Charles Fort – författare

This scholarly exploration of the borderlands between science and fantasy features four complete works by the redoubtable Charle Fort (1874-1932): The Book of the Damned, Lo!, Wild Talents, and New Lands. All concern the bizarre phenomena unexplained by traditional science: flying saucers, telekinesis, sudden showers of fish from the sky, stigmata, poltergeists, and spontaneous combustion.

From teleportation to spontaneous human combustion, poltergeists and UFOs—Fort's expansive and erratic research forms the basis of modern paranormal studiesCharles Fort (1874–1932) was a true iconoclast who embodied the idea of the "cult writer" in every sense of the term with his wildly entertaining prose and confounding research into the unknown. His early admirers formed the Fortean Society during his lifetime, in 1931, to elevate his work. Since that time, Fort's name has been synonymous with the strange, in large part due to the Fortean Times, published since 1973.While Fort has received sustained attention over the years, Research is the first book to delve into his methodology and source material for his investigations into paranormal phenomena. In addition to Fort's famously small notes that are extensively reproduced here for the first time, the book includes Fort's remarkable letters soliciting information on a wide variety of inexplicable phenomena that appeared in newspapers worldwide, as well as the responses he received. From frogs falling from the sky to sea monsters who inhabit our oceans, it is all here in his inimitable style, along with an appreciation by acclaimed experimental filmmaker and self-proclaimed Fortean Peggy Ahwesh.

This careful, exhaustive, often astonishing chronicle of anomalous phenomena dismissed by conventional science is Charles Fort's groundbreaking foray into the field of "weird science." Fort looked at science as a dogmatic attempt to explain phenomena in prefabricated and often constrictive terms. It was the anomalies, the excluded, or what Fort called "the damned" at the fringes of science that offered the most intriguing windows to the future of human insight.To tweak stodgy scientists, Fort's Book of the Damned recounts hundreds of strange situations that he felt eluded scientific explanation-from black rain to six-legged lambs-many of which were reported in mainstream scientific publications of the time. Scientists, he asserted, often argued according to their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence and ignored inconvenient facts that conflicted with their preferred theories. In this view he anticipated some of the arguments that Thomas Kuhn would later advance in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.While holding the distinct position of being called both an enemy of science and an enemy of dogma, Fort challenged the "closed minds" of established scientists and created a popular classic that has inspired legions of admirers.