Works of Charles Fort
Because Charles Fort lived in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, the only devices we have to form an educated opinion about him is his writing. Charles Fort wrote published four books during his lifetime. These included The Book of the Damned, Lo!, Wild Talents, and New Lands. All of these works touched on his own scientific beliefs and the fact that he was sickened by the way that conventional science would not touch on things that were difficult to explain. They all at some point touch on Fortean phenomenon, whether it be lightning balls, UFOs, spontaneous human combustion, or teleportation. Fort strived to find an explanation for the unexplainable and to bring it to the public’s attention that mainstream science would simply shrug off this phenomenon as nonexistent.
Fort’s work is famous for being difficult to understand. This is partly because his work is very deep and also very complex. It’s also because he had a habit of being very contradictory with himself. He would seem to disprove facts on one page only to, a few pages later, recall those same facts to prove a point. Fort’s writing at the time it was written was greatly criticized and much of his work was even deemed “almost unreadable” by Wilson in 2000.
Fort’s first book, The Book of the Damned focused on everything that science had up until that point, disregarded because it did not follow any known theories or guidelines. The book dealt mainly with certain types of phenomenon including UFOs, falling objects or animals, and mysterious disappearances and reappearances, along with many others. Today the book is still a very important piece of literature due to the fact that there are many studies being done today in conventional science about some of the phenomenal concepts that Fort touched on in the book.
It is New Lands that he mainly focuses on one subject; that being the Super-Sargasso Sea. This place, according to Fort, exists in a continent that is above Earth and this is where objects and animals appear only to later rain down on earth. He also goes into greater detail in this book about how there are many planets that scientists had not yet discovered or studied.
Lo! could be identified as a sequel of some sort to New Lands in the way that he delves mainly into astronomy and spends the second part of the book finding flaws in the way astronomy was done at the time. The title is meant to be somewhat sarcastic, poking fun at the scientists of the day who were continuing to discover new facts and theories about Earth that would eventually turn out to be incorrect. This is Fort’s most popular work.
The book Wild Talents begins by speaking of the paranormal phenomenon that had been spoken about in his other works as well but this time, Fort placed the focus elsewhere. He said in this book that he believed in these things because a lot of them the first men on Earth needed to survive. It is then that he delves into thinking things into existence, and spends a majority of the book talking about that.
If nothing else, Charles Fort’s books are extremely interesting and extremely controversial. While many of the ideas were rejected and even ridiculed when the books were first published, there is little doubt that at least some of Fort’s concepts have been accepted today as fact.