway passengers in Tsarist Russia period beards, stiff shirt collars and all, witnessing the explosion from afar,) Less well known mysteries that seems to have been forgotten about in the intervening 40 years were also given space in the pages of “Strange Stories”, (see, for example the “Strange Phenomena Involving U-Boats in WWI” below.)

World of Wonder was a slightly text-heavier spin off publication from its sister publication Look & Learn, founded in 1962 by Leonard Matthews, who had launched several children’s comics, and brought in some of the best of the comics illustrators to engage the kids with dynamic illustrations that would draw children in to history, geography and science. Both World of Wonder and Look & Learn had to do this while also somehow remaining acceptable to parents – a tall order, and probably the reason why there were so few appearance of any “Strange Stories” on World of Wonder’s cover.

World of Wonder shared several illustrators with Look & Learn. British childern’s comics expert Steve Holland recalls that World of Wonder came into being in an attempt to produce a format that – it was hoped - could be easily translated to be sold on to publishers in Germany, France, Italy, Holland and Yugoslavia. In the event, there was only an English version – under the editorship of Robert Bartholomew - and a Dutch language edition. After a five-year run, the publisher that bought the Dutch edition of World of Wonder from publishers IPC decided to go it alone, commissioning their own material. As WoW had less of a pedigree than its slightly brasher cousin Look & Learn, publisher Fleetway (a division of IPC) absorbed WoW into a new look L&L with some extra pages, and Strange Stories continued in L&L, for a while, at least…

It was the illustrations that “Strange Stories” – and its occasionally fortean sister series “Talking Point” - particularly excelled at, and which made the biggest impression on its pre-teen audience. (See Part One for more on the usually uncredited WoW artists.) “There Are Giant Serpents in Every Sea” declared WoW 26, depicting a collosal long-necked plesiosaur swimming in bright green seas, dwarfing a sailing ship of the Olden Days, as well as one sea serpent spotted by startled straw-boater and blazer wearing holidaymaker and his wife at the northern English seaside reasort of Skegness in 1966. The fearsome Serrano Cay giant octopus featured on the cover of WoW 179, menacing two Mexican lighthouse keepers when it suddenly came out of the depths in 1905. According to “Strange Stories”, the octopus killed one keeper, Diego Alvez, before his colleague Ferdinand Moxo eventually managed to shoot it with a rifle. Another giant octopus, spotted from the French sailing frigate Alecton. (WoW 76) was depicted in brilliant pinks. There’s also the narrative of James Bartley, (WoW 58), a British harpooner swallowed by a sperm whale off the Falklands in 1891, and cut out alive from its corpse the next day (after his funeral). His hair was bleached by “gastric juices” and he went briefly insane, before he resumed harpooning duties. WoW58 filled a whole page with the gaping mouth of the whale closing in on helpless man overboard Bartley, with the large headline SWALLOWED BY A WHALE.

Other “Strange Stories” from the annals of natural history and cryptozoology included (WoW 35) a decade of disbelief at Sir Harry Johnston discovery of the okapi in the forests of the Congo until he finally came up with photos of it in 1909. The Parisian pet derby of 1909 (WoW 78) was a race involving the exotic pets of decadent fin de siecle Parisian aristocratic ladies – contestants included an Egyptian dung beetle, a goose, the Princess of Lucinge’s lion cub, a tortoise and a monkey, with some prize pets depicted held on leads by the Parisian aristocratic ladies with girly bows round their necks. After a short race which descended into mayhem as runners tried to stangle or eat each other, Madamoiselle Yturbe’s monkey won. The illustrator got a little carried away with some of the French gentlemen’s top hats, some of which obscured part of the text.
Stranger still was WoW’s short and wilfully obscure ‘Birds that cannot fly” series, which covered (WoW 224) the “Emu War” of 1932, in which the Australian Heavy Battery artillery unit of the Australian Army attempts to exterminate a huge, crop-devastating flock of emus was outwitted by the nimble birds running around in all directions. An emu-proof fence eventually proved slightly more effective.
Incredible journeys were favourite theme of Strange Stories. In WoW 141, Apsley Cherry Gerrard made the worst journey in the world across Antarctica over five weeks in 1991 to collect three penguin eggs. Mark Poltorctzky, aged 13, walked 700 miles across Russia in 1714, surviving trees falling on him and exposure in the snow to reach Moscow ands take up hiw post as an Imperial Choirboy in Moscow in WoW 146. The coffin containing the body of actor Charles Coughlan, (WoW 135) who was buried in a coastal cemetery in Galveston, Texas in 1899, was swept out to sea in a hurricane the following year to finally come ashore on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, close to his birthplace on 15 September 1927. Coughlan’s coffin had made a journey in which it averaged 65-80 miles a day.

