Charles Fort, the Original Fortean Investigator, the Father of Cryptozoology, UFOology and More

This week it's the Borneo Monster, a 100 foot snake that has women and children hiding in their huts and men seeking the witch doctors. Last week tales of the Mongolia Death Worm, who dissolves its prey with a spit of acid, were making the circuit. El Chupacabra raises his very ugly head on a regular basis and surely Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster is everyone's favorite shy monster. Charles Fort would be delighted.

Charles Hoy Fort was a curious man, in more ways than one. His curiosity led him to travel the world for oddities, working his way when necessary for three years. Unfortunately, he contracted malaria in South Africa and had to return home to New York City in 1896. After marrying his father's house maid, he spent years searching out anomalies in publication in the New York City Library. Fort and his wife eventually made their way to London in 1921, where he spent the next eight years investigating every nook and cranny of the British Museum.

Fort's real passion was for the strange, the unusual, the hidden. Investigators of the paranormal, monster hunters, UFOologists and ghost hunters are all Charles Fort's spiritual descendants. "Fortean" has become a synonym for the fields of research of strange phenomena. Cryptozoology is one of these Fortean area of study.

Fort delighted in proving science wrong. He saw science as monolithic, inflexible construct that refused to accept any evidence that doesn't fit. His "Book of the Damned" wasn't about vampires, but about recorded unexplained instances in the real world that science dismissed because they didn't fit. For instance, in chapter 2 we find the following concerning reports of what we now know were meteorites.

"About one hundred years ago, if anyone was so credulous as to think that stones had ever fallen from the sky, he was reasoned with:
In the first place there are no stones in the sky:
Therefore no stones can fall from the sky. " Charles Fort, Book of the Damned

He takes great delight in the knowledge that all the scientists were wrong, until the first asteroids were discovered and meteorites became "real" and no longer damned to non-existence.

Not that Charles Fort was always right. Discussing rains of varying colors documented around the world he took issue with the accepted of Saharan sand being somehow transported into rainstorms in England or Holland, and even coagulated red rain in China. Fort ventured his own, very creative, explanations. Red rains could be caused by:

"Debris from inter-planetary disasters.
Aerial battles.
Food-supplies from cargoes of super-vessels, wrecked in inter-planetary traffic. " Charles Fort, Book of the Damned

Fort was extremely fond of reports of animals falling from the sky, usually associated with a storm. Frogs, snakes, snails and fish were the most common. Again, Fort has nothing but disdain for the superficial explanations such as two boys fooling around and throwing bucketfuls of water at each other. Of course, there must have been fish in the water, claimed the rationalists, despite credible reports of many pounds of fish or fish that were not of the area. Fort tentatively promotes some of his own possibilities; "that the bottom of a super-geographical pond had dropped out."

Whatever the truth behind the phenomena that Charles Fort found, whether strange animals falling from the skies or apparitions of the long-dead, he approached each new anomaly with an open mind. I once heard a man on TV who claimed to debunk every cryptozoological report, every report of the paranormal claim to have an open mind. "Of course I have an open mind. I'm a skeptic." I prefer a world in which science looks at wonders and wonders.

http://www.resologist.net/damnei.htm
http://www.forteana.org/html/fortsbooks.html
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=145531