Authors: Charles Fort
London
Daily Mail,
Nov. 2, 1926—“Tale that taxes credulity!” “A story of two seals, within three months, in a local pond, is taxing the credulity of residents of Hampstead.” But there is a story of another seal that had been caught, after a struggle, dying soon after capture. In the
Daily Chronicle,
it is said that the “first mystery catch” was still in the tank, in a thriving condition.
I have come upon more, though to no degree enlighteningly more, about the apes of Gibraltar. In the
New York Sun,
Feb. 6, 1929, Dr. Raymond L. Ditmars tells of an “old legend” of a tunnel, by which apes travel back and forth, between Africa and Spain. No special instances, or alleged instances, are told of. In Gilbard’s
History of Gibraltar,
published in 1881, is mention of the “wild and impossible theory of communication, under sea, between Gibraltar and the Barbary coast.” Here it is said that the apes were kept track of, so that additions to families were announced in the Signal Station newspaper. The notion of apes in any way passing across the Mediterranean is ridiculous to Gilbard, but he notes that there are so many apes upon the mountain on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar that it is known as the Hill of Apes.
In November, 1852, a much talked about subject, in England, was reindeer’s ears. There were letters to the newspapers. Reindeer’s ears came up for discussion in Parliament. Persons who had never seen a reindeer were dogmatizing upon reindeer’s ears. It had been reported that among reindeer’s skins that had arrived at Tromso, Norway, from Spitzbergen were some with the ears clipped.
Many Englishmen believed that Sir John Franklin had sailed through the Northwest Passage, and that survivors of his expedition were trying to communicate with occasional hunters in Spitzbergen, by marking reindeer. Spitzbergen was uninhabited, and no other explanation could be thought of. Spitzbergen is about 450 miles north of North Cape, Norway, and possibly an exceptional reindeer could swim this distance, but this is a story of many reindeer. All data upon drifting ice are upon southward drifts.
Branded reindeer, presumably from Norway or Finland, continued to be reported in Spitzbergen, but by what means they made the journey never has been found out. Lamont, in
Yachting in Arctic Seas,
p. 110, says that he had heard of these marked animals, and that, in August, 1869, he had shot two stags, each having the left ear “back half-cropped.” “I showed them to Hans, a half-bred Lapp, accustomed to deal with reindeer since infancy, and he had no doubt whatever of these animals having been marked by the hands of men.” Upon page 357, Lamont tells of having shot two more reindeer, similarly marked. Nordenskjold
(Voyage of the Vega,
vol. 1, p. 135) tells of these marked reindeer, some of them marked also upon antlers, and traces reports back to the year 1785. Upon one of these antlers was tied a bird’s leg.
Wherever they are coming from, and however they are doing it, or however it is being done to them, the marked reindeer are still appearing in Spitzbergen. Some of them that were shot, in the summer of 1921, are told of in the
Field,
Dec. 24, 1921. It must be that hundreds, or thousands, of these animals have appeared in Spitzbergen. There is no findable record of one reindeer having ever been seen drifting on ice in that direction. As to the possibility of swimming, I note that Nova Zembla is much nearer the mainland than is Spitzbergen, but that Nordenskjold says that the marked reindeer do not appear in Nova Zembla.
8
There is no way of judging these stories. Every canon, or device, of inductive logic, conceived of by Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill has been employed in investigating some of them, but logic is ruled by the fishmonger. Some of us will think as we’re told to think, and be smug and superior, in rejecting the yarns: others will like to flout the highest authority, and think that there may be something in them, feeling that they’re the ones who know better, and be just as smug and superior. Smug, we’re going to be, anyway, just so long as we’re engaged in any profession, art, or business, and have to make balance somewhere against a consciousness of daily stupidities. I should think that somebody in a dungeon, where it is difficult to make bad mistakes, would be of the least smug. Still, I don’t know: I have noted serene and self-satisfied looks of mummies. The look of an egg is of complacency. There is no way of judging our data. There are no ways, except arbitrary ways, of judging anything. Courts of appeals are of the busiest of human institutions. The pragmatist realizes all this, and says that there is no way of judging anything except upon the basis of the work-out. I am a pragmatist, myself, in practice, but I see no meaning in pragmatism, as a philosophy. Nobody wants a philosophy of description, but does want a philosophy of guidance. But pragmatists are about the same as guides on the top of a mountain, telling climbers, who have reached the top that they are on the summit. “Take me to my destination,” says a traveler. “Well, I can’t do that,” says a guide, “but I can tell you when you get there.”
