In Praise of the Paranormal Curiosity of Charles Fort, Patron Saint of Cranks

A strange precipitate fell July 12, 1873 across the streets and brick alleyways of Kansas City, over her stockyards and rail depots. Scientific American would report that there rained a “shower of frogs which darkened the air and covered the ground for a long distance.” A summer deluge of Dryophytes versicolor blanketing the Missouri city, coming down as if snow onto the Kaw River and the tony homes of Quality Hill, on Main Street and the City Market.

Not that this was a singular amphibious meteorological event—biblical rains of frogs were recorded in Toulouse, France in 1804, London in 1838, and in Birmingham, England in 1892, to choose just three examples. And, not just downpours of frogs, but spiders (Pakroff, Russia—1827), ants (Cambridge, England—1874), snakes (Memphis—1877), mussels (Paderborn, Germany—1892), turtles (Vicksburg, Mississippi—1894) and fish (Futtepoor, India—1918) as well. So copious are these animal rains that the London Times of 1859 quotes one confused vicar who was a witness to a blizzard of fish carcasses that the “roofs of some houses were covered with them.” That’s not to mention the storms of lead and diamonds, rains of water that were both black and red, and in one memorable instance the so-called 1876 “Kentucky Meat Shower,” which saw a downpour of bloody fleck-sized carrion that observers reported (but of course) tasted as if venison.

By the time a portly, mustachioed, failed novelist and hack journalist from the Bronx named Charles Fort recorded several instances of these events in his 1919 compendium The Book of the Damned he’d found an astounding sixty-thousand reports of such anomalous rain during research stints that took him to the 42nd Street Library where he had combed newspapers and almanacs, scientific journals and town records.

A modest inheritance from a wealthy uncle allowed Fort to quit his freelance stringing and to devote his attention entirely to the compilation of mysterious phenomena which he thought disrupted scientific consensus. “A procession of the damned,” Fort wrote, “By the damned, I mean the excluded.” To which, among other sundry subjects, he included telekinesis and teleportation, the Bermuda Triangle and animal cryptids, strange disappearances and ominous colors in the sky. Always presenting his archival discoveries—whether the disappearance of all the crewmembers on the Mary Celeste or accounts of triangle-shaped spacecraft—in a tone of wry, ironic detachment, Fort promised that the “outrageous is the reasonable, if presented politely.”

Fort developed an entirely new category, distinct from the occult. Unlike belief in magic and miracles, Fort’s interest in so-called anomalies depended on the authority of science, that which he was ostensibly often in conflict with. What he posited wasn’t the ability to divinely alter reality through incantation and conjuration, but rather of something scientifically discernable beyond the normal, beyond the natural. In four odd volumes including The Book of the Damned, New Lands in 1925, Lo! In 1931, and Wild Talents in 1932, Fort would invent that mode of thinking that goes beyond the normal and the natural, which is to say that this jocular New York journalist is the father of the paranormal and the supernatural.

Paranormal thinking can be defined as a discipline, a method, and a perspective, but also—and this isn’t emphasized enough—as a literary style. Fort may have posited himself as a modern day Diogenes, but before anything he was a writer, and a writer who conceived of an entirely novel genre at that. All the hallmarks of the paranormal mode are evident in Fort, manifesting like ectoplasm before the participants in a séance. The desire to see connections between disparate events, the baroque establishment of often contradictory explanations, the democratic distrust of authority. As much as an epistemological perspective, the paranormal is a prose style, a way of thinking about and explaining that which is inexplicable.

“I conceive of nothing in religion, science, or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while,” he writes in Wild Talents. His example gestated everyone from John Keel with his disturbing accounts of West Virginia’s fearsome Mothman and Graham Hancock discussing supposed prehistoric civilizations, to Erich von Däniken’s ancient astronauts and Colin Wilson’s urbane, English occultism. Traces of Fort can be seen in works as varied as the countercultural classic 1960 Morning of the Magicians by French journalists Louis Pauwels and Jacque Bergier to Art Bell’s radio show Coast to Coast A.M., a favorite of midnight truckers and stoned freshman alike. “Beyond that, the mystery begins,” wrote Pauwels and Bergier, a sentiment that Fort would have assented to, as he maintained that science could only peel the thin paper of the onion skin before another layer was revealed ad infimum.

Like those ancient Greek skeptics Pyrrho and Sextus Epictetus, Fort was a dogged anti-systematizer, anti-theorizer, anti-explainer. “I am a collector of data, and only a collector…piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores.” The resultant tetralogy is abundantly strange as a result; for books like New Lands and Wild Talents can be read as surreal, modernist experiments, collages of organized facts that add up to an anti-theory of reality as expressed in avant-garde anti-novels.