Former Italian diplomat Felice Benuzzi and two of his compatriots and fellow prisoners of war interned in Camp 354 in Kenya also made a “Strange Stories”-style incredible journey in WoW 92, escaping to undergo an 18-day ordeal ending in a climb to the summit of Mount Kenya, where they planted a homemade Italian flag, then returned to 354 to give themselves up. They were apparently bored in captivitiy. But my favourite incredible journey story has to be the one from WoW 130 of the extraordinary hardships endured by Frenchman Rene Caille, who made a year-long odyssey in 1828, disguised as a runaway Egyptian slave, to become the first white man to gaze on the legendary splendours of the forbidden city of Timbuktu, thereby claiming a 10,000 franc prize. After many life-threatening episodes, he discovered that Timbuktu had become a complete dump.

For those who found school history lessons boring, there was plenty of Strange Stories of historical revisionism. WoW7 speculated on the possible survival of Louis XVII, crown prince who went missing aged nine in the French Revolution. WoW2 asked, was Napoleon poisoned? WoW 108 asked, was American school teacher of French origin Philip Ney really Napoleon’s Marshall Ney, who had emigrated after surviving a firing squad? Look & Learn (L&L) 692 asked whether Joan or Arc had survived, having not been burnt at the stake after all. WoW 33 presented claims that Guy Fawkes was a patsy, an innocent tenant of the Westminster cellars, caught in an anti-Catholic plot to convince James I that ‘Papists’ were trying to blow him up. WoW 46 offered alternative authors of Shakespeare’s plays, while - somewhat more plausibly – WoW 57 suggested that missing American aviatrix Amelia Earhart was a spy who fell into Japanese hands. “Strange Stories” was an advocate of the teaching of what we would now call “critical thinking”. Always gently sceptical, “Strange Stories” gave these revisionist history theories the time of day but suggested to impressionable young minds that such theses should be taken with at least a healthy pinch of salt

“Strange Stories” seemed to have a particular affection for chancers and adventurers who became living gods. These included penniless Irish sailor David O’Keefe, shipwrecked on the South Sea island of Yap, who was welcomed as its king, who displaced the German “agent” active on the island at the time, who built a trading fleet to export coconut kernels direct to Hong Kong, who saw of pirates and Dutch colonists, before a German battleship and troops finally forced him into exile in 1901. “Lawyer Lebeau” tricked onto a prison ship to New France (as the French possessions in Canada were then known), where he was captured by the Iroquois. He persuaded the Iroquois nation he was a messenger from the Great Spirit, convincing them his law degree was a letter from the King of France giving him authority to flatten mountains. The Iroquois eventually lost interest in him (WoW 257). And there was also James Brooke, who “accidentally” became king of the headhunters in 1920s Borneo. Not quite a living god, but certainly a Venezuelan national hero after his work as a “hero doctor” fighting a plague epidemic in Peru was Pierre Bougrat, whose Strange Story featured in WoW 158. Whilst esteemed in Latin America, right up to his death in 1962, Bouget was regarded by the French has an fugitive convicted murderer, having escaped to South America from France’s Devil’s Island penal colony on a small boat with five other convicts.

Are there patterns that can be discerned in high strangeness? There are certainly themes that keep coming up in “Strange Stories.” As we saw in Part One, hoaxers, spectacular criminals and spectacular crimes, hoaxes, amazing scams, archaeological mysteries, extreme eccentrics, curses were popular Strange Stories subjects, as were unusual episodes from the annals of war. Cryptozoology was also a Strange Stories favourite, lending itself as it did to spectacular illustration possibilities. Then there were Strange Stories clusters of incredible journeys filled with hardship, historical revisionism and men who accidentally became prophets or living gods (see text). Timeslips - especially Parisian timeslips - were another theme, including the sighting by two British tourists at Versailles in 1901 of women in the clothing of Marie Antoinette’s time. Then there was the apparent timeslip involving the disappearance – along with all records of her having been there - of a Mrs Randolph staying in room 343 of the Carillon Hotel, Paris with her daughter during the 1899 Paris Exhibition. The ever sceptical “Strange Stories” told its young readers that there was a likely rational explanation – Mrs Randolph disappearing from history, right down to her entry in the hotel register, was actually down to her being discreetly spirited away to hospital by a Parisian health authoritiy conspiracy, they being eager to avoid panic in the streets after being alerted that she had caught “the plague” in India.

But for a bizarrely obscure fortean sub-genres, nothing comes close to Strange Stories apparent pre-occupation with strange phenomena associated with German U-Boats of the First World War. Strange Stories catalogued four such cases, which you don’t read so often about in fortean circles these days.

