UFOs? Raining fish? If it’s strange, it’s in the Fortean Times, a signpost that says . . : Welcome to Planet Weird

LONDON —  Good news for those who feel the world isn’t weird enough for them. It’s getting weirder. So say the experts at the Fortean Times, the magazine of strange phenomena, which has published a world strangeness index. Life on Earth was 3.5% weirder in 1993 than in 1992, according to their calculations.

Among thousands of bizarre events reported in 1993:

* Sixty lambs were found dead in a field in Germany after they were attacked by hundreds of crows.

* A policeman was rained on by two-inch-long fish in a remote area of northwest Australia.

* The apparition of an orange-red man-shaped object “filled the sky” over Shanghai for 20 minutes, then emitted red flashes, became mushroom-shaped and shrank from view.

Apparitions, bizarre deaths, mass hysteria, spontaneous human combustion--this is the world of the London-based Fortean Times. Although for its first 20 years it was available in the United States only by mail, it is now going on sale at some bookstores and newsstands.

To compute their Strangeness Index, the editors divided the world of weird phenomena into 34 categories and assigned points based on the increase or decrease of reported instances.

This totally unscientific--but exceedingly compelling--survey determined that reports of weird weather, strange deaths, animal swarmings and human ineptitude were up. Down were UFOs, crop circles and spontaneous human combustions. Poltergeists, water monsters and mass animal deaths remained static.

“We couldn’t tell whether there was actually an increase in phenomena or an increase in reportings,” co-editor Bob Rickard says. But he likes to think the list “could be useful in some sort of way.”

Although the magazine is primarily for entertainment, the editors believe it serves an important function by pointing out that the world is full of inexplicable events.

“The more we learn about the world, the more mysterious phenomena there are to be found,” Rickard says. “At one point it was thought science would explain the world and everything would be understood. I think it’s part and parcel of modern cynicism now that nobody believes that.”

Named after Charles Fort, a New York philosopher who published four volumes of strange phenomena between 1919 and 1932, the bimonthly magazine has a circulation of 17,000 and growing.

The current issue contains pages and pages of odd occurrences, such as the case of the Englishwoman whose dog always barks just before her phone rings and the Iranian man who bought a carp from a fish shop, placed it in his freezer for a week and then watched it jump back to life when he poured hot water on it.

Could this stuff be true?

A phone company technician discovered that the English dog was chained to a telephone ground post and was receiving a 90-volt shock with each incoming call.

No word yet on the fish, though.

*

Rickard and co-editor Paul Sieveking relish their role as purveyors of the odd and inexplicable.

“We’re kind of guerrilla scientists,” Rickard says. “We’re interested in those rugs we can pull out from under some people’s feet.”

What amazes him is not unexplained phenomena, but the established scientific community’s apparent lack of interest in seeking explanations for them.

“Science reacts like an organism,” he says. “It closes ranks; it sends its antibodies, its assassins. The first confrontation with a new fact or a new theory is seen as a threat to the status quo.”

That must be the reason we still don’t understand why it rains fish or frogs.

“I’ve actually interviewed people who put up their umbrellas and had them bouncing off,” Rickard says. “There’s no doubt they’re falling from somewhere. You get falls of thousands of fish in a contained space.”

John Maddox, editor of the British science journal Nature, is not familiar with the phenomenon of raining frogs. But he believes it could be possible for a strong enough wind, like a tornado, to lift a body of water and deposit it elsewhere.

On the question of whether scientists are ignoring strange phenomena, however, Maddox says, “the scientific community has its hands full with things that will provide tangible benefits” and that “it would be silly” to spend time investigating matters that were not well-grounded in observation or hypothesis.

Rickard, who studied product design, has no formal scientific training, while Sieveking studied archeology and anthropology but never worked in either field.

*

Among the odd phenomena the scientific Establishment apparently has left for amateurs to investigate is the grisly world of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC).

“It’s almost like a demonic visitation in that somebody, for no apparent reason, can suddenly burst into flames and in seconds be reduced to a pile of greasy ashes,” Rickard says matter-of-factly.

In its current issue, the Fortean Times examines the case of a Welshman whose fiery death in 1980 carried all the hallmarks of SHC. As in other cases, his body was reduced to ashes, but virtually nothing else was burned.

Police Officer John Heymer, who investigated the case, told the magazine he was shocked when the inquest into the death gave no mention of its unusual aspects.

Forensic scientists from a government laboratory studied the incident and declared it completely explicable. But their explanation, the officer says, meant the victim would have had to fall headfirst into his fireplace and then sit back calmly in his easy chair while flames burned down from his head to his knees--without anything else catching fire.

“You’d think the medical profession would be rushing to study it,” Rickard says.

It’s not easy keeping up with such a strange planet. Rickard does it from an office in his house, where he is surrounded by shelves and tables overflowing with books, periodicals, newspaper clippings and documents precariously like an avalanche waiting to happen.

“We have recorded the deaths of a few people crushed under mountains of books falling on them,” he says, acknowledging his teetering data base.

To assemble each issue of the Fortean Times, Rickard and Sieveking rely on correspondence from readers around the world.

*

Los Angeles would seem to be one of the strangest places on Earth, based on the number of bizarre reports emanating from there, Rickard says. But he’s not sure if it’s “really weird because of some intrinsic nature or whether it’s because of media reporting.”

Still, the Fortean editors are gathering material on the Riverside woman whose body was said to have emitted fumes that sickened emergency room staffers.

As for Fortean’s readers, they are overwhelmingly men between the ages of 20 and 44, and just more than half say they have experienced something inexplicable, according to a readership survey. Only 6.1% think that most of the subject matter is nonsense.

Some of it probably is nonsense, Rickard freely admits. Still, he says, there is much to learn about why myths develop and propagate. “I don’t think the general public is more rational than they were in the Middle Ages,” he says.

Rickard says he would never create or knowingly perpetuate a hoax. But beyond that, he’d like his readers to make up their own minds about what he publishes.

“We like to see ourselves, in a way, like wine experts. We taste the stuff, we sort of swill it around our minds and then sort of spit it out. We don’t swallow everything.”