"Charles Fort’s classic of the paranormal
is a definitive narration by esoteric scholar Mitch Horowitz
The Book of the Damned shot like a comet—or something unknown in the sky—across the horizon of a complacent industrial world and its new faith in orthodox science in post-World War I America.
Author Charles Fort (1874-1932) curated a registry of damned data: reports that philosophical materialism had excluded, such as strange airships in an era before UFOs; unknown beasts; blood, frogs, fishes, and stones falling to earth; floating islands; meteorites containing fossils; tools dropping from the skies; fairy coffins; lights on the moon; and strange figures moving across the sun.
Fort revealed how dogmas and orthodoxies once associated with religion were reemerging within triumphant science itself. Whatever authorities could not explain, they condemned, ridiculed, or ignored. But philosopher-compiler Fort illuminated enduring nether-realms that modern man, secure in his manufactured certainties, insisted did not exist.
With a new introductory essay, “Philosopher of the Damned,” historian of the esoteric Mitch Horowitz situates Fort in literary history as a figure who, like Edgar Allan Poe, defined a genre—one so unclassifiable, yet omnipresent, that it bears the author’s name: Fortean.
Mitch further explores how Fort’s insights into categories that physicalist science rejected presaged our own era—one of both new mysteries and new modes of insight. “Fort’s work,” he writes, “has not only endured into our age, but the outcast intellect influenced our quantum-entangled, binary-coded, multiversed conceptions of reality.”"
"This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.
Like Fort's previous works, Wild Talents deals with a number of anomalous phenomena and Fort's ongoing attack on scientific dogma. Though not as well known as some of his other works, Wild Talents is arguably Fort's best work. Fort's writing style and tongue-in-cheek sense of self-deprecating humor is on full display in this book. As a result, this book is generally easier to read than his earlier works."
"'Did beings from outer space visit earth in the past … are the various objects seen in the sky evidences of their visits?
What is the explanation of falls of frogs, falls of fishes, falls of seagulls, which have been recorded from time to time?
How can we account for all the inexplicable astronomical observations that have been made in the past?
How can we answer reports of strange animals, disappearances of men from open sight, curious structures in the snow, talents like teleportation and telekinesis?'
These are the 'damned,' by which the late Charles Ford meant all the wide range of mysteries that are ignored by orthodox science or explained away improperly.
He worked for 27 years at the British Museum and the New York Public Library gathering material on phenomena from the borderlands between science and fantasy. His research appeared in four books: The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents.
In these four volumes Fort organized and commented on a wild host of phenomena: flying saucers seen in the sky before the invention of aircraft, flying wheels, strange noises in the sky; correlations between volcanic activity and atmospheric phenomena; falls of red snow; falls of frogs, fishes, worms, shells, jellies; finding of 'thunderbolts'; discrepancies in the schedules of comets, sightings on Mars and the moon; infra-Mercurian planets; inexplicable footprints in snowfields; flat earth phenomena, disruptions of gravity; poltergeist phenomena; stigmata; surviving fossil animals; the Jersey devil; Kaspar Hauser; spontaneous combustion; and similar weird effects."
"Lo! was the third published nonfiction work of the author Charles Fort (first edition 1931). In it he details a wide range of unusual phenomena. In the final chapter of the book he proposes a new cosmology that the earth is stationary in space and surrounded by a solid shell which is (in the book's final words) '.. not unthinkably far away.'
Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932) was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various such phenomena."
"New Lands was the second nonfiction book of the author Charles Fort, written in 1925. It deals primarily with astronomical anomalies.
Fort expands in this book on his theory about the Super-Sargasso Sea - a place where earthly things supposedly materialize in order to rain down on Earth - as well as developing an idea that there are continents above the skies of Earth. As evidence, he cites a number of anomalous phenomena, including strange 'mirages' of land masses, groups of people, and animals in the skies. He also continues his attacks on scientific dogma, citing a number of mysterious stars and planets that scientists failed to account for.
Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932) was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various such phenomena."
"Wild Talents is the fourth and final nonfiction book written by paranormal author Charles Fort, published in 1932. In recounting a wide variety of odd phenomena, Fort largely disregards his previous teleportation theory, or at least incorporates him into his new thesis. Rather than a vague 'Cosmic joker', as he postulated in his earlier books, the responsibility for these occurrences are freak powers that occur in the human mind, that cannot be naturally developed, but are there, Fort feels, as a sort of throwback to primeval times.
Fort discusses many topics he had touched on before, though generally in more detail than in his other works - poltergeists, spontaneous human combustion, animal mutilations, vampires, and ghosts - along with many supposed cases of psychokinesis and ability to control one's surroundings. His thesis is that in primeval times, man needed such extraordinary powers in order to survive in the wilderness, and that all people can potentially develop these powers if they literally put their mind to it. He also explores alleged cases of witchcraft and murder by mental suggestion, compiling an impressive list of 'occult criminology' (people apparently being murdered under peculiar or unexplainable circumstances) in support. He also attacks the general sense of taboo which he feels prevents wild talents from being accepted, and suggests that such 'talents' would become acceptable if science would deem them as such.
Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932) was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various such phenomena."
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