Charles Fort (1) (1874–1932)

Some people dismiss Fort as an unscientific crank, some people embrace him whole-heartedly as a reporter of the paranormal, others just love him as a champion of the ABnormal. I like his language - wch may generally go undercommented on as people pay more attn to the more spectacular "Fortean" phenomena described. I find Fort's language to be EXTREMELY CAREFUL in its attempt to NOT BE DEFINITIVE & it's in this that, for me, therein lies Fort's extreme importance. It's not just that he stresses that scientists are capable of ignoring data/experiences that fall outside 'convenient' &/or 'consensus' 'reality', it's also that Fort describes things in such a way that's both expressive of & CONDUCIVE TO a state-of-mind of CONTINUAL QUESTIONING. Bravo!… (meer)

A vast compendium of unexplained, mysterious, and downright bizarre events collected by Charles Fort. Fort's dedication to recording and sharing reports of unexplained phenomena, combined with his innate distrust of scientific establishment and his tongue-in-cheek humorist style, garnered him a loyal fan-base and enough renown that the study of strange occurrences explainable by science was named after him - Fortean, or Forteana.

Lo! is one of three books he published on the subject, and it's a beast to read from cover to cover as he rattles through hundreds of reports featuring everything from rains of frogs to phantom planets, and his prose can be a bit meandering even for early twentieth century writing (Lo! was originally published in 1913). But as a reference for bizarre events, Lo! - one of three books Fort published on the subject - is indispensable for both its exhaustive knowledge and entertaining approach.… (meer)

In the fictional world of the TV show The X-Files, I can imagine this book being in Fox Mulders' library. It purports to be is a list of occurrences and UFO sightings that have been damned - that is, excluded from history - because there are no satisfactory scientific explanations for these incidents. Published in 1919, long before the Age of Space Travel, Charles Fort's major premise was that other worlds or entities, undetected by humanity, lurked nearby in the heavens, even closer than the Moon.

The money sentence from this tedious book (Boni & Liveright, 2nd printing, 1920 as found at Google Books) by Charles Fort is found on page 252: "I think that we're fished for." This sentence, made famous by William Gaddis in his masterful novel THE RECOGNITIONS where characters discuss Fort's ideas as part of an intellectual conversation taking place at a post-WWII social gathering in Manhattan, is Fort's humorous retort to an August 27, 1885 UFO sighting where a "'strange object in the clouds'" was reported to resemble a "triangular shape, and seemed to be about the size of a pilot-boat mainsail, with chains attached to the bottom of it." Fort wonders if there was "something [alien life] trawling overhead" fishing for humans below. As it turns out, the object was most likely a partially collapsed balloon.

As an impressive catalog of strange objects reported to have fallen to the ground since 1700 A.D., and as a collection of widely-scattered witticisms from Fort in his commentary upon these strange objects, this book retains some value, but don't expect much entertainment.… (meer)