(15) CHARLES FORT –

THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED / NEW LANDS / LO! / WILD TALENTS (1919-1932)

“Charles Hoy Fort, an eccentric American who meticulously collected and catalogued anomalous phenomena inexplicable or thought impossible by orthodox science – giving his name to ‘Fortean’ and ‘Forteana’ to characterize such phenomena, as in the ongoing online Fortean Times which effectively carries on Fort’s legacy.

I have a soft spot, as did Fort himself from evident from the prolific reports he compiled, for strange “falls” raining from the sky – fish (like on the book cover in my feature image), frogs, and so on.

They also are a good example of the anomalous phenomena Fort researched by visiting libraries in New York and London for more than 30 years “assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines” and compiling thousands of notes “on cards and scraps of paper in shoeboxes”. From this research, Fort wrote the four books in this special mention.

He was also ahead of his time, writing of UFOs – before 1947 and the usual start of “modern UFO allegations”. That might be reflected in why he wrote of triangle UFOs rather than the discs that were more in vogue from 1947, although triangle UFO sightings persist.

I also have a soft spot for his theory of a Super-Sargasso Sea to which he attributed strange falls and UFOs – a “sea” where all lost things go and occasionally rain back down on Earth – and an even softer spot for him effectively dismissing that and all other theories in his work (such as his “cosmic joker” theory), noting “I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written”.

Like H.P. Lovecraft (with whom he was largely contemporaneous), he was not the best prose stylist – although unlike Lovecraft he had much more of a sense of humor about it, tongue firmly in cheek – but created a modern mythology similar to that of Lovecraft and became a similar cult figure.

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)