CHARLES
FORT
B S
(Investigator 85, 2002
July)
Stigmata,
psychic
abilities, ghosts, spontaneous
human combustion, UFOs, weeping statues, fish falling from the sky.
These
and other anomalous phenomena are the stuff of Fortean Times
magazine.
They were also the stuff of Charles Fort's life.
Charles Fort
(1874-1932)
spent much of his
time in the New York City public library and the British Museum to
search
newspapers and magazines for reports of weird and mysterious
occurrences.
He published his findings in four books:
- Book
of the
Damned
(1919).
- New
Lands
(1923).
- Lo!
(1931).
- Wild
Talents
(1932).
Fort was not a
skeptic.
He simply gathered
reports which he rarely questioned or investigated. These included
astral
projection, auras, blindfold chess, clairaudience, clairvoyance,
eyeless
sight, firewalking, glossolalia, human calculators, levitation, mental
mathematics, photographic memory, poltergeists, psychokinesis, super
memory,
monstrous creatures, telepathy.
Fort opposed the
dogmatic
acceptance of natural
laws being discovered by science. The purpose of his research therefore
seems to have been to embarrass scientists by obscuring the boundary
between
fantasy and fact. His book New Lands, for example, attacked
astronomers
whom Fort said are "led by a cloud of rubbish by day and a pillar of
bosh
by night." His book Lo! introduced teleportation and the notion
of a living universe. And Wild Talents, completed shortly
before
Fort died and published posthumously, was about psychic abilities.
Fort apparently
regarded
scientific theories
to be equivalent to myth and he liked to point out refutations of
theories
and also wrong predictions by scientists. His own explanations were
themselves
often silly. To explain frogs or fish falling from the sky he
postulated
the existence of an ocean, the Super-Sargasso Sea, above the Earth.
Fort had one
novel
published – The Outcast
Manufacturers (1906). He wrote nine others and also his own
biography
but destroyed his notes.
A short
summary of Charles
Fort's life:
1874
|
Born
to a Dutch immigrant family who managed a grocery store. |
1892
|
Left
home and worked for a New York newspaper. |
| 1893-1896 |
Travelled
around
Great Britain, Europe, South Africa, USA |
1897
|
Married
Anna Filan. |
| 1897-1900 |
Wrote
ten novels
and his biography. |
| 1906-1915 |
Searched
journals
and newspapers in New York library. |
| 1920 |
Burned
his collection of "40,000 notes". |
| 1921-1928 |
Lived
in London. |
| 1929 |
Moved
back to New York. |
1932
|
Died
May 3, possibly of leukemia. |
Fort did not
found any
society for promoting
his investigations as he felt it would attract spiritualists and
crackpots.
When he died, however, Fort left 30 boxes of notes. A friend, Tiffany
Thayer,
founded the Fortean Society and published much of this material in Fortean
Society Magazine later renamed Doubt.
The Fortean
Society ended
when Thayer died
in 1959 but others continued the idea:
- Fortean
Times
magazine explores
"the wild frontiers between the known and the unknown".
- INFO
published by the International
Fortean Organization has stories about anomalies in astronomy and other
sciences as well as reports on hoaxes, cryptozoology, etc.
- Pursuit
– magazine about strange
things published by The Society for the Investigation of the
Unexplained
(SITU).
- Anomalist
– highlights mysteries
in nature and science.
- Strange
– magazine about all
aspects of the strange and anomalous.
- Sourcebook
Project – a catalogue
of anomalies founded by William R Corliss.
- Science
Frontiers
– a newsletters
by W R Corliss with summaries of reports about scientific anomalies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Garner, M (1957) Fads
and Fallacies in
the Name of Science.
Knight, D (1974) The
Complete Books of
Charles Forte.
Rickard, B (1997) Charles
Fort: His Life
and Times.
www.forteana.org/aboutfort/fortbiog.html
|