Authors: Charles Fort
***
A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine time.
Thinking Fort to be an earlier iteration of Thayer, Martin Gardner -- noted science writer and a skeptic honorable enough to be called Fortean -- devoted a chapter to him in his
Fads And Follies In the Name of Science
. While Gardner could not help but note some of Fort's more outlandish theories, he quickly observes that we cannot be sure at all that Fort is serious. By the end of the chapter the reader realizes that, somehow, the subject caught him off-guard, and so he pays Fort far more respect than anyone else in the book deserves.
References to Fort began to appear in the flying saucer books that came out in the 1950s; more still in the UFO books that came out in the 1960s. Then, the books themselves, reappeared, and after that the start-up of new Fortean groups as his influence became clear in every aspect of what began to known as the Paranormal. And in the time since, the first appearance of
Fortean Times
in the UK, which quickly became and remains the journal for all Forteans -- which means, as far as I want to define it, one with a mind skeptical yet convincible, especially in matters most often considered "human -- all too human." In the past fifty years, but most especially since the turn of the century, ours has become a world where it is essential to be a Fortean. To what degree it is essential, we are I think only beginning to discover.
Fort's time is here.
As a Fortean, it pleases me greatly that the original will now be available in eBook form, having spent the good part of the past century in print. In words at times as beautiful as anything ever written in English, Charles Fort will reveal to you the marvels of an age, question the nature of what you have been taught, and -- most importantly -- provide you more with than one lead on how not to be fooled by the dog stories, no matter who does the tell. You to draw the line somewhere.
NEW LANDS
PART I
1
Lands in the sky—
That they are nearby—
That they do not move.
I take for a principle that all being is the infinitely serial, and that whatever has been will, with differences of particulars, be again—
The last quarter of the fifteenth century—land to the west!
This first quarter of the twentieth century—we shall have revelations.
There will be data. There will be many. Behind this book, unpublished collectively, or held as constituting its reserve forces, there are other hundreds of data, but independently I take for a principle that all existence is a flux and a reflux, by which periods of expansion follow periods of contraction; that few men can even think widely when times are narrow times, but that human constrictions cannot repress extensions of thoughts and lives and enterprise and dominion when times are wider times—so then that the pageantry of foreign coasts that was revealed behind blank horizons after the year 1492, cannot be, in the course of development, the only astounding denial of seeming vacancy—that the spirit, or the animation, and the stimulations and the needs of the fifteenth century are all appearing again, and that requital may appear again—
Aftermath of war, as in the year 1492: demands for readjustments; crowded and restless populations, revolts against limitations, intolerable restrictions against emigrations. The young man is no longer urged, or is no longer much inclined, to go westward. He will, or must, go somewhere. If directions alone no longer invite him, he may hear invitation in dimensions. There are many persons, who have not investigated for themselves, who think that both poles of this earth have been discovered. There are too many women traveling luxuriously in “Darkest Africa.” Eskimos of Disco, Greenland, are publishing a newspaper. There must be outlet, or there will be explosion—
Outlet and invitation and opportunity—
San Salvadors of the Sky—a Plymouth Rock that hangs in the heavens of Servia—a foreign coast from which storms have brought materials to the city of Birmingham, England.
Or the mentally freezing, or dying, will tighten their prohibitions, and the chill of their censorships will contract, to extinction, our lives, which, without sin, represent matter deprived of motion. Their ideal is Death, or approximate death, warmed over occasionally only enough to fringe with uniform, decorous icicles—from which there will be no escape, if, for the living and sinful and adventurous there be not San Salvadors somewhere else, a Plymouth Rock of reversed significance, coasts of sky-continents.
But every consciousness that we have of needs, and all hosts, departments, and subdivisions of data that indicate the possible requital of needs are opposed—not by the orthodoxy of the common Puritans, but by the Puritans of Science, and their austere, disheartening, dried or frozen orthodoxy.
