For four decades up to 2019, Paul Sieveking selected and wrote up weird news stories for Fortean Times. Here are some of his favourite news reports from the first five years of the 21st century. For his selection of stories reported up to the turn of the millennium, see FT390:40-45, 394:46-49.
ANARCHIST MACAW
Barney, a five-year-old Macaw, once belonged to a retired truck driver who emigrated to Spain in 2002, after which he was acquired by the Warwickshire Animal Sanctuary in Nuneaton. His vivid blue and gold plumage and habit of saying “Thank you, big boy,” when given a digestive biscuit appealed to visitors. However, he was very fond of saying “bollocks!” and when a civic party came on tour, and he spotted the mayor’s chain and a woman vicar’s dog collar, his anarchist tendencies were revealed. “Fuck off!” he told the mayor before turning to the vicar: “You can fuck off too!” Also present were two policemen, to whom Barney said: “And you can fuck off, you wankers!” The pillars of the community took it in good part. The sanctuary’s owner, Geoff Grewcock, was attempting to reform Barney by keeping him alone in a special cage listening to Radio 4. “At night he likes to sit on my shoulder and watch documentaries and the news as well,” he said, “so hopefully his vocabulary should become cleaner.” Guardian, Metro, 27 July 2005. FT207:20
TALKING FISH
The story goes that at 4pm on 28 January 2003, Luis Nivelo – an Ecuadorean immigrant working as a fish-cutter at the Fish Market in New Square, New York, about 30 miles (48km) northwest of Manhattan – lifted a live 20lb (9kg) carp out of a box of iced-down fish and was about to club it in the head when it said something unintelligible. In shock, he fell among the slimy wooden packing crates that covered the floor. Then he ran into the front of the store screaming, “The fish is talking!” and pulled Zalmen Rosen away from the phone. Mr Rosen, whose family owned the fish shop, was a member of the Skver sect of Hasidim. When he approached the fish he heard it speaking in Hebrew. “It said ‘Tzaruch shemirah’ and ‘Hasof bah’, which essentially means that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is near,” he said. The fish commanded him to pray and to study the Torah and identified itself as the soul of a childless Canadian Hasid who had died a year earlier, identified by local gossips as Moshe Yehuda Geshtetener, who had come back to Earth to perform tikkun (healing). Geshtetener often bought carp at the shop for the Sabbath meals of p
