Were our ancestors water apes, hairless bipeds that lived an aquatic existence? Did Canadian inventor Troy Hurtubise really build an “Angel Light” that makes any object transparent when bathed in its glow? How come fish sometimes fall from the sky? Can pets actually predict earthquakes? These are some of the questions that scientists throughout history have seriously examined. For two years, Mark Pilkington, the fantastic Fortean behind Strange Attractor Journal, explored these weird experiments, scientific failures, and downright kookiness in his column Far Out that appeared in The Guardian’s science supplement. Now, he’s compiled those columns into a fantastic small book, Far Out: 101 Strange Tales from Science’s Outer Edge. Each short entry tackles a single anomalous report or invention from science’s cabinet of curiosity: electronic voice phenomena, The Cerebrophone, the memory of water, Skinner’s Box, plant sentience, just to name a few. My only complaint about this terrific text is that it’s not much, much longer.
