Charles Fort: Dogma be Damned
by Skylaire Alfvegren
Continued...
A couple dozen contemporary authors cover Fort’s beat; some approach strange phenomena encyclopedically, while the unweildy field’s greatest thinkers acknowledge their debt to Fort: John Michell, English tripster and expert on megalithic sites; rogue Egyptologist John Anthony West; John Keel, author, adventurer, UFO reconfigurer, and former Fate columnist--whose 1966 shocker, The Mothman Prophecies, was brought to the silver screen in 2002
I follow the Fortean philosophy as viewed by [zoologist] Ivan T. Sanderson, to study the tangible intangibles, those things that leave concrete evidence,” comments America’s preeminent cryptozoologist Loren Coleman (whose seminal Mysterious America was recently reprinted by Paraview Pocket Books.) “Belief is an artifact of religion. I accept the reality that some eyewitnesses are seeing, finding tracks, and coming across evidence of “unknown” or “unexpected” animals that have not been scientifically discovered and classified. Animals, in my way of thinking, are ‘flesh and blood.’ Cryptozoology is about science.” (Then again, some Forteans entertain the notion that Bigfoot might be an interdimensional traveller, somehow entwined with UFOs.)
Fort, to me, was the Monty Python of the strange and bizarre,” notes Brad Steiger, Forteana’s most prolific author. Having discovered Fort through the digest Fate (which has been published continuously since 1948), Steiger was captivated by Fort’s material as well as his satirical, non-dogmatic approach to it.
Many of Steiger’s 162 titles are “essentially collections of strange and bizarre material, offering no strong theories to explain the reasons for the mysteries which have occurred, but arguing nonetheless that these weird things had indeed happened to real people of sound mind and intellect.” (Steiger’s most recent book, the encyclopedic Conspiracies and Secret Societies: The Complete Dossier, has gone into multiple printings.)
With members scattered across the globe, INFO continues disseminating Fort's work and philosophy. Many INFO members will be embarking on another of the group’s “floating conferences” this December, on a cruise ship bound for the Caribbean. “At Fortfest, you see super left-wingers, right wingers, born again Christians, pagans, retired military officials, all getting along with enough respect for each other to listen without censorship but with a modicum of sense,” says Benjamin. (More information can be had at www.forteans.com).
