Charles Hoy Fort was born August 6, 1874, in Albany, New York, the son of Charles Nelson and Agnes Fort. Agnes Fort bore two other sons in the next four years and then died unexpectedly. The elder Fort raised his three boys as he saw fit, in a fashion brutal even by Victorian standards. He was not above lashing his sons with a dog whip, slapping them so hard that they bled, and even locking them in a tiny, dark pantry for days at a time. [1] Charles Hoy, in later years, referred to his father only as "They". This upbringing seemed to instill in him a distrust of authority figures of any kind, political, philosophical, or scientific.
One night in 1892, the teenaged Charles Fort came home to discover that "They" had locked him out of the house. Charles smashed a glass door in anger, and the elder Fort ordered him to sleep in the basement. Even though Charles sat at the table, he was not served breakfast for a week. Finally he came to blows with his father and found he could overpower him.
This began a new era of his life. His late grandfather having left him a small inheritance, Fort travelled around the world. He fell ill in South Africa and returned to New York, where he married a woman named Anna Filing in 1896.
Fort worked as a reporter and published short stories as well as one novel, The Outcast Manufacturers (1909), but much of his adult life he spent in poverty in New York City. In 1916, he came into another modest inheritance after his uncle Frank A. Fort died. This allowed him to quit more mundane jobs and take up an odd pursuit: reading the back files of newspapers, science journals, and popular magazines, taking notes on any report of phenomena that did not fit current scientific theories. As the years passed, he garnered thousands of notes, which he used as raw material for several curious books. "We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded." [2]
His first two efforts, X and Y, Fort burned for reasons unknown. His next volume was entitled The Book of the Damned (1919). The publishers in New York considered it unsalable, but, fortunately, Fort had been befriended by renowned novelist Theodore Dreiser, and eventually The Book of the Damned and three other volumes on strange phenomena saw publication.
The Book of the Damned was quite unlike the contemporary books on the unexplained. Fort uncovered reports, not of moaning spirits and mediums' materializations, but of phenomena that hardly anyone had ever heard of, yet which appeared to be downright common -- and totally at odds with the scientific world view. "I never write about marvels," he wrote years later in Wild Talents (1932). "All books written by me are of quite ordinary occurrences."
Fort gave page after page of odd materials descending from the heavens: dust, coke, ashes, frogs, crabs, worms, blood, flesh, multicolored rain and snow -- hundreds of instances of strange substances and living creatures falling with rain, or even out of the clear blue sky. The circumstances seemed, in most cases, to preclude the idea that the frogs, leaves, flesh, etc., had been sucked up in a tornado or whirlwind, to be dropped later. Fort suggested that a force he called teleportation was at work. He did not define this word in the sense it is used today, i.e., instantaneous transportation from one point to another. Fort envisioned the world or the universe as a single macro-creature, and "organic existence," and the mysterious flows and falls as caused by a super-cardiovascular system. That is to say, frogs, or water, or flesh were teleported to different points of the earth the same way food and oxygen are delivered to cells in the human body by the bloodstream. To back this up, he studied scientific journals and found reports of "wantings" before the falls: a summer bereft of insects before insect showers, a drought before water spilled out of thin air, etc. The cosmic cardiovascular system was a mechanistic supernaturalism, bringing manna to the starving, not in the manner of gods bestowing miracles, but like a physical body repairing itself.
I think we're property.
I should say we belong to something:
That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought amongst themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something. [3]
Long before the term "flying saucer" appeared, Fort suggested that extraterrestrials had visited the earth. As the above quote shows, he even imagined that someone -- or something -- owned our world. Fort envisioned cosmic beings of a very visceral nature -- no Olympian deities, but Things that battled and killed, the losers raining blood and flesh to earth: "A thing the size of the Brooklyn Bridge. It's alive in outer space -- something the size of Central Park kills it -- It drips." [4] His teleportation/ circulatory system, far from being a spiritual God or Gaea, was more like a monstrous organism on which we are parasites.
While other early books on the unexplained commonly altered or excluded the names of the percipients and the towns in which they lived, Fort buried his readers with sources, from The American Journal of Science to Nature to the Illustrated London News, always careful to give volume, date, and page number.
Fort followed The Book of the Damned with New Lands in 1923, which carried reports of what might be glimpses of parallel worlds. Shades of the Necronomicon -- novelist and playwright Ben Hecht predicted that "five out of six persons who read this book will go mad." [5] LO! appeared in 1931, covering falls again, but branching out into monster manifestations, the mysterious appearances and disappearances of people, spontaneous human combustion, and strange geological events, like what are now termed earthquake lights. His final volume, Wild Talents, concentrated on poltergeists and mental powers.
In February, 1932, Fort fell deathly ill. He barely managed to finish Wild Talents before he collapsed. On May 3, 1932, he was taken to Royal Hospital in New York, and he died the same day. His work in investigating the unexplained has been carried on by various authors, such as Ivan Sanderson, John Keel, Loren Coleman, and Jerome Clark, and by organizations such as the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained and the International Fortean Organization.
1. Knight, Damon, Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 12-13.
2. The Complete Books of Charles Fort (New York: Dover Books, 1974), p. 3.
3. Ibid., p. 163.
4. Ibid., p. 304.
5. Knight, op cit., p. 178.