One “Strange Stories” round-up of maritime mysteries featured U-Boat U236 which survived a mid-Atlantic torpedoing from a British sub in 1917 after one of these malfunctioned and jumped over U236. A year later, another (unnumbered) U-Boat fired a torpedo at the British Q ship Stock Force, only for the torpedo to slew back and blow the U-Boat up. WoW39 described how the U-Boat UB-65, reportedly haunted by the ghost of a dead officer, was beset by inexplicable disasters, and was spotted floating apparently abandoned by an American sub in 1918. (“Strange Stories”, perhaps wisely in view of possible parental surveillance, generally steered clear of ghosts.) WoW 25’s “Talking Point”, alongside better-known sea serpent sightings, had a dramatic illustration of Captain Georg van Forstner, on the bridge of yet another World War One U-Boat, this one while on active service in 1915, witnessing a strange, 60 ft- long “crocodile-like creature” – which in WoW’s illustration more closely resembles a finned Jurassic mososaur - being blown out of the sea and into the air by the boiler of explosion of a sinking British steamer that he’d recently torpedoed.

Normally sceptical WoW refrained from presenting a perfectly logical explanation for the “crocodile-like creature,” but the misidentified, fleetingly-glimpsed thrown up floating decaying corpse of a basking shark of whale as it shot past Captain Forstner before plunging beneath the waves does spring immediately to mind.

Some “Strange Stories” weren’t all that strange at all – Cardinal Wolsey’s rise to power, the invention of jeans by Levi Strauss, Napoleonic prisoners of war making intricate models out of bone – and the only mystery is what they were doing in Strange Stories at all. Just as newspapers have the odd “slow news day,” Strange Stories had the odd low strangeness week in which presumably already commissioned historical features – such as the dramatic yet not particularly strange rescue of Mussolini by powered glider, or the noteworthy but not exactly eyebrow-raised 1944 Operation Valkyrie plot against Hilter - had to be hastily rebranded under a dubious Strange Stories masthead. There is, after all, only so much strangeness out there suitable for a child audience, and “Strange Stories” had to find enough strangness to fill at least a full page every week for over five years.

And indeed, the “Strange Stories” strangeness supply did eventually run dry. WoW was taken over by Look & Learn in February 1975, with only a week’s warning to subscribers. While “Strange Stories” was among the limited number of WoW spots that made the transition, other regular WoW spots finished abruptly in mid-series, when WoW 258 was suddenly followed by L&L 686. L&L is best known for the sci-fi strip The Trigan Empire, which lost is excellent illustrator Don Lawrence soon afterwards and went downhill from there. The first L&L “Strange Stories” was the Turin Shroud, which had already been done as a Strange Story a couple of years before back in the old WoW glory days. “Strange Stories” went into decline in its L&L ownership, it ceased to be a weekly event and became more and more occasional, until it finally stuttered out of existence and faded from view forever around L&L 649 in 1975. The short fortean series “Haunted Britain” (featuring Geoff the talking mongoose and Drury Lane’s numerous theatre ghosts, followed, but L&L was a less nurturing environment for forteana than WoW, and it lived on only in the memories of then young forteans. (And not just the fortysomethings – at least one thirtysometing Strange Stories fan on online blogs recall discovering the series after stumbling across a complete set of WoW back issues in a box in a friend’s attic. Look & Learn, having gobbled up WoW and several other kid’s “knowledge” weeklies – Treasure, Tell Me Why, Speed & Power – finally bit the dust in 1982 – killed off by, of all things, soaring paper prices.

Most “Strange Stories” were presented to a young audience in good faith, and if “Strange Stories” team felt a story was not grounded in some kind of fact, they said so. After all, the “Strange Stories” team would face the wrath of angry parents if they passed off fantasy as sort-of-possibly-fact to the kids. But in retrospect, it seems one or two “Strange Stories” that were in fact groundless tall stories may have slipped through the net, probably copied from other secondary sources that had been unwittingly duped and hoaxed.

In this category of ‘probably made up’ was the alleged Parisian pet derby related above. Did the Parisian aristocratic ladies’ exotic pets derby (WoW 78) really happen?

And, finally… there is the most intriguing Strange Story of the Chinese invasion of Monterrey, California in the 1870s (WoW 228). According to Strange Stories, Imperial China under the Qing Dynasty sent a fleet of junks on a punitive expedition to America, in revenge for the way America cruelly exploited and humiliated Chinese immigrant workers in that country. So hopelessly antiquated was the Chinese invasion fleet that its navigators ran into trouble after underestimating the breadth of the Pacific Ocean, and headed for Monterrey, which had earlier briefly been the state capital of California, but not anymore. On landing, the Chinese invaders could not get the good citizens of Monterrey to understand that they’d come to punish them, and the locals seized them and carried them shoulder-high through the streets in welcome, as depicted by the “Strange Stories” illustrator. The invaders quickly assimilated into the immigrant Chinese community of Monterrey.