My own acceptance is that ours is an organic existence, and that our thoughts are the phenomena of its eras, quite as its rocks and trees and forms of life are; and that I think as I think, mostly, though not absolutely, because of the era I am living in. This is very much the philosophy of the
Zeitgeist,
but that philosophy, as ordinarily outlined, is Absolutism, and I am trying to conceive of a schedule of predetermined—though not absolutely predetermined—developments in one comprehensibly-sized existence, which may be only one of hosts of other existences, in which the scheduled eras correspond to the series of stages in the growth, say, of an embryo. There is, in our expressions, considerable of the philosophy of Spinoza, but Spinoza conceived of no outlines within which to think.
In anything like a satisfactory sense there is no way of judging our data, nor of judging anything else: but of course we have ways of forming opinions that are often somewhat serviceable. By means of litmus, a chemist can decide whether a substance is an acid, or an alkali. So nearly is this a standard to judge by that he can do business upon this basis. Nevertheless there are some substances that illustrate continuity, or represent the merging-point between acids and alkalis; and there are some substances that under some conditions are acids, and under other conditions are alkalis. If there is any mind of any scientist that can absolutely pronounce either for or against our data, it must be more intelligent than litmus paper.
A barrier to rational thinking, in anything like a final sense, is continuity, because of which only fictitiously can anything be picked out of a nexus of all things phenomenal, to think about. So it is not mysterious that philosophy, with its false, or fictitious, differences, and therefore false, or fictitious, problems, is as much baffled as it was several thousand years ago.
But if, for instance, no two leaves of any tree are exactly alike, so that all appearances are set apart from all other appearances, though at the same time all interrelated, there is discontinuity, as well as continuity. So then the frustrations of thought are double. Discontinuity is a barrier to anything like a finally sane understanding, because the process of understanding is a process of alleged assimilation of something with something else: but the discontinuous, or the individualized, or the unique, is the unassimilable.
One explanation of our survival is that there is underlying guidance, or control, or organic government, which to high degree regularizes the movements of the planets, but is less efficient in its newer phenomena. Another explanation is that we survive, because everybody with whom we are in competition, is equally badly off, mentally.
Also, in other ways, how there can be survivals of persons and prestiges, or highest and noblest of reputations, was illustrated recently. About April Fool’s Day, 1930, the astronomers announced that, years before, the astronomer Lowell, by mathematical calculations of the utmost complexity, or bewilderingly beyond the comprehension of anybody except an astronomer, had calculated the position of a ninth major planet in this solar system: and that it had been discovered almost exactly in the assigned position. Then columns, and pages of special articles, upon this triumph of astronomical science. But then a doubt appeared—there were a few stray paragraphs telling that, after all, the body might not be the planet of Lowell’s calculations—the subject was dropped for a while. But, in the public mind, the impressions worked up by spreadheads enormously outweighed whatever impressions came from obscure paragraphs, and the general idea was that, whatever it was, there had been another big, astronomical triumph. It is probable that the prestige of the astronomers, instead of suffering, was boomed by this overwhelming of obscure paragraphs by spreadheads.
