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Bringing Charles Fort Up to Date
By Mark Sunlin
FATE :: August 2006
Over a century ago, an American named Charles Hoy Fort (1871– 1932) inherited a bundle of money. While many under these circumstances would have bought a yacht, taken up globetrotting, or peacefully kicked back and gone fishing, Fort went hunting in the libraries of New York and London. His quest was to find reports of what are now popularly called “anomalies,” things that aren’t what they are supposed to be…especially in the eyes of science. By 1930 he had collected “some 60,000” of them, mostly jotted down on scraps of butcher’s paper.
Fort wasn’t after any particular theory. “Trying to prove something is no attempt of mine,” he remarked. It was more of an anti-establishment campaign. “Any pronouncement by any authority is to me the same as hand cuffs. It’s brain cuffs,” he quipped.
The term “Fortean,” for one who follows Fort’s lead of anomaly-seeking, was coined in 1919, upon the publication of his first book, when the impressed reviewer Ben Hecht wrote in The Chicago Daily News, “Henceforth I am a Fortean.” ...
Read the rest of this article in the August 2006 issue of FATE
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