Charles Fort

Who was Charles Hoy Fort born the 6th of August or by some accounts the 9th of August in 1874 and died 3 May 1932 the short version is that he was an American writer and researcher on the subject of anomalous phenomena, but he was much more then that. He was for all intense and purposes the father of anomalous phenomena studies, in fact most people who study anomalous phenomena in the modern day lovingly refer to themselves as Forteans.


Charles fort was a skeptic of sorts, he didn't look at anomalous phenomena skeptically but he did frown at all most all the Main stream Scientific explanations of the phenomena.
Fort was born in Albany, New York, where his father was a grocer and has been described as an abusive authoritarian. At the age of 18, Fort left New York on what would become a world tour. During this time he is know to have traveled through the majority American west , Scotland, and England, and South Africa. Having fallen ill he while touring in Africa, he returned home, where he was nursed back to health by Anna Filing. Fort had been friends with Filing since there childhood. They would eventually get married on 26 October 1896. they would later move to London Fort was busy with his research, and garnering some success as a short story writer. By all accounts there life was at or just above the poverty level something that was a source of depression for Fort.


Of the ten novels Fort wrote only one, The Outcast Manufacturers was published in 1906 hailed by critics of the day ahead of its time, it was sadly a commercially flop. By 1915, Fort was working on writing two books, entitled X and Y. X dealt with beings on the planet Mars and there ability to control events on Earth. Y dealt with the idea of a evil civilization which lived at or below the South Pole. Forts friend Theodore Dreiser, a writer himself attempted to help fort get the books published. Unfortunately neither were ever published. Depressed by the frailer of the books Fort burnt the manuscripts. Shortly after this he begin work on the book that would change the course of his life as well as influence generations to come, and make him famous almost 100 years later. His book The Book of the Damned. Was a collection of his notes on anomalous phenomena, the title sarcastically referred to what he called "damned data". Fort felt that the phenomena he catalog was not account for, rejected or ignored by the science of his day. For over thirty years, Charles Fort sat in the assorted libraries of New York, London, and other cities he visited, reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, collecting notes on phenomena that were outside the so called accepted theories of the time.


Examples of anomalous phenomena are things often referred to as occult or supernatural, and/or paranormal. Things like poltergeist, spontaneous fires, levitation , and giant wheels of light. He also covered things like coining a Fort term for teleportation, falls of frogs, fishes, inorganic materials, unaccountable noises and explosions, ball lighting, mysterious appearances and disappearances, and animals found outside their normal ranges (phantom cat, ardent Kangaroos ). It is possible that he was the first to offer explanations for strange human appearances and disappearances. He had the hypothesis we know now as alien abduction.