Born in Albany in 1874, Charles Fort, the so-called “father of modern phenomenalism, ” was something of a factotum in his early years. After a formative trek from England to the south of Africa, Fort spent the next decade of life working odd jobs, while attempting to gain a foothold as a newsman and science fiction novelist. During this time, Fort produced ten books — only one of which ever saw publication.

It wasn’t until the age of 42 that Fort finally made his entrance to a wider readership. After a rather large inheritance from the untimely death of his brother allowed him a more leisurely lifestyle, the now full-time writer began his first non-fiction endeavor. For the rest of his life, Fort would spend hours poring over newspapers, academic journals and scientific theses, meticulously cataloguing each recorded instance of events dubbed impossible by the scientific establishment.

These reports of spontaneous human combustion, unidentified lights in the sky, stigmata, phantom creatures, teleportation — a term he coined — and the like were eventually compiled into Fort’s four best-selling books: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932). Much to his surprise, they proved be incredibly successful and remain in print to this day.

Fort’s interest in seeking out anomalous phenomena seems be an outgrowth of an inborn anti-authoritarian streak. Never in his work does he to claim to know the cause of these freak occurrences outright; rather, he merely points to the inability of then-modern day science to account for events that shouldn’t be possible, yet were witnessed by dozens – and sometimes hundreds – of bystanders.

For instance, he rejected the notion that the scientific mainstream had delivered satisfactory explanation for a happening near and dear to his own heart: mysterious falls of frogs, fish, stones and colored rain from the sky. Instead, he postulated that a realm he dubbed the Super-Sargasso Sea existed somewhere in the atmosphere. Random material from the Earth, he reasoned, was sucked up at random into this “sea,” then deposited at random to another point on the globe.

Such theories, however, may have been yet another mode for Fort to thumb his at the powers-that-be. He labeled himself an intellectual agnostic and wrote in the very first chapter of Lo! that “I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written.” After his death in 1932, Fort’s many followers carried on his curiosity driven crusade, eventually resulting in the founding of The Fortean Society the very same year and The International Fortean Organization in 1965.

Today, Fort’s name lives on as a part of the English language. The term “Fortean” is generally defined as “ pertaining to extraordinary and strange phenomenon and happenings.”

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