Charles Fort: The Final Boss of Facebook Boomer Conspiracy Theorists
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes, 26 seconds. Contains 2288 words
I love Charles Fort.
One of the many pleasures of looking into a past is occasionally you stumble onto someone who shares your predilections and frustrations and this lonely planet gets a little cozier.
And Fort is one of those for me.
He was certainly a flawed man, but one worth a bit of study.
With all the heaviness of the world I thought it’d be fun to talk about this guy I think is cool for a bit.
This is the Trenchant Edges, a newsletter of the damned and excluded and the people who look into them anyway.
Prophet of the Unexplained
Charles Fort, we’ll speedrun his biography in a moment, is one of my favorite kinds of people: Wrong, but for interesting reasons.
He collected and published oddities and challenged the basic concept of science itself. Not conclusively, but in a way that’s both kind of worth considering and obviously not coherent itself.
Fort is a beautiful paradox there: He extolls coherence but his work is a collection of the opposite: Strange, often half stories from newspapers and magazines about the unexplained.
In his first big work, The Book of the Damned, Fort starts off like this:
A PROCESSION of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them-- or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.
Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.
A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety.
And here’s the other thing: Charles Fort can fucking write.
A lot of fringe schlock is, well, workmanlike prose. It’s fine. It gets the job done.
But Fort did it with style.
Some might say style isn’t substance, and they’d be right. Here’s where things get a lot more hit or miss.
But before we go into that let’s take a moment and draw a sketch of Fort’s whole, uh, deal.
Who exactly was Charles Fort?
Fort was born in 1874 and died of probably leukemia in 1932 at the aged of 57. Starting in 1906 he started collecting incidents of odd things happening in newspapers.
He was kind of a wonky autodidact who moved from job to job, not really settling on anything, until his uncle Frank died in 1916 which left him with enough money to try writing full time. He was something of a failed novelist (one sympathizes!).
According to his biographer Damon Knight (who I’m quoting from wikipedia, tbh), his father was abusive and his suspicion of authority began when he was young.
The Book of the Damned, the main work we’re dealing with today, was published in 1919 and was successful enough to get him an early fandom and successor groups such as the Fortean Times and Fortean Society. There are still a few of them operating today over a century after his first big hit.
He’d spend the remaining 13 years of his life looking for more oddities and publishing several more books: New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents. I’m going to level with you, I’ve only read The Book of the Damned.
He scoured libraries in New York and London for everything he could find and found many ideas that didn’t fit within the paradigms of the day and tried to rearrange them into some kind of pattern that made sense. Lo! included him coining the word teleportation to explain things, but by his last book Wild Things he’d shifted from an environmental explanation to a more psychic one.
Wrong But Interesting
Part of why this post is later than I wanted it to be is I just kept falling into rabbit holes with Fort. Instead this is going to be more a pitch for you to go read his books if he sounds interesting and maybe pick up Jim Steinmeyer’s Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural.
A biography that hits the rarest note of all: It’s written by someone who gets the thing I most like about a figure well enough that I feel less desire to write about them.
The generation before Fort, the Victorians, were in love with various aspects of the supernatural, including mind-reading, mesmerism, and spiritualism—and often gave these phenomena the patina of scientific study and analysis.
What Fort invented was our modern view of the paranormal. He worked as a pure agnostic; rather than building up his phenomena to the status of miracles, he tore down the hallowed traditions of religion and science. After Fort, it was no longer possible to discuss these subjects without debating the nature of reality. After Fort, the supernatural was no longer associated with religiosity, but was presented as a natural, if unexpected, part of our world: those nagging “believe it or not” facts suggesting that our belief system is at best misguided and at worst conspiratorial. As De Casseres wrote of Fort’s accomplishments, “There is something tremendously real, annoyingly solid about Fort. His is the first attempt in the history of human thought to bring mysticism and trans-material phenomena down to (or maybe lift it up to) something concrete.”
Fort tried to find the edges of polite society and draw up what was underneath. A noble goal even if performed incompletely.
And another quote from Steinmeyer:
The author labelled himself an 'intermediatist,' recognizing that there was no way of positing absolutes or coming to conclusions. According to his formula, established science was a sham, for science didn't actually concern itself with 'prying into old bones, bugs, unsavory messes,' but was seeking reality by actively excluding all the data that did not fit with its present organization. The Book of the Damned took a different perspective, as if viewing the world through the opposite end of a telescope: 'Hailstones have fallen as big as hen's eggs. Or two-pounders. Six-pounders. A lump of ice fell in India "the size of an elephant". Snowflakes the size of saucers, or even bigger.' Fort gave the citations: from the Monthly Weather Review, Report of the Smithsonian Institution, or Nature, all within the past few decades. Stones had fallen from the sky. Not meteors; stones. Pebbles, rocks, boulders. Rains of pollen. Yellow rains. Black rain and black snow. Red rain. Fort gave many examples of red rain, and admitted that scientists often explained it as dust from the Sahara. But there are also accounts of blood from the sky, 'thick, viscous red matter'.
