“Who in the name of frenzy is Charles Fort?” asked Booth Tarkington in 1920. Fresh off his Pulitzer win for The Magnificent Ambersons, the novelist had picked up Fort’s The Book of the Damned by mistake and had found himself floored by it. “He’s colossal,” Tarkington wrote to a friend that February, “a magnificent nut, with Poe and Blake and Cagliostro and St. John trailing way behind him. And with a gorgeous madman’s humor!”
Born in 1874 in Albany, N.Y., Charles Fort started his career as a journalist and aspiring fiction writer until his uncle’s death in 1906 left him with enough money to pursue his paranormal research full time. By then he had already been collecting reports of various anomalies and strange occurrences, living in Manhattan and making regular pilgrimages to the New York Public Library to scour scientific journals and foreign newspapers. He gathered up accounts of frogs and fish raining from the heavens, mysterious disappearances, strange animal mutilations, unexplained flying objects, and anything else that seemed to lie outside the domain of accepted science. Encouraged by his good friend, the novelist Theodore Dreiser, Fort tried first to string this news of the weird into two books he called X and Y: The first suggested that humans were being controlled telepathically by sinister beings on Mars, the second that there existed a secret malevolent civilization at the South Pole. Even with Dreiser’s help, he couldn’t get either published (the manuscripts have since both been lost). But in 1919 he found a new form to describe the strange anomalies he’d collected, compiling them into a single volume he called The Book of the Damned.
Fort gathered up accounts of frogs and fish raining from the heavens, mysterious disappearances, and anything else that seemed to lie outside the domain of accepted science.
Rather than argue a specific theory, Fort’s masterpiece instead presents events and facts that are traditionally disregarded or ignored. “A procession of the Damned,” he proclaims them in the opening pages. “And by damned, I mean excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.” Fort saw his work as a critique of academia and mainstream science, which, he believed, worked by actively ignoring anything it couldn’t make sense of. “In the topography of intellection,” he proclaimed, “I should say that what we call knowledge is ignorance surrounded by laughter.” Possessed of a genial, welcoming style filled with baroque circumlocutions, Fort sought to restore a sense of childlike wonder to what he saw as a narrow, joyless, and increasingly technical scientific culture. “If we weren’t so accustomed to Science in its essential aspect of Disregard,” he argued, “we’d be mystified and impressed” by the world around us, and wouldn’t rush to explain away what we can’t immediately understand.
Academe, in Fort’s eyes, built itself up by excluding evidence that didn’t fit pre-established theories. Science’s “seeming approximation to consistency, stability, system,” he argued, “is sustained by damning the irreconcilable or the unassimilable—” Note the lack of a period: Ending sentences with an em dash was a hallmark of Fort’s writing, like an unresolved chord at the end of a song, or a “to be continued” card at the end of a serial. Even at its most strident, Fort’s prose resisted the urge to sum up, holding out some possibility that the sentence may yet continue, or turn on itself, or perhaps just hang there, contemplating the possibilities.
The publication of The Book of the Damned was a watershed moment in 20th-century culture. Without Fort, there would be no X-Files or Twin Peaks, no Unsolved Mysteries or In Search Of…, no Ancient Aliens or the dozens of similar shows on History and the Discovery Channel. Fort’s book gave space to theories and beliefs that were dubious, unpopular, and problematic; it gave readers tools to push back against biologists, physicists, and historians; and it encouraged people to remain skeptical toward academic orthodoxies. There had been plenty of cranks before Fort’s time: amateurs who’d set themselves up as pseudo-archaeologists to argue for the existence of Atlantis or pseudo-physicists to prove that ghosts were real. Having tried and abandoned that tactic, Fort found success by critiquing the establishment without offering a fully fleshed-out alternative theory. He didn’t need to have the answers; what he instead demanded was that scholars take seriously all that he claimed they had ignored and damned to irrelevance.
Fort inspired a legion of acolytes, and they are the subject of Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers (University of Chicago Press, June 2024), by Joshua Blu Buhs. While Fort himself has been the subject of several biographies, Forteans, Buhs writes, are far less understood, “ignored or dismissed as etiolated imitators.” This is unfortunate, he argues, because those who wrestled with Fort seriously “forged a unique response to modernity,” and their influence had a long, if unexpected, tail. These followers set themselves the task of transforming Fort from an outlier — “a magnificent nut,” in Tarkington’s words — to the center of a movement. How, they asked, could Forteanism be made into some kind of discipline, method, or system? Can a positive program be assembled from the facts of the damned? Can one make a science out of the rejection of science?