I do not think that it is vanity, in itself, that is so necessary to human beings: it is compensatory vanity that one must have. Ordinarily, one pays little if any attention to astronomers, but now and then come consoling reflections upon their supposed powers. Somewhere in everything that one does there is error. Somebody is not an astronomer, but he classes himself with astronomers, as differentiated from other and “lower” forms of life and mind. Consciousness of the irrationality, or stupidity, pervading his own daily affairs, is relieved by a pride in himself and astronomers, as contrasted with dogs and cats.
According to the Lowell calculations, the new planet was at a mean distance of about forty-five astronomical units from the sun. But, several weeks after April Fool’s Day, the object was calculated to be at a mean, or very mean, distance of 217 units. I do not say that an educated cat or dog could do as well, if not better: I do say that there is a great deal of delusion in the gratification that one feels when thinking of himself and astronomers, and then looking at a cat or a dog.
The next time anybody thinks of astronomers, and looks at a cat, and feels superior, and would like to keep on feeling superior, let him not think of a cat and a mouse. The cat lies down and watches a mouse. The mouse moves away. The cat knows it. The mouse wobbles nearer. The cat knows whether it’s coming or going.
In April, 1930, the astronomers told that Lowell’s planet was receding so fast from the sun that soon it would become dimmer and dimmer.
New York Times,
June 1, 1930—Lowell’s planet approaching the sun—for fifty years it would become brighter and brighter.
A planet is rapidly approaching the sun. The astronomers publish highly technical “determinations” upon its rate of recession. Nobody that I know of wrote one letter to any newspaper. One reason is that one fears to bring upon oneself the bullies of science. In July, 1930, the artist, Walter Russell, sent some views that were hostile to conventional science to the
New York Times. Times,
August 3rd—a letter from Dr. Thomas Jackson—a quotation from it, by which we have something of an idea of the self-apotheosis of these pundits, who do not know, of a thing in the sky, whether it is coming or going:
“For nearly three hundred years no one, not even a scientist, has had the temerity to question Newton’s laws of gravitation. Such an act on the part of a scientist would be akin to blasphemy, and for an artist to commit such an absurdity is, to treat it kindly, an evidence of either misguidance or crass ignorance of the enormity of his act.”
If we’re going to be kind about this, I simply wonder, without commenting, what such a statement as that for nearly three hundred years nobody had ever questioned Newton’s laws of gravitation, is evidence of.
But in the matter of Lowell’s planet, I neglected to point out how the astronomers corrected their errors, and that is a consideration of importance to us. Everything that was determined by their mathematics turned out wrong—planet coming instead of going—period of revolution 265 years, instead of 3,000 years—eccentricity of orbit three tenths instead of nine tenths. They corrected, according to photographs.
It is mathematical astronomy that is opposing our own notions.
Photographic astronomy can be construed any way one pleases—say that the stars are in a revolving shell, about a week’s journey away from this earth.
Everything mathematical cited by me, in this Lowell-planet-controversy, was authoritatively said by somebody one time, and equally authoritatively denied by somebody else, some other time. Anybody who dreams of a mathematician’s heaven had better reconsider, if of its angels there be more than one mathematician.
9
I have come upon a story of somebody, in Philadelphia, who, having heard that a strange wild animal was prowling in New Jersey, announced that he had caught it. He exhibited something, as the “Jersey Devil.” I have to accept that this person was the press agent of a dime museum, and that the creature that he exhibited was a kangaroo, to which he had attached tin wings and green whiskers. But, if better-established branches of biology are subject to Nature-fakery, what can be expected in our newer biology, with all the insecurities of newness?
“Jersey Devils” have been reported other times, but, though I should not like to be so dogmatic as to say that there are no “Jersey Devils,” I have had no encouragement investigating them. One of the stories, according to a clipping that was sent to me by Miss F.G. Talman, of Woodbury, N.J., appeared in the
Woodbury Daily Times,
Dec. 15, 1925. William Hyman, upon his farm, near Woodbury, had been aroused by a disturbance in his chicken coop. He shot and killed a never-before-heard-of-animal. I have written to Mr. Hyman, and have no reason to think that there is a Mr. Hyman. I have had an extensive, though one-sided, correspondence, with people who may not be, about things that probably aren’t. For the latest account of the “Jersey Devil,” see the
New York Times,
Aug. 6, 1930.