Fort walked into a very interesting problem Karl Popper begin considering the same year as the book of the damned was published: The Demarcation Problem.
Where does science end and nonscience begin?
Fort’s approach to this was a kind of full rejection of the vanity justifications of science: Here were data no respectable scientist would touch. Why not?
Like many autodidacts before and since, Fort skipped the important step of actually trying to understand that problem. He used other psychic infrastructure nearby and did the common move of comparing science to a religion.
It’s clear to me both as someone with basic scientific training and an appreciation for the weird that Fort was collecting outliers as a rule. Things you can’t apply experiment or mathematics to, leaving them difficult to study with anything approaching rigor.
A true gap in the theory, at least. There’s an old metaphor about being in a dark room and only looking in the one area where the light is good.
Carl Sagan famously thought of science as the light, the only source of reliable knowledge.
But I think of it more more of a somewhat fixed light source in any moment, illuminating while also ruining one’s night vision and making the shadows deeper by contrast.
As the old metaphor goes: What use is looking in the light if what you’re trying to find isn’t there?
Tricky, tricky.
To say nothing of how dubious it becomes.
Fort’s skepticism was also imperfect. His snippets of stories hold a bit more credibility than more elaborate ones as they’ve clearly not been, well, processed for a reader. But he does not show nearly as much skepticism of the news as he does of science, though surely many of the same institutional biases for propriety apply- plus the need to sell more papers!
The Book of the Damned assails readers with account after account with varying degrees of detail and context.
I’ve seen a few people describing Charles Fort as a kind of proto-postmodernist, and his skepticism and phenomenological approach may make him a candidate for that school. But that’s kind of silly. While he used absolute skepticism rhetorically, he clearly though explanations were possible, just that the ones we had couldn’t explain the reports he’d collected.
And it’s perhaps a Fortean problem itself that the great skeptic himself didn’t point his suspicion at the institutions that fed him with the raw material he worked with: The news media itself.
You can reasonably say, “Yeah, Newspapers are full of shit sometimes” and wipe away pretty much all of Fort’s work in a flash.
In a sense, Charles Fort’s whole life is a monument to the importance of seeking out primary sources and direct evidence. This secondary and tertiary source shit often lacks so much detail that it’s hard to tell if anything happened at all.
I have a collection of all his published works and have found 647 mentions on the word news. Well, sort of. Many of them are just the letters news in a row, sometimes with a space. Using this method it took me through his third book Lo! to find something critical of the media itself, and not just a reference to a newspaper where the report came in.
Or, the words new star. Which appear far more often than you might assume if you were me.
It is said, in the [London] Daily Mail, May 17th [1909], that many other stories of unaccountable objects and lights in the sky had reached the office of the Mail. If so, these stories were not published. The newspapers are supposed to be avid for sensational news, but they have their conventions, and unaccountable lights and objects in the sky are not supposed to have sex, and it is likely that hosts of strange, but sexless, occurrences have been reported, but have not been told of in the newspapers. In the Daily Mail, it is said that no attention had been paid to the letters, because everything that was mentioned in them, as evidence, was unsatisfactory. It is said that the object reported at Peterborough was probably a kite with a lantern tied to it.
I’m going to look through his references as test for my newfound access to deep newspaper archives.
Anyway, that might be the limit of his “media criticism.” Many self-styled skeptics have big perceptual gaps in their skepticism.
This kind of naïve media realism paired with his industriousness in seeking out media reports provides a less savory comparison to his modern conspiracy descendants: The free association that 4chan users and Qanon digital soldiers call baking.
Baking is a kind of social game today, played with hints and pieces to rearrange the events of the world into a coherent story that supports your underlying prejudices.
It’s distinct from robust critical thinking because it doesn’t discount personal bias, motivated reasoning, and ingroup/outgroup biases.
Charles Fort half accomplishes some of that but his goals of showing that there are always exceptions in any explanatory system didn’t really require him to go further to form any kind of functional alternative.
But that’s OK.
I think we can enjoy what’s fun about him and know what his flaws are without being too harsh.
An ongoing fact about people is they can be tremendously insightful in one respect and utter fools elsewhere. We’re a messy species.
I tend to think Fort’s march of the damned are probably mostly rumors, exaggerations and lies. But hey, you never know.
Wrapping Up
OK, uh, so this was supposed to be a thing I could do in a day. But that day was like November 29th. So… whoops.
I haven’t been idle though. Last time y’all voted I do a history of modern disclosure and in the way of that I asked for some old episodes of Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM and now I have an entirely new rabbit hole: The Disclosure Movement ended by 9/11.
I’ve been picking at a few subjects at once.
What I think is going to happen (canned laughter) (pause for the audience to laugh) is later this week I’m going to post more of a summary of our UFO coverage so far, including some stuff I’ve written about elsewhere.
I’m on bluesky now, so I want to set up a gateway for new readers.
And that’s pretty much that.
See you sooner than later ;-)
-SF
P.S. I was just notified of this lovely essay that goes into a lot more detail about Fort himself and how his views changed over time. It’s really good.
As always, extremely readable. Great summary and looking forward to anything involving Art Bell and C2C.