Perhaps the person most invested in this question was Tiffany Thayer, Fort’s main devotee and the man most responsible for attempting to shape his legacy. During the 1930s, Thayer had been an incredibly successful novelist, his lurid blockbuster Thirteen Men having made him a household name. (The follow-up, Thirteen Women, would be adapted as a pre-Code shocker starring Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne.) Thayer reached out to Fort when the latter’s career was at a low ebb, and helped get Fort’s third book, Lo!, published in 1931. He subsequently helped organize the original Fortean Society in New York City — a collective that would include Dreiser and Tarkington as well as other eminent literary men like the cultural critic H.L. Mencken and the playwright and screenwriter Ben Hecht. The Society’s goal, according to Dreiser, was “to make scientists take Fort seriously — as a thinker, not a crank.” It was a group effort at first, with the various members taking turns editing the Fortean Society’s magazine, Doubt. But gradually Thayer came to the fore, taking over the editorship of Doubt as well as Fort’s archives after Fort died in 1932.
Can one make a science out of the rejection of science?
Thayer devoted most of the rest of his career to attempting to shape Fort’s legacy and to establish a Fortean way of doing things, a methodology that could be self-sustaining in the absence of the author’s inimitable literary personality. Think to New Worlds chronicles Thayer’s attempts to create a stable discipline of Forteanism while constantly pushing back against the various ways in which other readers and thinkers tried to use Fort.
In a sense, the Fortean method was simple: Doubt everything, refuse to accept anything on faith, and seek out that which is generally excluded from dominant epistemologies. This radical skepticism was, Buhs notes, a kind of “anti-religion,” and Fort’s books became a Bible for those who’d seen the improbable or believed the implausible. Ufologists, from the start, leaned heavily on Fort’s work. As soon as the pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine shiny, unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier in June 1947 (setting off the modern UFO craze), believers were quick to look to Fort for answers. A Chicago AP writer published a report of Arnold’s sighting alongside various evidence that he had pulled from Fort’s collected works as a means of bolstering Arnold’s claims: The unsigned article, “Rare Book Tells of Freak Discs in the Sky Long Ago,” culled passages from The Book of the Damned regarding “a luminous cloud moving at high velocity” over Florence, Italy, in 1731, “globes of light seen in the air” over Swabia in 1732, an “octagonal star” seen over Slavange, Norway, in 1752, and an event that happened in Skeninge, Sweden, in 1808, where the “sun turned brick red” and “there appeared on the Western horizon a number of round objects, dark brown in color and seemingly the size of a hat crown” that “passed overhead and disappeared on the eastern horizon.” Arnold’s was not, it seemed, an isolated experience: Here was a long, detailed history of similar sightings, alongside rains of frogs and reports of mutilated livestock. As more sightings accumulated and as people began to think governments were hiding something from the public, ufologists increasingly turned to Forteanism to help bolster their credibility.
Thayer fought back against this tendency, doing his best to keep Forteanism from becoming synonymous with ufology. Doubt had long solicited reports from its readers, but by the early 1950s Thayer’s mailbag was swamped with UFO sightings, which he tried to keep out of the magazine as much as possible. He had begun to doubt the doubters, and wondered whether the whole thing was only a hoax concocted by the CIA. The credulity with which the public embraced UFOs bothered him, and the ways in which the UFO community wanted to reduce all examples of Forteana to visitation by aliens enraged him. In 1953 he wrote to a friend, “I am now killing every man woman or child who says ‘saucer’ to me.”
Another contingent of Forteans could be found among science-fiction writers, who consistently mined Fort’s work for ideas. As John W. Campbell, author of Who Goes There? (the basis for John Carpenter’s The Thing) and editor of Astounding Science Fiction, wrote of the 1941 Thayer-edited omnibus The Books of Charles Fort, “It probably averages one science-fiction or fantasy plot idea to the page.” Fort had offered up nothing but a litany of the weird, the unusual, the thought-provoking, and the impossible — precisely the kind of things that science-fiction writers loved. H.P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness begins with a textbook Fortean element: newspaper reports of odd and inexplicable things of unknown organic matter (“pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be”) found in the wake of a historic flood. An early Robert Heinlein story, “Goldfish Bowl,” features two Fortean investigators whose inquiry into a pair of mysterious water spouts (a favorite anomaly of Fort’s) leads to revelations of disturbing alien intelligence. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, mentions Fort by name in his story “Rat Race,” and in Stephen King’s novel Firestarter (which is about pyrokinesis, a staple Fortean topic), a man reads Lo! to his daughter as a bedtime story.
