Charles Hoy Fort

Charles Hoy fort
Photo Source: Public Domain

Today it is quite common to hear about someone that saw a UFO, or about some natural phenomena that appeared in the sky, but this was not the case one hundred years ago. While the paranormal was recognized then, it was a subject that brought laughter to many a scientist in those days and today also. The general public has a little different idea, polls have shown that some of us do believe in the paranormal, while others are at least interested. This can be proven by the popularity of various television shows on haunting and spirit investigation. Abnormal finds and events have fascinated many of us and all these things were part of the latter life’s work of Charles Hoy Fort.

Charles Hoy Fort was born on August 6, 1874 and died on May 4, 1932, at the age of 67 years old. He was an author of many books on the paranormal and because of his research, we have the terms Fortean and Forteana when discussing paranormal events. Fort did not have a happy youth. He wrote an autobiography, but never published it. In it he spoke of several instances of abuse by his father. Some detractors say that since Fort was not even a good student, that his work should not be taken seriously and others say that since we are talking about the paranormal, nothing in that realm should be taken seriously. Fort traveled quite extensively and fell ill in Southern Africa. He returned home and was eventually married to a woman that was either illaterate or just not interested in literature, I am not sure.

Fort made a living of sorts by writing short stories and worked at various jobs. He was able to devote all his efforts to writing after he inherited money from an uncle. He then received more money a year later when his brother died. Out of ten books that he wrote, only one was published and this was not a success. He moved on and wrote two more books that were not published, but what is interesting about those books are the themes. These book were written before 1919 and the first was about beings on Mars that controlled events on Earth and the second was about an evil race that lived at the South Pole. Fort then hit pay dirt. In 1919 he published a book entitled, The Book Of The Damned. This book was a compilation of data that Fort had collected, for which the science at the time had no explanation.

One might say that Fort was one of the first authors to get popular by questioning scientific dogma as it related to different abnormalities. Wow that was a mouthful. He became popular and eventually had what some called a cult following. His fans would anxiously look for phenomena that they thought was abnormal and send him clippings and such. He was not beyond writing back to them, to their delight. When Fort died, his collection of over 60,000 notes was donated to the New York Public Library. Fort would spend much of his time at the libraries where ever he lived. When he was in New York, he would go to the New York public library and when in London he would use the library there. He was looking for things that just didn’t fit into the accepted scientific theory of the day and he found plenty of that. More of his notes can be found at the University of Pennsylvania. The interesting thing is that it is said that he threw out over 100,00 notes over his lifetime.

Besides The Book Of The Damned, he also wrote other books that dealt with the same type of subject material. They were New Lands, Lo! and Wild Talents, which was published while he lay on his death bed. Fort would love to find scientific explanations for something and point out the ridiculous of them to his readers. Fort actually made a very bizarre statement. He said, "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written." This is quite a strange statement indeed for a man to make who devoted almost the entire latter part of his life to exposing the explanations of science for abnormal events and objects. As crazy as this might sound, I understand what he was getting at. As a writer, we sometimes like to suggest alternate explanations for things, but that does not necessarily mean that we believe that this is the correct answer, even though it could be.

Fort would write about anything that he considered abnormal. Some of these events would be of a paranormal nature, but not all. Sometimes he would write about strange natural events, such as different animals falling from the sky. Even today we have reports of fish and frogs raining down on people and this is what he was referring to. He wrote about disappearances of people that could not be explained, much as I have. Another thing dear to my heart was apparently dear to his, out of place objects. I am talking about things like jewelry found in lumps of coal that are known to be hundreds of thousands of years old, or other objects that were much too advanced to be found in the strata of earth where they were dug up.

What I found interesting is that Fort believed in alien abduction. Was he the first one to believe this? If he wasn’t, he was among the very first. He also believed in UFOs and pointed to the fact that strange lights could be seen in the skies and that he believed that these might be alien craft from another world. He thought that all these events were connected and that there was really only one event and that everything else was part of this. An interesting idea and one that some today seem to also believe. There is no denying that while Fort was not a good student, he was intelligent and well read and this presented a problem for some of his critics, when he would reply to them with an intelligent argument. One of the arguments that he put forth is one that is being stated over and over again today and that is, in science there is the acceptable and the unacceptable. Meaning that if something seems not to fit into the norm, it is buried in some museum basement, never to be heard about again.

Fort was fond of saying that sometimes there is more than one explanation for evidence and he believed that all should be considered. Some of the things that Fort was laughed at for talking about in his day, are now scientific fact. A good example of this is the fish fall I talked about above. It is now known to happen naturally. The same is true for ball lightning. Was Fort more than just a paranormal journalist? It would certainly seem so and this is what some of his famous admirers thought, such as Clarence Darrow the world renowned lawyer.