Remains of a strange animal, teleported to this earth from Mars or the moon—very likely, or not so likely—found on a bank of a stream in Australia. See the
Adelaide Observer,
Sept. 15, 1883—that Mr. Hoad, of Adelaide, had found on a bank of Brungle Creek, a headless trunk of a pig-like animal, with an appendage that curved inward, like the tail of a lobster.
New Zealand Times,
May 9, 1883—excitement near Masterton—unknown creature at large—curly hair, short legs, and broad muzzle. Dogs sent after it—one of the dogs flayed by it—rest of the dogs running away—probably “with their tails between their legs,” but the reporter overlooking this convention.
There have been stories of strange animals that have appeared at times of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. See Sea Serpent stories, about the time of the Charleston earthquake. About the same time, following a volcanic eruption in New Zealand, there were stories in New Zealand.
The volcano Rotomahana was a harsh, black cup that had spilled scenery. Or the somber thing was a Puritan in finery. It had belied its dourness with two broad decorations of siliceous deposits, shelving down to its base, one of them the White Terrace and the other the Pink Terrace. These gay formations sloped from the bare, black crater to another inconsistency, which was a grove of acacias. All around, the famous flowering bushes of this district made more sinful contrast with a gaunt, towering thing. Upon the 10th of June, 1886, this Black Fanatic slung a constitutional amendment. It was reformation, in the sense that virtue is uniformity that smothers variation. It drabbedtits gay terraces: the grove of acacias was a mound of mud: it covered over the flowering bushes with smooth, clean mud. It was a virtuously dismal scene, but, as in all other reformations, a hankering survived in it. A left-over living thing made tracks in the smoothness of mud. In the
New Zealand Herald,
Oct. 13, 1886, a correspondent writes of having traversed this dull, dead expanse, having seen it marked with the footprints of a living creature. He thought that the marks were a horse’s. But there was another story that was attracting attention at this time, and his letter was in allusion to it. Maoris were telling of a wandering animal, unknown to them, that had appeared in this desert of mud. It was a creature with antlers, or a stag, according to descriptions, an animal that had never been seen, or had never before been seen, by Maoris.
Just what relation I think I can think of, between volcanic eruptions and mysterious appearances of living things may seem obscure. But I have been impressed with several accounts of astonishing revivifications in regions that were volcanically desolated. Quick growths of plants have been attributed to the fertilizing properties of volcanic dust: nevertheless writers have expressed astonishment. If we can have an organic view of our existence, we can think of restorative teleportations to a place of desolation, quite as we think of restorations occurring in places of injury in an animal-organism.
There are phenomena upon the borderline between the organic and the inorganic that we can think of: such as restorations of the forms of broken crystals in a solution. It is by automatic purpose, or design or providence, or guidance by which lost parts of a starfish are regenerated. In higher animal-organisms, distinct structures, if lost, mostly are not restored, but injured tissues are. Still even in the higher organisms there are some restorations of mutilated parts, such as renewals of forms” of a bird’s clipped wing-feathers. The tails of some lizards, if broken off, renew.
For a conventional explanation of reviving plants in a fern forest that had been destroyed by flows of liquid lava, from the volcano Kilauea, Hawaii, see an account, by Dr. G.R. Wieland, in
Science,
April 11, 1930. Dr. Wieland considers his own explanation “amazing.” I’d not say that ours is more than that.
Strange animals have appeared and they may have been teleported to this earth from other parts of an existence, but the easiest way of accounting for strange animals is to say that they are hybrids. Of course I could handle, or manhandle, this subject any way to suit me, and be about as reasonable one way as another. I could quote many authorities against the occurrence of bizarre hybrids, leaving hard to explain, in terms of terrestrial origin, strange creatures that have appeared upon this earth. There are biologists who will not admit fertility between creatures as much alike as hares and rabbits. Nevertheless, I think that there have been strange hybrids.