Islands of space—see
Sci. Amer.,
vol. this and p. that—accounts from the
Repts. of the Brit. Assoc. for the Ad. of Sci.—Nature,
etc.—except for an occasional lapse, our sources of data will not be sneered at. As to our interpretations, I consider them, myself, more as suggestions and gropings and stimuli. Islands of space and the rivers and the oceans of an extra-geography—
Stay and let salvation damn you—or straddle an auroral beam and paddle from Rigel to Betelgeuse. If there be no accepting that there are such rivers and oceans beyond this earth, stay and travel upon steamships with schedules that can be depended upon, food so well-cooked and well-served, comfort looked after so carefully—or someday board the thing that was seen over the city of Marseilles, Aug. 19, 1887, and ride on that, bearing down upon the moon, giving up for lost, escaping collision by the swirl of a current that was never heard of before.
There are, or there are not, nearby cities of foreign existences. They have, or they have not, been seen, by reflection, in the skies, of Sweden and Alaska. As one will. Whether acceptable, or too preposterous to be thought of, our data are of rabbles of living things that have been seen in the sky; also of processions of military beings—monsters that live in the sky and die in the sky, and spatter this earth with their red life fluids—ships from other worlds that have been seen by millions of the inhabitants of this earth, exploring, night after night, in the sky of France, England, New England, and Canada—signals from the moon, which, according to notable indications, may not be so far from this earth as New York is from London—definitely reported and, in some instances, multitudinously witnessed, events that have been disregarded by our opposition—
A scientific priestcraft—
“Thou shalt not!” is crystallized in its frozen textbooks.
I have data upon data upon data of new lands that are not far away. I hold out expectations and the materials of new hopes and new despairs and new triumphs and new tragedies. I hold out my hands to point to the sky—there is a hierarchy that utters me manacles, I think—there is a dominant force that pronounces prisons that have dogmas for walls for such thoughts. It binds its formulas around all attempting extensions.
But sounds have been heard in the sky. They have been heard, and it is not possible to destroy the records of them. They have been heard. In their repetitions and regularities of series and intervals, we shall recognize perhaps interpretable language. Columns of clouds, different colored by sunset, have vibrated to the artillery of other worlds like the strings of a cosmic harp, and I conceive of no buzzing of insects that can forever divert attention from such dramatic reverberations. Language has shone upon the dark parts of the moon: luminous exclamations that have fluttered in the lunar crater Copernicus; the eloquence of the star-like light in Aristarchus; hymns that have been chanted in lights and shades upon Linné; the wilder, luminous music in Plato—
But not a sound that has been heard in the sky, not a thing that has fallen from the sky, not a thing that “should not be,” but that has nevertheless been seen in the sky can we, with any sense of freedom, investigate, until first we find out about the incubus that in the past has suffocated even speculation. I shall find out for myself: anybody who cares to may find out with me. A ship from a foreign world does, or does not, sail in the sky of this earth. It is in accordance with observations by hundreds of thousands of witnesses that this event has taken place, and, if the time be when aeronautics upon this earth is of small development, that is an important circumstance to consider—but there is suffocation upon the whole occurrence and every one of its circumstances. Nobody can give good attention to the data, if diverting his mind is consciousness, altogether respectful, of the scientists who say that there are no other physical worlds except planets, millions of miles away, distances that conceivable vessels could not traverse. I should like to let loose, in an opening bombardment, the data of the little black stones of Birmingham, which, time after time, in a period of eleven years, fell obviously from a fixed point in the sky, but such a release, now, would be wasted. It will have to be prepared for. Now each one would say to himself that there are no such fixed points in the sky. Why not? Because astronomers say that there are not.
But there is something else that is implied. Implied is the general supposition that the science of astronomy represents all that is most accurate, most exacting, painstaking, semi-religious in human thought, and is therefore authoritative.
Anybody who has not been through what I’ve been through, in investigating this subject, would ask what are the bases and what is the consistency of the science of astronomy. The miserable, though at times amusing, confusions of thought that I find in this field of supposed research word my inquiry differently—what of dignity, or even of decency, is in it?
Phantom dogmas, with their tails clutching at vacancies, are coiled around our data.
Serpents of pseudo-thought are stifling history.
They are squeezing “Thou shalt not!” upon Development.