Virtually ignored by mainstream literary critics and historians, even among those with an attraction to his subject matter critiques have often been withering. Representative is the opinion of Colin Wilson, himself the author of the 1971 doorstopper The Occult: A History, who appraised Fort as being “almost unreadable…a patron saint of cranks.” During his short lifetime, however, he was lauded by some surprising heavyweights, including celebrated litigator Clarence Darrow, author Sherwood Anderson, and novelist Theodor Dreiser, who was not only responsible for Fort’s first book contract, but also would go onto become the president of the first Fortean Society (the man whom it honored wasn’t a member). For writers like Anderson and Dreiser, Fort’s oeuvre was to be read in the same spirit in which it was written—with a gleefully ironic eye, content to find contradictions in nature’s design while being free of any commitments. A body of work irreverent and wonderous.

Even Wilson had to admit that as a researcher, Fort had a talent for finding the weirdness in the scientific as if he were a metal detector detecting treasure on the beach. There were, for example, the bipedal, cloven-hoofed footprints made in the virgin snow on an 1855 winter’s day that originated in South Devon, England and continued uninterrupted for nearly a hundred miles, with Fort quoting one witness who maintained that the “footprints being so peculiar and far apart gave rise to a scare that the devil was loose.”

Then there is the unearthly luminescence, the uncanny glow that permeated the atmosphere in 1883, visible from Novgorod to New York, San Francisco to Sydney, which was attributed to the massive volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, except as Fort explains, reports of the phenomenon preceded the volcano’s eruption by several months. A more concerning eruption explored by Fort was of the spontaneous human kind, the mysterious immolation of bodies without any clear mechanism, which he describes in terms that most find florid and purple, but to my ear bears the hallmarks of Fort’s Victorian upbringing combined with rococo psychedelics, wherein he writes how the phenomenon was derived from “psycho-electricity…flowing from human batteries there was a force that was of use to the luminous things that hung around.”

Indeed there is a prosody that, when it occurs, supersedes his arguments, an incongruous yoking together of bizarre imagery with such exuberance that Fort’s style reminds me of his European contemporaries the Dadaists and Surrealists. Imagining the potential utility of witchcraft to military purposes, Fort describes a “regiment burst into flames, and the soldiers are torches. Horses snort smoke from the combustion of their entrails. Reinforcements are smashed under cliffs that are teleported from the Rocky Mountains. The snatch of Niagara Falls—it pours upon the battlefield. The little poltergeist girls reach for their wads of chewing gum.”

Fort is a Yankee Andre Breton, whose own contention in the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto that “Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality” could be from The Book of the Damned. Consider the 1912 rain in Queensland, Australia that saw mud, dirt, and indeed balls of fire plummet from the sky, which Fort describes in an idiom idiosyncratic and beautiful, evoking to me a modernist prose poem.  “Sometimes there are abortive embryos that are mixtures—an eye looking out from ribs—other features scattered. Fire and dust and darkness—mud that was falling from the sky—Australia was a womb that was misconceiving.” The fragments offset by em dashes—the surreal imagery—the rhetorical polysyndeton—that arresting final metaphor. It’s a mistake to read Fort as philosophy, or even journalism, rather than as poetry.

Despite all of the sheer fun that Fort can engender, an emotion not unfamiliar to anyone who enjoys the Weekly World News or Chris Carter’s The X-Files, the line between The Book of the Damned and the “Did my own research” Google scholar, the “I don’t trust experts” kook, is short. When Fort writes in The Book of the Damned, “Accept anything. Then explain it your own way,” it’s hard not to see intimations of the most noxious of the conspiracy-minded, a path from teleportation and telekinesis to Pizzagate and Qanon, even if his own purposes always seemed satirical.

Epistemological anarchism can come perilously close to epistemological nihilism. But there is something of worth in Fort’s pose as well, a philosophy of science that humbly acknowledges that the “fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open.” This isn’t anti-science so much as it is anti-positivism; that’s to say that Fort doesn’t reject empiricism per se, rather he (rightly) discounts truth as only being in the domain of science. He’s a pulp version of philosophers of science like Karl Popper in his 1959 The Logic of Scientific Discoveries and Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Arguably Fort’s thinking is in line with that of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, and his “problem of induction” which emphasizes that just because something has always acted in a certain way, doesn’t mean that it always will. In other words, science has never been in the truth business, but has always traded in facts, and the difference between those two things is where wonder resides. “Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive,” writes Kuhn, and he sounds just like Fort. Fort is the modernist scribe of the twentieth-century’s scientific upheavals, a figure aligned with the absurdities of general relativity and quantum mechanics, where mass is energy and space is time.

After all, it was only a year before Fort published New Lands that physicists at Western Electric demonstrated that sometimes an electron acts like a particle, and sometimes it acts like a wave. The difference, it was surmised, all depends on the act of observation itself.