The cow that gave birth to two lambs and a calf.
I don’t know how that will strike all minds, but to the mind of a standardized biologist, I’d not be much more preposterous, if I should tell of an elephant that had produced two bicycles and a baby elephant.
The story is told in the
Toronto Globe,
May 25, 1889. It is said that a member of the staff of the
Globe
had been sent to investigate this outrage upon conventional obstetrics. The reporter went to the farm of Mr. John H. Carter, at South Simcoe, and then wrote that he had seen the two lambs, which were larger and coarser than ordinary, or less romantically derived, lambs, having upon their breasts tufts of hair like calves’ hair. Other newspapers—
Quebec Daily Mercury,
for instance—published other details, such as statements by well-known stockbreeders that they had examined the lambs, and were compelled to accept the story of their origin.
So I am harming our idea that creatures, unlike anything known upon this earth, but that have appeared upon this earth, may have been teleported from Mars or the moon: but I am supporting our general principle that, whether in biology, astronomy, obstetrics, or any other field of research, everything that is, also isn’t; and that everywhere there are data, partly sense and partly nonsense, that oppose established nonsense that has partly some sense to it.
It does not matter what scientific dictum may be brought against us. I will engage to find that it is only an approximation, or that it is a work-out only in imaginary conditions. The most rigorous science is frosted childishness. Every severe, or chaste, treatise upon mechanics is only a fairy story of frictionless and non-extensible characters that interact up to the “happy ending.” Nowadays, a scenario writer will sometimes tone down the absolute happiness of a conclusion, with just a suggestion that there is a little trouble in the offing: but the tellers of theorems represent about the quality of intellect in the most primitive times of Hollywood. For everything that is supposed to be so well-known that it is proverbial, there are exceptions. A mule is a symbol of sterility. For instances of fertility in mules, look over indexes of the
Field.
As to anything else that we’re taking as absolute truth—look it up.
One afternoon, in October, 1878, Mr. Davy, a naturalist, who was employed at the London Aquarium, took a stroll with a new animal. I think of a prayer that is said to have been uttered by King Louis XIV. He was tired of lamb chops and beef and bacon—“Oh, God! Send me a new animal.” Mr. Davy took a stroll with one. People far away were attracted by such screeches as are seldom heard in London. Some ex-slaves, who were playing in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
were following the new animal, and were letting loose their excitability. The creature was about two feet long, and two feet high, and was formed like nothing known to anatomists—anyway to anatomists of this earth. It was covered with wiry hair: head like a boar’s, and curly tail like a boar’s. It was described as “a living cube.” As if with abdomen missing, its hind legs were close to its forelegs. If Mr. Davy’s intention had been to attract attention, he was succeeding. Almost anybody with the modern view of things will think what a pity he wasn’t advertising something. The crowd jammed around so that he ran into an Underground Railway Station. Here there was an uproar. He was compelled to ride in the brake, because of a fear that there would be a panic among the passengers. At the Aquarium, Davy told that an acquaintance of his, named Leman, had seen this creature with some peasants, in the South of France, and had bought it, but, unable to speak the
patois
of the district, had been unable to learn anything of its origin. At the Aquarium the only explanation that could be thought of was that it was a dog-boar hybrid.
Davy’s publicity continued. He took the new animal to his home, and a crowd went with him. His landlord looked at the animal. When the animal looked at the landlord, the landlord ran to his room, and from behind closed doors, ordered Davy to take away the monster. There was another hold-up of traffic all the way to the home of Frank Buckland.
