Charles Fort

Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 - May 3, 1932) was a writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. (According to some sources he was born on August 9.)

Fort and the unexplained

Fort's relationship with the study of anomalous phenomena is frequently misunderstood and misrepresented. For over thirty years Charles Fort sat in the libraries of New York and London, assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, collecting notes upon phenomena that lay outside the accepted theories and beliefs of the time.

Related Topics:
Anomalous phenomena - New York - London - Magazine - Phenomena

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Examples of these phenomena include many of what are variously referred to as occult, supernatural, and paranormal — for instance, teleportation — a term Fort is generally credited with coining — poltergeist events, falls of frogs, fishes, inorganic materials of an amazing range, crop circles, unaccountable noises and explosions, spontaneous fires, levitation, mysterious appearances and disappearances, giant wheels of light in the oceans, and animals found outside their normal ranges (see phantom cat). Many of these phenomena are now collectively and conveniently referred to as 'Fortean' phenomena (or 'Forteana'), whilst others have developed into their own schools of thought, for example, UFOs into ufology.

Related Topics:
Occult - Supernatural - Paranormal - Teleportation - Poltergeist - Frog - Fish - Crop circles - Explosion - Spontaneous fires - Levitation - Mysterious appearances and disappearances - Wheel - Light - Ocean - Animal - Phantom cat - UFOs - Ufology

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Fort in his lifetime must have taken tens of thousands of notes — he is said to have compiled as many as 40,000 notes, though there were no doubt many more than this. The notes were kept on cards in shoeboxes. They were taken on small squares of paper, in a cramped shorthand of Fort's own invention, and some of them survive today in the collections of the University of Pennsylvania. More than once, depressed and discouraged, Fort destroyed his work, but always began again. Some of the notes were published, little by little, by the Fortean Society until its dissolution.

Related Topics:
Shorthand - University of Pennsylvania - Fortean Society

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From these researches Fort wrote seven books, though only four survive. These are: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932); one book was written between New Lands and Lo! but it was abandoned and absorbed into Lo!. Understanding Fort's books takes time and effort: his style is complex, violent and poetic, satirical and subtle, profound and puzzling.

Related Topics:
The Book of the Damned - 1919 - New Lands - 1923 - Lo! - 1931 - Complex - Poetic - Satirical - Puzzling

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Ideas are abandoned and then recalled a few pages on; examples and data are offered, compared and contrasted, conclusions made and broken, as Fort holds up the unorthodox to the scrutiny of the orthodoxy that continually fails to account for them. Pressing on his attacks, Fort shows the ridiculousness of the conventional explanations and then interjects with his own theories.

Related Topics:
Data - Orthodoxy

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Fort suggests that there is, for example, a Super-Sargasso Sea into which all lost things go — and justifies his theories by noting that they fit the data as well as the conventional explanations. As to whether Fort believes this theory, or any of his other proposals, he gives us the answer: "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written." (in other words, facts are 'underdetermined': for any given collection of facts, more than one theory will explain them adequately...this is widely accepted now, but was extremely controversial at the time Fort was writing).

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In the face of these examples, skeptics and critics have frequently called Fort credulous and naïve, a charge his supporters deny strongly. Over and over again in his writing, Fort rams home a few basic points that are frequently forgotten in discussions of 'what is science': the boundaries between science and pseudoscience are 'fuzzy' (see fuzzy logic), not binary, these boundaries change over time, and there is a strong sociological influence on what is considered 'acceptable' or 'damned' (see strong program in the sociology of scientific knowledge). He also points out that whereas facts are objective, how facts are interpreted depends on who is doing the interpreting and in what context. These are viewpoints that would not be widely accepted until the early 21st century.

Related Topics:
Skeptics - Critic - Pseudoscience - Fuzzy logic - Binary - Sociological - Strong program - Sociology of scientific knowledge - Objective - 21st century

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There are many phenomena in Fort's works which have now been partially or entirely "recuperated" by mainstream science, but many of Fort's ideas are on the very borderlines of science, or beyond, in the fields of paranormalism and the bizarre. Fort resolutely refused to abandon the territory between science and the absurd. Among Fort's contributions to the thought of the 20th century was the invention of the word "teleportation" to denote the strange disappearances and appearances of anomalies, which, tongue-in-cheek, he suggested may be connected.

Related Topics:
20th century - Teleportation

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He also is perhaps the first person to explain strange human teleportations by the hypothesis of alien abduction.

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Many consider it odd that Fort, a man so skeptical and so willing to question the pronouncements of the scientific mainstream, would be so eager to take old stories — for example, stories about rains of fish falling from the sky — at face value. Fort remarked "I offer the data. Suit yourself." The theories and conclusions Fort presented allegedly came from the same sources as those of what Fort called "the orthodox conventionality of Science." It did not matter to Fort whether his data and theories were accurate: his point was that alternative conclusions and world views can be made from the same data "orthodox" conclusions are made, and that the conventional explanations of Science are only one of a range of explanations, none more justified than another. In this respect, he was ahead of his time. In The Book of the Damned he showed the influence of societal values and what would now be called a "paradigm" on what scientists consider to be "true." This prefigured work by Thomas Kuhn years later. In a similar way the anarchic "anything goes" approach to science of Paul Feyerabend is similar to Fort's.

Related Topics:
World view - Paradigm - Thomas Kuhn - Anarchic - Paul Feyerabend

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Fort's great contribution is to the humor of science, for although many of the phenomena which science rejected in his day have since been proven to be objective phenomena, and although Fort was prescient in his collection and preservation of these data despite the scorn they received from his contemporaries, Fort was more of a parodist and a humorist than a scientist.

Related Topics:
Humor - Parodist

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Nonetheless, Fort is considered by many as the father of modern paranormalism, not only because of his interest in strange phenomena, but because of his "modern" attitude towards religion, 19th century spiritualism, and scientific dogma.

Related Topics:
Religion - 19th century - Spiritualism - Dogma

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Fort's collected works are published by Dover Books and individual volumes are available in recent editions.

Related Topics:
Collected works - Dover Books

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Fort's work of compilation and commentary on anomalous phenomena reported in scientific journals and press has been carried on very creditably by William R. Corliss, whose self-published books and notes bring Fort's collections up-to-date with a Fortean combination of humor, seriousness and open-mindedness. Mr. Corliss' notes rival those of Fort in volume, while being significantly less cryptic and abbreviated.

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