Charles Fort: Dogma be Damned

by Skylaire Alfvegren

Siena, Italy’s best preserved medieval city, was deluged by blood red rains on the morning of December 28, 1860. A second scarlet rain fell before noon. It returned three days later, and locals prayed the rosary heavenward.

This strange report, standing alone, may not raise an eyebrow. Now consider it alongside thousands of other verified reports of inexplicable things falling out of the world’s skies: “substances” pulpy, perfumed, purple or phosphorescent; transparent or unctuous; from “greenish-yellow” to “salmon-colored.” Drizzles of fungus, nitric acid, insects, coins, fish (or their scales), sulphur. Rains of bullets, snakes, frogs, flesh and blood. Bizarro rains, considered together, become the phenomenon known as “skyfalls,” and considered together, have more credence.

For over a quarter of a century, Charles Fort, bibliomancer extraordinaire, combed the world’s newspapers and scientific journals for wonders which orthodox science either ignored or explained away. In the libraries of New York and London, he gathered tens of thousands of reports of ghosts and psychic phenomena, geophysical and atmospheric anomalies, astronomical and archaeological mysteries, which he pounded into four spectacularly original tomes: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932).

With short stories and one novel under his belt, Fort incinerated the antecedents of The Book of the Damned (literally setting fire to his first two manuscripts) before hitting upon a completely distinctive formula. Compelled by “strange orthogenetic gods,” his style was as explosive as the impossibilities he cataloged: highly satirical, volcanically stream of consciousness, and full of wild hypotheses which would later bleed into science fiction (Robert Heinlein, Fritz Leiber and Philip K. Dick are but a few authors who admitted Fort’s influence), and science, as well.

“He identified many previously unrecognized types in phenomenal reality, such as the UFO, the fireball and the teleportation effect,” wrote John Michell and Bob Rickard in their Phenomena: A Book of Wonders.

Fort believed in nothing absolutely, presenting his data as “a procession of the damned… [meaning] the excluded.” He delighted in poking fun at dogmatic science, the practioners of which had “said to all these things that they are damned” in the first place. He explained, "I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while." His damned data, he wrote, would “be “proved” as well as Moses or Darwin ever “proved” anything.” On Darwinism, for instance, he noted, “The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest—weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does not survive. Darwinism: That survivors survive.”

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