Charles Fort (1)Rezensionen

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!

“Like everybody else, I don’t know what to think, but, rather uncommonly, I know that.”

“For everything that is supposed to be so well-known that it is proverbial, there are exceptions.”

“Only those who know little of a matter can have a clear and definite opinion upon it.”

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.

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.

I’ve never got around to reading Charles Fort until now. If you’re unfamiliar with him, he flourished around the turn of the 19th century, and apparently devoted his life to perusing the world’s newspapers and clipping accounts of strange events. In Wild Talents, Fort is concerned with spontaneous human combustion and a variety of poltergeist phenomena, which he attributes to – witchcraft. Not nude hags worshiping a demon goat (Fort has no use for conventional religion), but people who have mental powers that allow them set others on fire, cause their cooking utensils to leap through the air, make stones shower on their houses, etc.

Fort’s writing style, although literate, is extremely involved and circumlocutory; his cases cry out for a couple of tables – so that all the people bursting into flames could be studied together rather than scattered through hundreds of pages and mixed amidst mutilated cattle and ambulating furniture. Fort’s cases are almost all self-debunking; while Fort was famously disparaging of science, he was completely credulous when it came to newspaper accounts – even if (for example) the newspaper was in Madras and the event being described took place in Minneapolis.

In the 1950s, a lot of Fort’s material was culled and reissued by Frank Edwards; I remember running across Edward’s book Stranger than Science sometime in my grade school years and being frightened almost out of my housebreaking by it; I was particularly freaked out by accounts of spontaneous human combustion, and somehow convinced myself that if I always crawled around on my hands and knees I wouldn’t burst into flames. This was difficult to explain to my parents and peers. I was also terrified by the Moving Coffins of Barbados (Fort doesn’t mention these – at least not in this book – but Edwards did) and was afraid they would move into my bedroom in the middle of the night. Fortunately, both spontaneous combustion and coffin home invasions were set aside when I read an article in True magazine (or maybe Argosy?) about fire ants, which I expected to appear en masse over the southern horizon at any moment, devouring all in their path. I believe this was also about the time I took the back door off the hinges to keep Communists from stealing it. Ah, for the care-free days of childhood.

I'm a big and long term fan of "Fortean Times", having read the magazine for over twenty years and amassing a collection of related publications. So, I was obviously keen to check out the source. As it turns out, I'm glad I didn't read "Lo" before anything else as I may have given "Fortean Times" a miss.

Fort's writing style is underwhelming and doesn't seem to have aged well. He also starts the book with a long chapter on odd things falling from the sky, which has to be my least favourite fortean topic. The book drags on, with a few highlights but eventually I tossed it aside and reread an old "Fortean Times", which was much more enjoyable.½

Mass consciousness, psychosomatic illness, pictures appearing etched on walls and windows, stigmata, mysterious fires and gassings, unexplained disappearances these are the things that populate Charles Fort’s world. In the previous book I read by Fort entitled “Lo!” the author hypothesized that unexplained phenomena was explained by teleportation. In this tome he theorizes that people are capable of much more than they realize. According to Fort we all have latent psychic powers and that if we pictures things in our minds they will come true. If you think about a picture falling off a wall, it will. A person who is angry at another person can cause that person injury. Someone who goes to a lecture on food poisoning my develop symptoms of food poisoning.

Charles Fort will never tell you that his ideas are the correct ones because he wants the reader to think for themselves. His books are not for people who want mysteries explained logically or rationally. Fort’s writing is dated and most of the supernatural events he mentions can be easily explained. His books are for those who like to read about strange phenomena. If you enjoyed watching “In Search Of” or any of the ancient mysterious and UFO shows on The History Channel you will enjoy his books.

Lo! Charles Fort explains the world! Rains of living things, mysterious disappearances, unexplained appearances, spontaneous human combustion, Kaspar Hauser, natural disasters, it’s all here in this book! Charles Fort spent many hours in the libraries of New York and London rifling through newspapers and journals looking for strange occurrences. He lists all of the unusual phenomena and then asks you the reader to decide if the scientific or theological explanation is correct, then he gives you his ideas.

Fort was an intelligent man and even though his idea of how the world works is a bit wacky, it doesn’t seem totally implausible because it is obvious he has thought about it a great deal. He has a wry wit when dealing with scientists and theologians. His sense of humor helps to keep you interested in the book because lists of articles in newspapers and scientific journals can get boring after a while.

This book was written in the 1930s. The first half is a lot of fun to read. It slows down in the last section which is about astronomy and the rotation of the earth and how that affects natural disasters on our planet. This section in dated because he is speculating on whether or not man could leave the Earth’s orbit and travel to a distant star. If he had written the book today he may have seen space differently or maybe not. He probably wouldn’t have believed the moon landing.½

If you call yourself Fortean (or you want to) this is the first book that you need on your bookshelf. Start here to immerse yourself in the worlds (

A happy hunting ground of offbeat phenomena

The classic work that prompted Ben Hecht to coin the term "Fortean". Charles Fort was a great collector of quirky newspaper stories about strange phenenomena. He was acutely aware of the human habit of consigning to oblivion strange stories with no ready explanation.

But Fort was not one of those credulous UFO-geeks who sees cover-up and conspiracy in every failure to confirm his belief in extraterrestrials. Rather he was an open-minded man who sought honest inquiry in response to the facts, no matter how baffling.

Charles Fort is sui generis, the jedi master of the cataloguers of the weird, the inexplicable, the unkown, the scathingly brutal skunk at the garden party of modern scientism. Half the new age book shop is still spinning it's wheels on the trail Fort blazed so long ago. Almost all the 'true but weird' genre really should be sending a royalty to Fort's descendants, because they pretty much owe their income to him, and after all this time he is still the best.

Yet actually you don't see much of Fort's books actually in the new age shops these days, maybe because they know that once you've read Fort non of these johny-come-lately's can hold a candle to him and it might depress sales.

This Dover edition gives you what Dover is best at, a good cheap durable book of a classic that has been to long out of print, and this one is a special treat gathering all of Forts books under one cover.

Anyone interested in the paranormal,the unexplained, the weird, the supernatural or just stuff that makes you go huh?... you just HAVE to have this book in your collection.

The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, Wild Talents

A tough read, but I love that moment when you realize it's a satire, and really GET that it's a satire through and through.

A procession of data collected from sources dating around the 1800's, overlooked by science.

"Robert J. Durant's Bible" according to widow Mauricette. Includes inscription: "I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject-matter for beliefs - C.F." Also includes notes and newsclippings.

my edition Ace ISBN 044149962-, 197?

Pages 638 and843 bookmarked by "pagemarker" bookmarks.