In
Land and Water,
of which he was the Editor, issue of October 5, Buckland wrote an account of this “demon,” as he called it, saying that it looked like a gargoyle, or like one of Fuseli’s satanic animals. He did not try to explain, but mentioned what was thought at the Aquarium. In the next issue of
Land and Water,
Thomas Worthington, the naturalist, wrote that the idea of the hybrid was “utterly untenable”: but his own idea that the creature was “a tame hyena of some abnormal kind” leaves mysterious how the “demon” ever got into the possession of peasants in the South of France. It would be strange if they had a tame hyena of a normal kind.
In January, 1846
(Tasmanian Journal of Science,
3-147), a skull was found on a bank of the river Murrumbridgee, Australia. It was examined by Dr. James Grant, who said that the general form and arrangement of the teeth were different from those of any animal known to him. He noted somebody’s suggestion that it might be the skull of one of the camels that had been sent to Australia in the year 1839. He accounted for its having characters that were unknown to him, by thinking that it might be fatal. So then, whether in accordance with a theory or not, he found that some of the bones were imperfectly ossified, and that the teeth were covered with a membrane. It was not a fossil. It was a skull of a large, herbivorous animal, and had not been exposed long.
Melbourne Argus,
Feb. 28, and March 1, 1890—a wandering monster. A list of names and addresses of persons who said that they had seen it, was published. It was a creature about thirty feet long, and was terrorizing the people of Euroa. “The existence of some altogether unheard-of monster is vouched for by a cloud of credible witnesses.”
I am tired of the sensible explanations that are holding back new delusions. So I suggest that this thing, thirty feet long, was not a creature, but was a construction, in which explorers from somewhere else, were traveling back and forth, near one of this earth’s cities, having their own reasons for not wanting to investigate too closely.
I don’t know what will be thought of zoologists of Melbourne, but whatever will be thought of me can’t be altogether focused upon me, because there were scientists in Melbourne who were as enlightened as I am, or as preposterous and sensational as I am. Officials of the Melbourne Zoological Gardens thought that, whether this story was nonsense or not, it should be looked into. They got a big net, and sent a man with the net to Euroa. Forty men, with the man with the net, set out. They hunted all day, but no huge bulk, more or less in the distance, was seen, and a statement that enormous tracks were found may be only a sop to us enlightened, or preposterous, ones.
But the man with the net is a significant character. He had not the remotest of ideas of using it, but, just the same, he went along with it. There are other evidences of occasional open-mindedness among biologists, and touches of indifference, now and then, to whatever may be the fascinations of smugness. Why biologists should be somewhat less dogmatic than astronomers, or why association with the other animals should be rather more liberalizing than is communion with the stars is not mysterious. One can look at a rhinoceros and at the same time be able to think. But the stupefying, little stars shine with a hypnotic effect, like other glittering points. The little things are taken too seriously. They twinkle humorously enough, themselves.
A reported monster is told of, in the
Scientific American,
July, 1922. Dr. Clement Onelli, Director of the Zoological Gardens, of Buenos Aires, had published a letter that had been sent to him by an American prospector named Sheffield, who said that, in the Argentine Territory of Chebut, he had seen huge tracks, which he had followed to a lake. “There I saw in the middle of the lake an animal with a huge neck, like that of a swan, and the movement of the water made me suppose the beast to have a body like that of a crocodile.” I wrote to Dr. Onelli, and received a reply, dated Aug. 15, 1924, telling that again he had heard of the monster. Maybe this same huge-necked creature was seen somewhere else, however we explain its getting there. The trouble in trying to understand all reported monsters is their mysterious appearances and disappearances. In the London
Daily Mail,
Feb. 8, 1921, a huge, unknown animal, near the Orange River, South Africa, is told of by Mr. F.C. Cornell, F.R.G.S. It was something with a neck like a bending tree trunk, “something huge, black, and sinuous.” It devoured cattle. “The object may have been a python, but if it was it was of incredible size.” It is only preposterously unreasonable to think that the same thing could have appeared in South Africa and then in South America.