Mr. X-Files: Charles Fort, Founding Father of Paranormal Studies

Mainstream scientists may not have thought very highly about the writings of American researcher Charles Hoy Fort after The Book of the Damned was published way back in 1919, but those interested in paranormal phenomena today certainly owe him a lot, regardless of whether they have ever heard of him or not. Quite literally ahead of his time, Fort was the first to publish writings that popularized the investigation of so-called "anomalous phenomena." His fascination with the occult, the supernatural and the unexplained immediately struck a chord and found resonance in mainstream America, and this long before the 1950's fascination with UFOs or the more recent Generation X-Files. In fact, he was the first person to ever suggest the idea of alien abduction, or that strange lights or objects observed in the skies might actually be alien spacecraft.

Like a very early version of FBI agents Scully and Mulder, Fort's "interests" included anything and everything that crossed the line of the twilight zone that exists between fact and fantasy. An obsessive hunter of oddities (he collected tens of thousands of notes, primarily in the New York City Public Library and the British Museum), he spent his entire life seeking connections between a wild host of disparate phenomena: Poltergeists, mass hysteria, disappearing people, falls of living animals, spontaneous human combustion and countless other phenomena. He was clearly convinced that everything is somehow connected and that strange coincidences and inexplicable phenomena happen for a reason.

Born in 1874 in Albany, New York, Fort grew up to become highly distrustful of authority and fiercely independent in his thinking. This, along with his obsession for collecting information about phenomena modern science was unable to account for, logically led to the publication of The Book of the Damned, a book which would change the course of a life which had been filled with more than its fair share of failure and adversity up until then. He had written ten novels and numerous short stories before then but had met with only very limited success. Prone to depression, his frustration was indeed so great at times that he even destroyed thousands of his beloved notes and several of his own manuscripts, among them two finished works entitled X and Y, the first dealing with Martian beings controlling events on Earth, the second describing a malevolent civilization living on the South Pole. Luckily however, New Lands, Lo! and Wild Talents, the books which followed the publication of The Book of the Damned, were just as well-received as his first great literary success. Taken together, these four books not only established Fort's reputation as a writer, they eventually made him the subject of a downright cult following.

But strangely, the books themselves aren't necessarily the accomplishments that have stood the test of time, regardless of how witty and interestingly written they are. Fort's true appeal for many is the fact that he is a true skeptic, one "who opposes all forms of dogmatism, believes nothing, and does not take a position on anything" He was never particularly interested in questioning the reliability of his countless sources, for instance, nor did ever feel the need to confirm his findings using scientific method or testing. On the contrary, Fort was quite vocal about being skeptical of the scientific method itself, mistrusting what he saw as scientific dogma and "priestcraft" in science, a system which ignored or even suppressed data inconvenient to it. Fort made no secret of the fact that he "believed" what he did because he chose to, and that just because some people may have a psychological need to believe in mysteries doesn't make them more prejudiced or gullible than others who have a psychological need not to believe in them.

A patron of cranks, as one scientist referred to him? Perhaps, but the cranks who have followed in his footsteps have become quite numerous indeed. Several societies and organizations have been created in his honor, as was the term "fortean phenomena." And apart from his many books and a modern pop culture today obsessed with anomalous phenomena, one he helped pioneer, he has also left behind some 32 crates of notes which survive today at the University of Pennsylvania. His own X-Files, so-to-speak.