The time since the last one had been incalculable, the logistic difficulties seemed insurmountable and it was a bit on the rainy side, but we did it! Yes, the 12th (count ’em) Fortean Times UnConvention took place at the University of Westminster over the weekend of 1–2 November, to the edification and bedazzlement of all who attended.

Well perhaps that was just me, but by 5pm on the Sunday I was staggering slightly from an overload of ideas, images, arguments and coffee (not to mention fascinating period underwear courtesy of the final item on the programme.) I shouldn’t start at the end, but that tends to be the first point at which you see the weekend clearly, with the result that you immediately want to clamber into a time-loop and do the whole thing again, this time watching all the talks you missed, continuing the great conversations and possibly ingesting less caffeine.

The venue, new to us, offered the advant­age of proximity to Oxford Circus underground plus any number of designer coffee shops, though being a working university it also provided a canteen with student-priced eatables. More significantly, it allowed for two strands of talks throughout the weekend, giving everyone the chance to make difficult decisions and sit down afterwards to compare them. Needless to say, a programme that managed to run 12 talks each day didn’t leave much time for socialising, and for the hard-core fortean, doing one thing inevitably meant not doing another. Still, complaints of too much are preferable to the opposite, and the most popular talks did manage to fill both lecture rooms simultaneously (sometimes to overflowing).

The building was once the splendidly-named Polytechnic Young Men’s Christian Institute, Regent Street, the successor to the Royal Polytechnic where popular science was approached with an enticing degree of showmanship – an early Director was Pro­fessor John Pepper, inventor of the famous “Pepper’s Ghost” spectral stage effect. It was also the site of the first public film screening in Britain, when the Lumière Brothers demonstrated their cinematograph in 1896. Negotiating around it did engage some navigat­ional skills that might have been aided by a compass and a trail of breadcrumbs, but as compensation the wood-panelled Fyvie Hall lent a distinct period charm to the talks located there, coming complete with pictorial panels apparently depicting assorted high spots of British cultural history. It must be admitted, though, that the acoust­ics were better in the Old Cinema, which didn’t stop the Fyvie from hosting some of the liveliest debates.

And there were debates, which with luck may fuel future FT articles and Message Board discussions. Proceedings opened (if you weren’t seduced by the alluring notoriety of Spring-heeled Jack) with psychologist and former professional magician Richard Wiseman detailing his own rationalist investi­gations into things paranormal. This was an appropriate eye-opener, positing such vital questions as just how far can a fire-walker walk, with or without his/her protective bubble of mental energy? This set the tone for a programme of talks that re-assessed favourite fortean themes by intelligent contextualisation and introduced new areas of investigation via the detailed marshalling of documented information. Theo Paijmans uses Fort’s own methods, trawling through endless newspaper reports to put together an overview of the Woman in Black, an entity whose mythic aspects bear an uneasy relation­ship to the almost mundane sightings of her across time and location. Jan Bondeson, reliable as ever, was on top form with engagingly circumstantial accounts of multiple births, entombed toads and assorted animal rains.

Ghosts seem to be flickering back into fashion, and Gordon Rutter’s well-illustrated talk on spirit photography raised the issue of visual expectations and the role of the interpreter. Given all the tricks of which photography is capable, it was an act of faith that this medium would “pin down” some vital part of our ideas about the afterlife and render them objectively verifiable. And as Gordon demonstrated, photographs (or perhaps photographers) proceeded to do just that, provided the viewer wanted to believe. The role of the haunted was also explored in Alan Murdie’s talk “Scared to Death”, where it was only mildly disappointing to discover that, by and large, people aren’t (well, not by ghosts, anyway). In a neat crossover into Gordon’s theme, there was something desperately poignant about the photograph of an old London house whose window displayed a possible human phantasm but an unmistakeable ghostly curtain where no curtain was known to be.

