The Fortean Fallacy
New York eccentric Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932) really
started something. The obsessive hobby which occupied the last 26 years of his
life led to four published books — The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!,
and Wild Talents — which appeared between 1919 and 1932. These books are
perfect examples of the classic pseudoscience activity of research by exegesis.
Fort haunted the British Museum in London and the New York Public Library,
noting any event reported in old magazines and newspapers — the older the
better — which in any way seemed “odd.” Fort enjoyed taking several hundred
such odd events and using them to prop up a scenario “theory” — the wilder the
better. Fort equally enjoyed contradicting himself; instead of riding the
hobbyhorse of a single crazy “theory,” like most modern pseudoscientists, Fort
offered numerous totally inconsistent ones. For example, in one place he
speculates that the earth is relatively stationary in a space that is
surrounded by an opaque shell, full of holes (the starts and planets) and with
areas which are mushy or jelly-like. Between the shell and the earth are
gigantic floating islands of jello, to which stick tons of rubbish — worms,
fish, dead birds, bricks, worked stone, worked iron, liquids of various colors,
frogs, odd humans like Caspar Hauser — which has somehow blown there or drifted
there from other worlds. Fort did not take anything he wrote seriously, and his
books are intentionally very funny — a really rare thing since one of the
distinctive features of pseudoscience is its total lack of humor, except for
unintended humor. On the other hand, Fort, a devout believer in the philosophy
of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, if little else, was quick to point out that
in his opinion all the claims, facts, theories and discoveries of science were
just as absurd and false as Fort’s own speculations. Fort, who knew nothing
whatsoever about science, had not the vaguest idea how scientists confirm or
validate an idea. He was not so much a pseudoscientist as he was one who
believes, like Hegel and his modern disciple, Feyerabend, that there is no
difference between science and pseudoscience; his decades of exegesis were
intended to demonstrate mainly that “reality” is ultimately unknowable, and
that the smug certainties of science are achieved mainly by sweeping aside and
ignoring all the “unpleasant facts” that don’t fit in with scientific dogmas.
As a critic of science, Fort is of no interest whatsoever,
because he was totally ignorant of what science is and what scientists do. But
his impact on pseudoscience was immense. Fort taught the field of pseudoscience
that all you need to write a book is a subscription to some newspapers and good
sharp scissors plus a scrapbook to paste it all in. Since newspapers publish
vast amounts of “weird” and “strange” reports, one just has to keep clipping
until one has enough for a book — of course, one never investigates directly to
see whether these reports actually correspond to real events! That would spoil
the fun; it would also no longer be pseudoscience.
The two most serious modern Forteans — a Fortean being one
who occupies himself clipping weird reports out of old magazines and
newspapers, like Fort himself — are Vincent H. Gaddis and William R. Corliss.
Gaddis is the unsung inventor of the Bermuda Triangle hoax. Corliss is the
creator of a number of vast tomes full of questionable reports on a wide
variety of topics, as part of what he calls his “Sourcebook Project.” Both
Gaddis and Corliss completely lack the wit and literary elegance that make
Fort’s books such fun to read. Many other writers have followed in the
footsteps of Fort and Gaddis, particularly, often plagiarizing their books
directly. Some modern Forteans include Charles Berlitz, Jacques Bergier, Ivan
T. Sanderson, Morris K. Jessup, Robert Charroux, John Wallace Spencer, D. Scott
Rogo, Martin Ebon, Frank Edwards, Harold T. Wilkins, and many others.
Such book-producing Forteans should not be confused with
members of the Fortean Society, a club founded in 1931 by members of the New
York novel-writing profession, including Tiffany Thayer, Alexander Wolcott,
Booth Tarkington, and Ben Hecht. The Fortean Society was merely an excuse for
buddies to get together, hear exceptionally valueless speeches after a good dinner,
and then drink one another under the table.
We might define Forean activity as the collection of
magazine and newspaper reports of “odd” or “impossible” phenomena, and the
grouping of such phenomena by “type,” followed by the claim to have learned something
from reviewing the reports of the phenomena. The “something” generally tends to
be an absurd scenario “theory” — that all these missing cats have wandered into
the 9th Akasic dimension, that’s why they’re never seen again.
Further, these reports are always taken precisely at face value. There is never
the slightest attempt at checking or verification. As most are aware, there
have been for a number of years some tabloid newspapers and one or two
magazines which exist principally to print or reprint Fortean material. Most of
the tabloids that sit near drugstore checkout counters are of this kind —
BIGFOOT STOLE MY WIFE! TV STARS CURSED BY INDIAN MEDICINE MAN! GHOST OF J. F. K.
HAUNTS U.S. AIR FORCE! “MASH” STAR’S EXPERIENCE WITH REINCARNATION! and so on;
with the difference that essentially the entire content of such tabloids is
literally made up on the spot by the writers sitting at their word processors,
which short-cuts the laborious clipping procedure, while insuring that the
desired celebrities are mentioned as being involved somehow. A more traditional
Fortean publication is the magazine Fate, which has been published since
1948, founded by science fiction magazine editor Raymond A. Palmer.
A fairly large percentage of all pseudoscience books published
in this century have had a basically Fortean format. After Fort’s own books,
the most successful were Fortean books on “flying saucers” that appeared in the
early 1950’s. The success of these books led pseudoscientists to create Fortean
books on a vast number of other topics, including mysterious disappearances of
ships and aircraft at sea. The classic Fortean book is a collection of ghost
stories, “ESP experiences,” recollection of near-death experiences, reports of
the Loch Ness Monster, etc., etc., etc.
For more about Charles Fort, see:
