Charles Fort
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 👤 Person
Contents 4
| Type | Person |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Charles Hoy Fort |
Charles Fort (6 August 1874 – 3 May 1932) was an American writer who collected thousands of reports of strange events that science could not explain. His books, starting with The Book of the Damned (1919), are among the earliest to suggest that lights and objects seen in the sky might be visitors from elsewhere, and the word "Fortean" is still used for unexplained phenomena.[1]
Life
Fort was born in Albany, New York. After working as a journalist and writing novels, of which only one was published, he received a modest inheritance in 1916 that let him write full-time.[1] For about 30 years he combed scientific journals, newspapers and magazines in the New York Public Library and the British Museum, writing his findings on tens of thousands of notes kept in shoeboxes. He and his wife Anna lived mostly in the Bronx, with stays in London in the 1920s.[1] He died in 1932, shortly after seeing advance copies of his last book.[1]
His books
Fort published four books of anomalies: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932). The "damned" were the facts he felt science had excluded. They included falls of frogs and fish from the sky, ball lightning, mysterious disappearances and strange lights and objects in the sky.[1] He is credited with coining the word "teleportation".[1] In Lo! he discussed reports of aerial apparitions from the 19th and 20th centuries, and he was an early proponent of the idea that strange lights or objects in the sky might be alien spacecraft.[1]
Fort wrote with heavy irony, mocking scientists and their certainties. He offered outlandish theories of his own, such as a "Super-Sargasso Sea" in the sky where lost things collect, but said he believed nothing he had written.[1] Jerome Clark called him a satirist deeply sceptical of claims to final knowledge.[1]
Influence
Fort's friends, including novelist Theodore Dreiser and screenwriter Ben Hecht, founded the Fortean Society in 1931, though Fort refused to join.[1] Science-fiction writers such as Eric Frank Russell, Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick admired his work, and the magazine Fortean Times, founded in 1973, carries on his interests.[1] His collections of early aerial sightings made him an important forerunner of ufology, and UFO researchers such as Jerome Clark have described themselves as Forteans.[1]
References
- Charles Fort — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
This page was last edited on 31 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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