For all the classic reasons of bad timing and looking in the other direction, I managed to miss most of the ufological presentations, but did catch Ian Simmons on extraterrestrial mythologies in modern music. There were issues bubbling below the surface here about the way certain tropes of science fiction have been used to forge cultural identities – most overtly in the case of Sun Ra, whose Afro-futurism blended Egypt­ian mythology with the musician’s own professed origins on Saturn. Audience questions were largely of the “Why didn’t you include so-and-so?” variety, suggesting that there are connections yet to be explored between popular music and the dissemination/adaptation of potent ideas about who might be out there and how this relates to us.

That intrepid fortean explorers might venture beyond the confines of the library is, of course, a conjecture that takes we armchair investigators into the realms of the strange-but-true – yet such things do happen. The expeditionary and the exotic are particularly well-suited to the format of the illustrated talk, with far more pictures than you could get into an article and commentaries fuelled by first-hand experience. Ivan Mackerle took us in search of the Golem of Prague and Siberia’s Valley of Death, while Richard Freeman went looking for the Russ­ian Wildman or Almasty. A core member of Devon’s Centre for Fortean Zoology, Richard always manages (thus far) to return from his trips with amazing tales of almost seeing something, finding traces that could practically be what he was looking for, eating and drinking things beyond his ken and falling over, both dangerously and often. This is just as it should be. Richard’s brand of ripping yarn provides an honest reminder that the journey may be valuable in ways beyond classifiable results and that the process of searching is always revealing. The flavour of his own experience is priceless, and he resists the temptation to shape his material to suit any preconceived theory. The Almasty emerged as a cultural construct, a flesh-and-blood creature and an eerie, liminal being existing on an edge where folklore meets the natural world. When Richard does come back from a trip carrying simple physical proof of some semi-mythical animal, it will almost be a disappointment.

And it wouldn’t be the UnCon without a good rant, which came courtesy of the CFZ (again) as embodied by Jon Downes, Woolfardisworthy’s own bearded sage. As usual, the CFZ constituted an unmissable presence at the weekend, and before his talk Jon’s minions were already distributing leaflets in which that august institution declared war on the limitations of the national curriculum and the loss of a sense of wonder in the world. It’s a brave and justifiable stand, though I must admit that I can’t see quite what they’re going to do about it. Jon’s talk was packed to the rafters, and as he stomped up and down like Devon’s answer to Godzilla, roaring periodically, taking pot shots at critics and art historians and banging his stick to emphasise every point, you could see why. It’s almost incidental that he gave an excellent account of how certain aspects of the Chupacabras myth could be demolished while others pointed to explanations, rational if unexpected, that were genuinely scary. The end of the talk was a plea for – er – the socially healing power of cryptozoology. I did have a few questions but, like many others, I knew I wouldn’t be able to shout sufficiently loudly to get them across.

The other session that seems (to judge by the Message Boards) to have generated strong feelings was a “conversation” between Peter Brookesmith and Rob Irving on the perennially dangerous topic of hoaxing. Alas, this was programmed against my own offering on (yet more) vampire imagery, this time mainly batty but with diversions into Wallachian war-lords and soft toys. I think I can safely say that the size of my bat was a source of wonder throughout the weekend, and that my slide of the human flea of Edinburgh was greatly appreciated. Also striking a note of unashamed entertainment was Professor Vanessa Toulmin, whose presentation on the “Speciality Acts” that brought the fortean into variety theatre could have gone on much longer, with a wealth of visual material that brought tears to our eyes for more reasons than one.

Closing the whole shebang was Kittie Klaw with her spiritualist-inspired burlesque show. There were songs, there were dances, there were delightful young women in remarkable underwear and there was a sense of fortean fun (plus a viable alternative in the form of a panel about the Alan Godfrey abduction case). It wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but gals in corsets will always light a few fuses. On a more memorial note, Ian Simmons was called upon to deliver an ad hoc tribute to the late Ken Campbell, who was fortean fun embodied and whose idiosyncratic approach to life will remain irreplaceable.

And yes, it was a good weekend, full of stuff, pith and matter. There were teething troubles with the venue and some good suggestions for improvement, but the most important thing is that UnCon lives and thrives and remains as bewilderingly multifarious as ever.