New Lands—and the horrors and lights, explosions and music of them; rabbles of hellhounds and the march of military angels. But they are Promised Lands, and first must we traverse a desert. There is ahead of us a waste of parallaxes and spectrograms and triangulations. It may be weary going through a waste of astronomic determinations, but that depends—
If out of a dreary, academic zenith shower betrayals of frailty, folly, and falsification, they will be manna to our malices—
Or sterile demonstrations be warmed by our cheerful cynicisms into delicious little lies—blossoms and fruits of unexpected oases—
Rocks to strike with our suspicions—and the gush of exposures foaming with new implications.
Tyrants, dragons, giants—and, if all be dispatched with the skill and the might and the triumph over awful odds of the hero who himself tells his story—
I hear three yells from some hitherto undiscovered, grotesque critter at the very entrance of the desert.
2
“Prediction confirmed!”
“Another Verification!”
“A Third Verification of Prediction!”
Three times, in spite of its long-established sobriety, the
Journal of the Franklin Institute,
vols. 106 and 107, reels with an astronomer’s exhilarations. He might exult and indulge himself, and that would be no affair of ours, and, in fact, we’d like to see everybody happy, perhaps, but it is out of these three chanticleerities by Prof. Pliny Chase that we materialize our opinion that, so far as methods and strategies are concerned, no particular differences can be noted between astrologers and astronomers, and that both represent engulfment in Dark Ages. Lord Bacon pointed out that the astrologers had squirmed into prestige and emolument by shooting at marks, disregarding their misses, and recording their hits with unseemly advertisement. When, in August, 1878, Prof. Swift and Prof. Watson said that, during an eclipse of the sun, they had seen two luminous bodies that might be planets between Mercury and the sun, Prof. Chase announced that, five years before, he had made a prediction, and that it had been confirmed by the positions of these bodies. Three times, in capital letters, he screamed, or announced, according to one’s sensitiveness, or prejudices, that the “new planets” were in the exact positions of his calculations. Prof. Chase wrote that, before his time, there had been two great instances of astronomic calculation confirmed: the discovery of Neptune and the discovery of “the asteroidal belt,” a claim that is disingenuously worded. If by mathematical principles, or by any other definite principles, there has ever been one great, or little, instance of astronomic discovery by means of calculations, confusion must destroy us, in the introductory position that we take, or expose our irresponsibility, and vitiate all that follows: that our data are oppressed by a tyranny of false announcements; that there never has been an astronomic discovery other than the observational or the accidental.
In
The Story of the Heavens,
Sir Robert Ball’s opinion of the discovery of Neptune is that it is a triumph unparalleled in the annals of science. He lavishes—the great astronomer Leverrier, buried for months in profound meditations—the dramatic moment—Leverrier rises from his calculations and points to the sky—“Lo!” there a new planet is found.
My desire is not so much to agonize over the single fraudulencies or delusions, as to typify the means by which the science of Astronomy has established and maintained itself:
According to Leverrier, there was a planet external to Uranus; according to Hansen, there were two; according to Airy, “doubtful if there were one.”
One planet was found—so calculated Leverrier, in his profound meditations. Suppose two had been found—confirmation of the brilliant computations by Hansen. None—the opinion of the great astronomer, Sir George Airy.
Leverrier calculated that the hypothetic planet was at a distance from the sun, within the limits of 35 and 37.9 times this earth’s distance from the sun. The new planet was found in a position said to be thirty times this earth’s distance from the sun. The discrepancy was so great that, in the United States, astronomers refused to accept that Neptune had been discovered by means of calculation: see such publications as the
American Journal of Science,
of the period.
Upon Aug. 29, 1849, Dr. Babinet read, to the French Academy, a paper in which he showed that, by the observations of three years, the revolution of Neptune would have to be placed at 165 years. Between the limits of 207 and 233 years was the period that Leverrier had calculated. Simultaneously, in England, Adams had calculated. Upon Sept. 2, 1846, after he had, for at least a month, been charting the stars in the region toward which Adams had pointed, Prof. Challis wrote to Sir George Airy that this work would occupy his time for three more months. This indicates the extent of the region toward which Adams had pointed.
The discovery of the asteroids, or in Prof. Chase’s not very careful language, the discovery of the “asteroidal belt as deduced from Bode’s Law”:
We learn that Baron Von Zach had formed a society of twenty-four astronomers to search, in accordance with Bode’s Law, for “a planet”—and not “a group,” not “an asteroidal belt”—between Jupiter and Mars. The astronomers had organized, dividing the zodiac into twenty-four zones, assigning each zone to an astronomer. They searched. They found not one asteroid. Seven or eight hundred are now known.
