Author: Una McGovern (Ed.)
Publisher: Chambers
Price: £35.00
Isbn: 9780550102157

Defin­ing what we mean by the term dict­ion­ary is a relat­ively straight­forward matter; defin­ing what we mean by a term like ‘the unexp­lained’, rather less so. After all, we’re not talk­ing about a sub­ject area with agreed para­met­ers but a mass of fre­quent­ly contra­dict­ory data drawn from a wide vari­ety of sourc­es and pro­vok­ing, more often than not, vio­lent dis­agree­ment rather than happy con­sensus.

Editor Una McGovern and her team, then, should be con­grat­ul­ated for att­empt­ing to create a one-volume refer­ence work that casts its net across such vast, stormy seas of the improb­able and impond­er­able and spreads out the vari­eg­ated catch in an ord­ered manner.

Cruc­ially, that team in­spires con­fid­ence; read­ers of this mag­a­zine will be reass­ured to find a cert­ain Mr Rick­ard cred­ited as spec­ial­ist con­sult­ant and the likes of David V Barr­ett, Alan Murdie, Jenny Randl­es and Dr Karl Shuker listed as con­trib­ut­ors. The 1,250 ent­ries – and a large number of panels cov­er­ing major sub­jects and import­ant cases – are admir­ably bal­anced and succ­inct, and as up-to-date as poss­ible (so, you’ll find the rec­ently coined UAP here along with its more fam­il­iar, and more prob­lem­atic, forebear, UFO).

The diff­i­cult­ies inher­ent in the sub­ject matter are faced squarely. As Bob Rick­ard states in his pre­face: “Inev­it­ably, in such a wide-rang­ing forum, the vari­ety and qual­ity of inform­at­ion spans a full spect­rum, from deeply pers­onal (but ultim­ately unveri­fi­able) exp­eri­ences to the most rigor­ous of schol­arly re­search papers.” And it’s not just the inform­at­ion, but also the inter­pret­at­ive models app­lied to it – from ardent belief to hard-line scept­ic­ism – that have shaped pop­u­lar under­stand­ing of many phen­om­ena (scept­ics, of course, would have pro­duced a sign­if­ic­antly shorter book, having al­ready ex­plained away a good number of ent­ries to their own sat­is­fact­ion).

The ‘unexp­lained’ is also a cat­e­gory that inev­it­ably shifts over time, its bound­ar­ies pushed back by new know­ledge; where once the gor­illa might have feat­ured as a hairy crypt­id of doubt­ful habits, we now have Big­foot (whose grad­u­at­ion to the stand­ard zoo­log­ical refer­ence works seems less cert­ain). The Dict­ion­ary does a laud­able job of pro­vid­ing enough hist­ori­cal and sub­ject-spec­ific con­text that newbies will soon real­ise that most pop­u­lar myst­er­ies have been sub­ject to a pro­cess of con­stant­ly chang­ing inter­pret­at­ion; and, con­com­it­antly, that even while sci­ence might appear to have mapped – and thus shrunk – much of the undis­cov­ered coun­try, it’s a realm that has a habit of chang­ing its con­tours through tiny incre­ments of new and un­dreamed of strange­ness.

If the book has a prob­lem, it’s the unavoid­able one of sel­ect­ion. I checked for the first 10 pot­ent­ial entries that popped into my head – bi­loc­at­ion, Harry Price, crys­tal skulls, Bligh Bond, Valens­ole, Almas, hoaxes, Humpty Doo, Philip experi­ment, Hexham Heads – and got a cred­it­able hit rate of 60 per cent. This issue’s cover star, for example, was not­able by his ab­sence (though many of the sub­jects of his invest­ig­at­ions were repres­ented); where I’d ex­pected to find ‘Price, Harry’ I in­stead found ‘Pres­ley, Elvis Aron’. As the author of an art­icle on the King’s fort­ean as­pects (FT166:42–47), I can hardly be acc­used of unfair­ness in find­ing this a curi­ous state of aff­airs.

There are some decid­edly odd inclus­ions. Cert­ain relig­ious, myth­o­log­ical and sym­bolic ent­ries are surely cov­ered ade­quately else­where. Why, for example, does each of the 10 seph­ir­oth of the kabb­alah merit a sep­a­rate entry? Find­ing ‘Hod’ foll­owed by ‘Hog­boon’ (a mound-dwell­ing fairy in Orkney folk­lore, don’t you know?) may be part of the joy of brows­ing that any good dict­ion­ary should offer, but it also repres­ents a some­what jarr­ing coll­is­ion of myst­er­ies of quite diff­er­ent orders, and a re­minder that ‘the unexp­lained’ is at best a pretty fuzzy cat­e­gory.

My other main gripe is the lack of sources or fur­ther read­ing; again, this is prob­ably the result of space issues, but it’s still a shame. So, until we have an ever-evolv­ing fort­ean Wiki, this book is as close to an author­it­at­ive and aff­ord­able one-stop shop as you’re likely to find.