The brutal Qing dynasty certainly couldn’t give much of a damn what happened to the hordes of peasants, who were risking life and limb to flee the feudal miseries of China and its rulers in the first place. Qing China’s formidable foreign ministry, the Zongli Yamen, had been in operation since 1861, and its intelligence-gathering section woul have been informed of the correct distance across the Pacific. Any fleet of war junks China could have raised would probably have been blasted out of the sea by the numerous European, American or Japanese fleets that had taken up residence in the “Treaty Ports” they had carved out along China’s coast. And the internet is suspiciously silent on the subject of any alleged 1870s Chinese invasion of Monterrey, California. This begins to look awfully like one of the small town19th century American newspaper tall tales made up to fill space, or a faintly racist satire on contemporary Chinese immigration. Can any FT readers enlighten us on whether this particularly Strange Story really is made up?

As a nine-year old I of course believed every word of it, I had read it in the totally groovy coll fab Strange Stories, after all, so it must be true. I even vigorously defended the veracity of Strange Stories-sourced evidence, 13ft-high Mexican giant skeletons and all, against contemptible doubting Look & Learn readers in the back of the car on the school run.

While there have been compilations of Look & Learn published since its demise, back issues of World of Wonder and “Strange Stories” seem to command little value or interest – so little interest in fact, that I wasn’t even able to find out from ebay how much I could get for the complete bound volumes of WoW that earlier this year were still knocking around the home I grew up in. My mum wanted to throw them out, so I donated them to the offices of Fortean Times for safekeeping – a suitable home for what Charles Fort called “damned data.”

SOURCES

World of Wonder bibliography http://www.26pigs.com/world-wonder/bibliography.html

26pigs.com – reminiscences on World of Wonder http://www.26pigs.com/world-wonder/index.html

Official Look & Learn website http://www.lookandlearn.com

The Bumper Book of Look and Learn, selected by Stephen Pickles, Century/Random House, London, 2007

World of Wonder is held in the British Library serials collection (http://catalogue.bl.uk), shelf mark P.993/58. The Fortean Times office holds a complete bound set of World of Wonder.

Update (2025): The bound copies of World of Wonder and Look and Learn featuring Strange Stories are now held at the Charles Fort Institute, their contact details are on their homepage.

Strange Stories in a World of Wonder

The 'Strange Stories' series, which ran for the first half of the 1970s in World of Wonder magazine ('the magazine for every boy and girl') was very influential in getting some of today's forteans interested in Spring Heeled Jack, Kasper Hauser, yetis and that sort of thing. Part one of my feature on 'Strange Stories' from the January 2011 issue of Fortean Times is now availabe here - as a limited a sneak preview designed to entice you into buying the online paywall edition of the magazine.

As soon as the 'first British serial' has expired, the feature will be on this blog in full.
















(Cover image understood to be 'fair dealing' for the purposes of a critique or review under the 1988 Copyright Act)

Italian translation of 'Trots in Space'

I've just spotted this Italian translation of my Fortean Times 'Trots in Space' feature on the Posadists - a UFO cult who at one point believed that flying saucers were evidence of advanced Socialist civilizations on other planets. I'm following up to find whether this work comes under the syndication deal I signed with Fortean Times way back in 2003, or whether it's unauthorised, in which case, the authors owe me money!

Update: 29 March 2020. I made a deal with the author of the Italian translation, I would take no action if he would let have unlimited use his translation. The Italian translation's since disappeared from the internet. The original English version is on archive.org, after the forestry charity to which former Fortean Times owner Felix Dennis had left his publishing empire decided they didn't want to
bother with fripperies like a back catalogue of articles on their websites anymore.

I will eventually put "Trots in Space" on this blog, footnotes and all, with never-before seen photos, links and updates.

Freedom of Information – think like a bureaucrat

Maurice Frankel, who campaigned for many years to bring about the Freedom of Information Act, and Mark Watts of the FOIA Centre, examined the Freedom of Information Act at a recent NUJ London Freelance Branch meeting. The secret of using the Act, says Maurice is not to think like a journalist but to do something much harder, to think like a bureaucrat. Read the report here.

Report urges Met to facilitate fair reporting

The recent Metropolitan Police Authority Civil Liberties Panel report in the aftermath of the April 2009 London G20 protests has many welcome recommendations. Its conclusions on police relations with journalists include the advice that "If containment is used, officers should be required to record when they prevent journalists from crossing containment cordons and the reasons for doing so". And the Panel wants "a more clearly auditable trail" kept by police of such incidents. The MPA also – after a minimal amount of research – was able to knock on the head suggestions often heard from front line coppers that Press Cards “might be forgeries”. There’s more here.