A little information about Charles Fort.

Charles Hoy Fort, father of anomalistics, and iconoclastic philosopher, was born in New York State, USA in 1874.

By the age of 23 he had accumulated twenty-five thousand notes on the apparent infallibility of science. He destroyed them when he became dissatisfied with them and started to collect more. He wrote two books entitled X and Y. The book named X suggested that it was Martians that at first colonised the Earth and the second book Y described a strange civilisation that supposedly lived at the North Pole. These books were not taken seriously by publishers and they too, were destroyed.

Fort was able, thanks to a legacy, to dedicate the whole of his life to researching strange, paranormal phenomena. He was particularly interested in Spontaneous Human Combustion, Unexplained showers of things like frogs and fish and the spontaneous involuntary disappearance of people and objects. Fort coined the term ‘teleportation’ for the mysterious disappearance of things that turned up elsewhere with no apparent explanation.

Fort did not try to explain the whys and wherefores of these mysterious goings-on but instead wanted to make scientists understand that just because they could not prove things scientifically did not mean that all these phenomena were fraudulent or non existent. He published four books ‘The Book of the Damned’ (1919); ‘New Lands’ (1923); ‘Lo!’ (1931) and ‘Wild Talents’ (1932)

Fort fervently believed in the ‘Cosmic Joker’ writing that ‘we are being played with’ and suggested that we were being organised and by some bored entity that had nothing else to do but interfere and upset the lives of the Human Race.

In 1931 Dreiser launched the Fortean Society but Fort declined the presidency and a year later he died.

In 1947 when the UFO scare began, people began to remember Fort and his ideas and arguments. His work therefore became relevant to a wider and more diverse public.

Fort has inspired many Fortean periodicals including the Journal of the International Fortean Organisation, Pursuit and British Fortean Times.

In this section we will include many things that we can’t really put in other topics and some of the things that Charles Fort himself was fascinated with.

Sources-

The Encyclopaedia of the Unexplained (A Complete Guide to the Unexplained) by Lynn Picknett

The Paranormal, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia by Stuart Gordon