Charles Fort was a crank in the best sense of the word. Lovecraft and the X-files can't begin to compete with the spooky stuff he uncovered. In the early twentieth century he put together great quantities of exhaustively documented 'puzzling evidence' (in the words of David Byrne), data which science is unable or unwilling to explain. Forts' books gave me nightmares when I read them when I was seven. Strange items drop from the sky, bizarre artifacts turn up in unexpected places, stars violate the laws of astronomy, giant clouds blot out the moon and the sun trembles in the sky. Is the world inside out? Is it flat? Or maybe shaped like a giant spindle?
What does it all mean? He drops cryptic, breathless hints such as "I think we're property." and "I think that we're fished for. It may be that we're highly esteemed by super-epicures somewhere." Whatever you think about this information, you will at some point while reading Forts' books feel like the foundations of your reality are slipping slightly to the south...
Consider yourself warned!
EXCERPT
LANDS in the sky-
That they are nearby-
That they do not move.
I take for a principle that all being is the infinitely serial, and that whatever has been will, with differences of particulars, be again-
The last quarter of the fifteenth century--land to the west!
This first quarter of the twentieth century--we shall have revelations.
There will be data. There will be many. Behind this book, unpublished collectively, or held as constituting its reserve forces, there are other hundreds of data, but independently I take for a principle that all existence is a flux and a re-flux, by which periods of expansion follow periods of contraction; that few men can even think widely when times are narrow times, but that human constrictions cannot repress extensions of thoughts and lives and enterprise and dominion when times are wider times--so then that the pageantry of foreign coasts that was revealed behind blank horizons after the year 1492, can not be, in the course of development, the only astounding denial of seeming vacancy--that the spirit, or the animation, and the stimulations and the needs of the fifteenth century are all appearing again, and that requital may appear again-
Aftermath of war, as in the year 1492: demands for readjustments; crowded and restless populations, revolts against limitations, intolerable restrictions against emigrations. The young man is no longer urged, or is no longer much inclined, to go westward. He will, or must, go somewhere. If directions alone no longer invite him, he may hear invitation in dimensions. There are many persons, who have not investigated for themselves, who think that both poles of this earth have been discovered. There are too many women traveling luxuriously in "Darkest Africa." Eskimos of Disco, Greenland, are publishing a newspaper. There must be outlet, or there will be explosion-
Outlet and invitation and opportunity-
San Salvadors of the Sky--a Plymouth Rock that hangs in the heavens of Servia--a foreign coast from which storms have brought materials to the city of Birmingham, England.
Or the mentally freezing, or dying, will tighten their prohibitions, and the chill of their censorships will contract, to extinction, our lives, which, without sin, represent matter deprived of motion. Their ideal is Death, or approximate death, warmed over occasionally only enough to fringe with uniform, decorous icicles--from which there will be no escape, if, for the living and sinful and adventurous there be not San Salvadors somewhere else, a Plymouth Rock of reversed significance, coasts of sky-continents.
But every consciousness that we have of needs, and all hosts, departments, and sub-divisions of data that indicate the possible requital of needs are opposed--not by the orthodoxy of the common Puritans, but by the Puritans of Science, and their austere, disheartening, dried or frozen orthodoxy.
Islands of space--see Sci. Amer., vol. this and p. that--accounts from the Repts. of the Brit. Assoc. for the Ad. of Sci.--Nature, etc.--except for an occasional lapse, our sources of data will not be sneered at. As to our interpretations, I consider them, myself, more as suggestions and gropings and stimuli. Islands of space and the rivers and oceans of an extra-geography-
Stay and let salvation damn you--or straddle an auroral beam and paddle it from Rigel to Betelgeuse. If there be no accepting that there are such rivers and oceans beyond this earth, stay and travel upon steamships with schedules that can be depended upon, food so well cooked and well served, comfort looked after so carefully--or some day board the thing that was seen over the city of Marseilles, Aug. 19, 1887, and ride on that, bearing down upon the moon, giving up for lost, escaping collision by the swirl of a current that was never heard of before.
There are, or there are not, nearby cities of foreign existences. They have, or they have not, been seen, by reflection, in the skies of Sweden and Alaska. As one will.