Philosophical Magazine,
12-62:
That Piazzi, the discoverer of the first asteroid, had not been searching for a hypothetic body, as deduced from Bode’s Law, but, upon an investigation of his own, had been charting stars in the constellation Taurus, night of Jan. 1, 1801. He noticed a light that he thought had moved, and, with his mind a blank, so far as asteroids and brilliant deductions were concerned, announced that he had discovered a comet.
As an instance of the crafty way in which some astronomers now tell the story, see Sir Robert Ball’s
Story of the Heavens,
p. 230:
The organization of the astronomers of Lilienthal, but never a hint that Piazzi was not one of them—“the search for a small planet was soon rewarded by a success that has rendered the evening of the first day of the nineteenth century memorable in astronomy.” Ball tells of Piazzi’s charting of the stars, and makes it appear that Piazzi had charted stars as a means of finding asteroids deductively, rewarded soon by success, whereas Piazzi had never heard of such a search, and did not know an asteroid when he saw one. “This laborious and accomplished astronomer had organized an ingenious system of exploring the heavens, which was eminently calculated to discriminate a planet among the starry host . . . at length he was rewarded by a success which amply compensated him for all his toil.”
Prof. Chase—these two great instances not of mere discovery, but of discovery by means of calculation, according to him—now the subject of his supposition that he, too, could calculate triumphantly—the verification depended upon the accuracy of Prof. Swift and Prof. Watson in recording the positions of the bodies that they had announced—
Sidereal Messenger,
6-84:
Prof. Colbert, Superintendent of Dearborn Observatory, leader of the party of which Prof. Swift was a member, says that the observations by Swift and Watson agreed, because Swift had made his observations agree with Watson’s. The accusation is not that Swift had falsely announced a discovery of two unknown bodies, but that his precise determining of positions had occurred after Watson’s determinations had been published.
Popular Astronomy,
7-13:
Prof. Asaph Hall writes that, several days after the eclipse, Prof. Watson told him that he had seen “a” luminous body near the sun, and that his declaration that he had seen two unknown bodies was not made until after Swift had been heard from.
Perched upon two delusions, Prof. Chase crowed his false raptures. The unknown bodies, whether they ever had been in the orbit of his calculations or not, were never seen again.
So it is our expression that hosts of astronomers calculate, and calculation-mad, calculate and calculate and calculate, and that, when one of them does point within 600,000,000 miles (by conventional measurements) of something that is found, he is the Leverrier of the textbooks; that the others are the Prof. Chases not of the textbooks.
As to most of us, the symbols of the infinitesimal calculus humble independent thinking into the conviction that used to be enforced by drops of blood from a statue. In the farrago and conflicts of daily lives, it is relief to feel such a
rapport
with finality, in a religious sense, or in a mathematical sense. So then, if the seeming of exactness in Astronomy be either infamously, or carelessly and laughingly, brought about by the connivances of which Swift and Watson were accused, and if the prestige of Astronomy be founded upon nothing but huge capital letters and exclamation points, or upon the disproportionality of balancing one Leverrier against hundreds of Chases, it may not be better that we should know this, if then to those of us who, in the religious sense, have nothing to depend upon, comes deprivation of even this last, lingering seeming of foundation, or seeming existence of exactness and realness, somewhere—
Except—that, if there be nearby lands in the sky and beings from foreign worlds that visit this earth, that is a great subject, and the trash that is clogging an epoch must be cleared away.
We have had a little sermon upon the insecurity of human triumphs, and, having brought it to a climax, now seems to be the time to stop; but there is still an involved “triumph” and I’d not like to have inefficiency, as well as probably everything else, charged against us—
The Discovery of Uranus.
We mention this stimulus to the textbook writers’ ecstasies, because out of phenomena of the planet Uranus, the “Neptune-triumph” developed. For Richard Proctor’s reasons for arguing that this discovery was not accidental, see
Old and New Astronomy,
p. 646.
Philosophical Transactions,
71-492—a paper by Herschel—“An account of a comet discovered on March 13, 1781.” A year went by, and not an astronomer in the world knew a new planet when he saw one: then Lexeil did find out that the supposed comet was a planet.