Thayer tolerated the science-fiction writers more than he did the ufologists, but not by much. Despite his own success writing commercial potboilers, Thayer remained far more interested in modernism and the avant-garde: “Science fiction was too conventional, too hackneyed, and boring,” Buhs explains. Thayer dreamed of Fortean dance, Fortean music, whatever that might possibly look like. But he found it impossible to guide Doubt’s readership away from science fiction and weird tales.
Fort’s work had been largely apolitical, but over the course of the 1940s Thayer brought the Society further and further to the right, and his own developing paranoia, xenophobia, and racism poisoned his attempts to broaden the appeal of Fort’s work. Thayer believed the attack on Pearl Harbor to be a hoax, advocated isolationism during World War II, and, as the war wore on, descended deeper into antisemitism and conspiracy theory. He attracted other antisemites and Nazi sympathizers to the Fortean cause. The problem was, as Buhs correctly notes, that for all its radical skepticism, “Forteanism was not immune to the appeal of authoritarianism; quite the opposite. Forteans were often unprotected by their vaunted skepticism from accepting the word of strong men as truth.” So convinced were they of their own superior ability to reject orthodoxies, Forteans as often as not were easy marks for con artists and political opportunists.
By the late 1940s, the Fortean Society was increasingly coming to be seen, as the science-fiction writer James Blish wrote, as a “clearing house for people who think they are being controlled by radio by little green (Negro-Jewish-Russian) men.” Thayer, for all his desire to steward the legacy of Fort, was operating with a fundamental misunderstanding of what made The Book of the Damned special. As the science-fiction critic Frederick Shroyer put it, “In his anti-dogmatism, he is fanatically dogmatic.”
For that matter, the same could be said of Charles Fort himself. For all he professed to believe in nothing and to practice radical skepticism, he too was often guilty of conforming to his own orthodoxy. Fort’s books are filled with half-baked notions that would make a contemporary conspiracy theorist scratch their head in disbelief. (Perhaps most famously, he argued that above us there is a “Super Sargasso Sea” in which all manner of things — fish, birds, frogs, and a “desert of blood” — float, some of which sometimes get dislodged and rain down on us.) And, as Buhs points out, Fort’s early death at 57 came about because he distrusted doctors and refused to see one.
The stakes of radical skepticism, then as now, are life and death. Our current age of anti-vaxxers and climate denialists cannot be entirely untangled from the legacy of Fort. While distrust of science and government long predated the publication of The Book of the Damned, the attitudes he helped popularize (particularly in the wake of the UFO era and a widespread belief that the government was hiding the truth about aliens) magnified the full-blown paranoia that has lately gripped the right and the left. Fort and his followers worked to erode “the distinctions between truth and falsity” and “undermined the authority of experts and expertise,” Buhs notes. “They launched a thousand conspiracies into the national consciousness.”
Our current age of anti-vaxxers and climate denialists cannot be entirely untangled from the legacy of Fort.
But it’s also true that “conspiracism had changed since The Book of the Damned.” As Buhs sees it, “Fort’s playfulness had been replaced by Thayer’s acerbic nihilism, which became omnipresent and decoupled from any need to compile evidence or craft arguments.” Ultimately, the problem (and the allure) of Fort is that the revelation that runs through his work is explicitly anti-discipline, anti-methodology. The facts of the damned, by definition, simply cannot be incorporated into any kind of stable system. Again and again, reading Think to New Worlds, one is reminded that as soon as doubt ossifies into a stance, it ceases to be radical and becomes dogmatic.
Fort’s The Book of the Damned remains a remarkable work. But Fort was a gadfly, not a prophet. Lionizing him — as Thayer and others have tried to do for the last century — is as problematic as marginalizing him. Perhaps the appropriate attitude toward Fort is to treat his writing as he treated the anomalous facts he uncovered: with seriousness and wonder, but also with a savage and relentless skepticism. His ultimate gift was not to get us to think to new worlds, but to scrutinize our own more closely.