Whether acceptable, or too preposterous to be thought of, our data are of rabbles of living things that have been seen in the sky; also of processions of military beings--monsters that live in the sky and die in the sky, and spatter this earth with their red life-fluids--ships from other worlds that have been seen by millions of inhabitants of this earth, exploring, night after night, in the sky of France, England, New England, and Canada--signals from the moon, which, according to notable indications, may not be so far from this earth as New York is from London--definitely reported and, in some instances, multitudinously witnessed, events that have been disregarded by our opposition-
A scientific priestcraft-
"Thou shalt not!" is crystallized in its frozen textbooks.
About the Author: Charles Hoy Fort
Charles Fort (1874-1932) fancied
himself a true skeptic, one who
opposes all forms of dogmatism,
believes nothing, and does not take
a position on anything. He claimed
to be an "intermediatist," one who
believes nothing is real and nothing
is unreal, that "all phenomena are
approximations one way or the
other between realness and
unrealness." Actually, he was an
anti-dogmatist who collected weird
and bizarre stories.
Fort spent a good part of his
adult life in the New York City public
library examining newspapers,
magazines, and scientific journals.
He was looking for accounts of anything
weird or mysterious which
didn't fit with current scientific theories.
He collected accounts of frogs
and other strange objects raining
from the sky, UFOs, ghosts, spontaneous
human combustion, the stigmata,
psychic abilities, etc. He published
four collections of weird tales
and anomalies during his lifetime:
Book of the Damned (1919), New
Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild
Talents (1932). In these works, he
does not seem interested in questioning
the reliability of his sources,
which is odd, given that he had
worked as a news reporter for a
number of years before embarking
on his quest to collect stories of the
weird and bizarre. He does reject
one story about a talking dog who
disappeared into a puff of green
smoke. He expresses his doubt that
the dog really went up in green
smoke, though he doesn't question
its ability to speak.
Fort did not seem particularly
interested in making any sense out
of his collection of weird stories. He
seemed particularly uninterested in
scientific testing, yet some of his
devotees consider him to be the
founding father of modern paranormal
studies. His main interest in scientific
hypotheses was to criticize
and ridicule the very process of
theorizing. His real purpose seems
to have been to embarrass scientists
by collecting stories on "the borderland
between fact and fantasy"
which science could not explain or
explain away. Since he did not generally
concern himself with the reliability
or accuracy of his data, this
borderland also blurs the distinction
between open-mindedness and
gullibility.
Fort was skeptical about scientific
explanations because scientists
sometimes argue "according to their
own beliefs rather than the rules of
evidence" and they suppress or ignore
inconvenient data. He seems to
have understood that scientific theories
are models, not pictures, of reality,
but he considered them to be
little more than superstitions and
myths. He seems to have had a profound
misunderstanding of the nature
of scientific theories. For, he
criticized them for not being able to
accommodate anomalies and for
requiring data to fit. He took particular
delight when scientists made incorrect
predictions and he attacked
what he called the "priestcraft" of
science. Fort seems to have been
opposed to science as it really is:
fallible, human and tentative, after
probabilities rather than absolute
certainties. He seems to have
thought that since science is not infallible,
any theory is as good as any
other. This is the same kind of misunderstanding
of science that we
find with so-called "scientific creationists"
and many other pseudoscientists.
Apparently, Fort was a prolific
writer. He is said to have written ten
novels, but only one was published:
The Outcast Manufacturers (1906).
One of Fort's amusements as an
adult seems to have been to speculate
about such things as frogs falling
from the sky.
He postulated that
there is a Super-Sargasso Sea above
the Earth (which he called
Genesistrine) where living things
originate and periodically are
dumped on Earth by intelligent beings
who communicate with secret
societies down below, perhaps using
teleportation.
Fort had very few friends, but
one of them, Tiffany Thayer, created
the Fortean Society to promote and
encourage Fort-like attacks on science
and scientists.Ê When Fort died
in 1937, he left over 30 boxes of
notes, which the Fortean Society
began publishing in the Fortean Society
Magazine. In 1959 Thayer died
and the Fortean Society came to an
end. Others, however, took up the
torch. There are many Fortean
groups, but it is worth noting that
Fort opposed the idea of a Fortean
Society. He thought that such a
group would attract spiritualists and
crackpots.
... And sure enough...
Softcover, 8¼" x 10¾", 210+ pages
Perfect-Bound