Statues from which used to drip the life-blood of a parasitic cult—
Structures of parabolas from which bleed equations—
As we go along we shall develop the acceptance that astronomers might as well try to squeeze blood from images as to try to seduce symbols into conclusions, because applicable mathematics has no more to do with planetary interactions than have statues of saints. If this denial that the calculi have place in gravitational astronomy be accepted, the astronomers lose their supposed god; they become an unfocused priesthood; the stamina of their arrogance wilts. We begin with the next to the simplest problem in celestial mechanics: that is, the formulation of the inter-actions of the sun and the moon and this earth. In the highest of mathematics, final, sacred mathematics, can this next to the simplest problem in so-called mathematical astronomy be solved?
It cannot be solved.
Every now and then, somebody announces that he has solved the Problem of the Three Bodies, but it is always an incomplete, or impressionistic, demonstration, compounded of abstractions, and ignoring the conditions of bodies in space. Over and over we shall find vacancy under supposed achievements; elaborate structures that are pretensions without foundation. Here we learn that astronomers cannot formulate the interactions of three bodies in space, but calculate anyway, and publish what they call the formula of a planet that is interacting with a thousand other bodies. They explain. It will be one of our most lasting impressions of astronomers: they explain and explain and explain. The astronomers explain that, though in finer terms, the mutual effects of three planets cannot be determined, so dominant is the power of the sun that all other effects are negligible.
Before the discovery of Uranus, there was no way by which the miracles of the astro-magicians could be tested. They said that their formulas worked out, and external inquiry was panic-stricken at the mention of a formula. But Uranus was discovered, and the magicians were called upon to calculate his path. They did calculate, and, if Uranus had moved in a regular path, I do not mean to say that astronomers or college boys have no mathematics by which to determine anything so simple.
They computed the orbit of Uranus.
He went somewhere else.
They explained. They computed some more. They went on explaining and computing, year in and year out, and the planet Uranus kept on going somewhere else. Then they conceived of a powerful perturbing force beyond Uranus—so then that at the distance of Uranus the sun is not so dominant—in which case the effects of Saturn upon Uranus and Uranus upon Saturn are not so negligible—on through complexes of interactions that infinitely intensify by cumulativeness into a black outlook for the whole brilliant system. The palæo-astronomers calculated, and for more than fifty years pointed variously at the sky. Finally two of them, of course agreeing upon the general background of Uranus, pointed within distances that are conventionally supposed to have been about six hundred millions of miles of Neptune, and now it is religiously, if not insolently, said that the discovery of Neptune was not accidental—
That the test of that which is not accidental is ability to do it again—
That it is within the power of anybody, who does not know a hyperbola from a cosine, to find out whether the astronomers are led by a cloud of rubbish by day and a pillar of bosh by night—
If, by the magic of his mathematics, any astronomer could have pointed to the position of Neptune, let him point to the planet past Neptune. According to the same reasoning by which a planet past Uranus was supposed to be, a Trans-Neptunian planet may be supposed to be. Neptune shows perturbations similar to those of Uranus.
According to Prof. Todd there is such a planet, and it revolves around the sun once in 375 years. There are two, according to Prof. Forbes, one revolving once in 1,000 years, and the other once in 5,000 years. See Macpherson’s
A Century’s Progress in Astronomy.
It exists, according to Dr. Eric Doolittle, and revolves once in 283 years
(Sci. Amer.,
122-641). According to Mr. Hind it revolves once in 1,600 years
(Smithson. Miscell. Cols.,
20-20).
So then we have found out some things, and, relatively to the oppressions that we felt from our opposition, they are reassuring. But also are they depressing. Because, if, in this existence of ours, there is no prestige higher than that of astronomic science, and, if that seeming of substantial renown has been achieved by a composition of bubbles, what of anything like soundness must there be to all lesser reputes and achievements?
Let three bodies interact. There is no calculus by which their interactions can be formulated. But there are a thousand interacting bodies in this solar system—or supposed solar system—and we find that the highest prestige in our existence is built upon the tangled assertions that there are magicians who can compute in a thousand quantities, though they cannot compute in three.