Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (76 page)

NO WORRIES

How long would
you
have slaved away at a hotel laundry to support a scribbling, unproductive pack rat like Fort? Anna Fort labored from 1906 to 1916 to keep a roof over her husband’s head, and she might have had to keep at it much longer if one of Fort’s uncles hadn’t died in 1916 and left the pair enough money to live on for the rest of their lives. Anna could finally quit her job, and Fort was free to pour himself into his research without having to worry about making a living again.

As Fort sifted, sorted, shuffled, organized, and reorganized his notes, he began to notice things that no one had ever noticed before. He started making these connections as early as 1912, when he first began having trouble writing his short stories.

CRITICAL MASS

Fort “was drawn to apparent anomalies—strange phenomena that defied neat classification,” biographer Jim Steinmeyer writes in
Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural
. “He started to discover them everywhere, prying them out of established journals and histories. After years of collecting—idly arranging and rearranging objects, phrases, or information—he now began to notice patterns. Odd patterns.”

Of course, Fort lived in an age when there was no Google, Wikipedia, or other Internet tools to help people collect and organize tens of millions of pieces of information, free of charge. Those powerful tools were nearly a century away. But Fort’s strange system of cross-referenced notes was the next best thing.

For instance, Fort read that people living along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea saw strange, blood-red rain falling on March 6, 1888, and again 12 days later. “Whatever the substance may have been, when burned, the odor of animal matter from it was strong and persistent,” Fort noted.

1st gay married couple on
The Newlywed Game
: George Takei (of
Star Trek
fame) and his partner
.

But few if any people realized that a year earlier in Cochin, China, “there fell…a substance like blood, somewhat coagulated,” as Fort’s notes described it. And nine years before that, in Olympian Springs, Kentucky, “flakes of beef” fell from the sky on an otherwise clear day.

In an age before radio, television, jet travel, or the Internet, when even the news wires were still in their infancy, each of these peculiar occurrences was almost by default an
isolated
incident: The people who experienced it were unlikely to know that it might have also happened somewhere else.

THE FORT-O-NET

Fort was a human search engine—a living, breathing Google. It wasn’t until someone like him came along, someone willing and (thanks to his wife and uncle) able to spend more than 20 years sifting through books, journals, magazines, and newspapers, taking copious notes, and sorting the information, one piece at a time, that anyone realized that strange, unexplained events such as these were as numerous as they were.

When Fort came across an account of “a large ball of fire” that rose out of the sea off the eastern coast of Canada on December 22, 1887, then hovered in the air for five minutes before vanishing, he made a note of it. Then he filed it in the shoebox that contained his notes on similar incidents, such as the account of three “luminous bodies” that rose out of the Mediterranean on June 18, 1845, and hovered within sight of the sailing ship
Victoria
for 10 minutes before disappearing.

When he read of the case of 77-year-old Barbara Bell of Blyth, England, whose badly burned remains were found in a room where nothing else had burned and nothing had been found that could have caused the fire, he filed it with other cases of “spontaneous combustion,” including that of a woman found burned to ashes in her bedroom in Paris in 1869. “Bedclothes, mattresses, curtains, all other things in the room showed not a trace of fire,” Fort noted in that case. “A burned body in an almost unscorched room.”

Chevy Chase was expelled from college for taking a cow to the third floor of a campus building
.

Reading articles, taking notes, sorting slips of paper, stuffing them into shoeboxes—it was all simple enough. But because no one had ever done it before, Fort’s contribution to popular culture would be profound.

JUST THE FACTS

It would take some time before Fort figured out how best to put his scraps of paper to use. As if the peculiar incidents he collected weren’t strange enough, the conclusions he drew from them were even weirder. In 1915 he wrote a book titled
X
, in which he argued that a strange force that he called “X,” emanating from Mars, was somehow controlling events on Earth. In 1916 he wrote a book titled
Y
, in which he speculated on the existence of a hidden civilization, which he called “Y,” of blond Eskimos at the North Pole. Neither book ever found a publisher, which frustrated Fort so much that he burned both manuscripts. Only pieces of them survive today.

Had Fort continued to peddle his looney theories, he would likely be forgotten today, just another crackpot lumped in with the flat-Earthers and the people who believe the pyramids were built by space aliens. But he eventually concluded that the tidbits of information he was collecting were interesting enough in their own right that no theory tying them together was needed. Eventually, he published four books on the paranormal,
The Book of the Damned
(1919),
New Lands
(1923),
Lo!
(1931), and
Wild Talents
(1932). In them, Fort presented his readers with the strange phenomena he’d dug up over the years, accompanied by plenty of commentary and speculation…but no definitive answers. He left it up to the reader to connect the dots.

NOW REPEAT AFTER ME

Fort cited his sources in his books so his readers could look up the material themselves if they wanted to. The flakes of beef that fell in Kentucky? He directed his readers to articles in
Scientific American
and
The New York Times
. The ball of fire that rose out of the sea near Cape Rose could be found in the December 22, 1887, issue of the science journal
Nature
.

By challenging his readers to think for themselves and directing them to the source material they would need to do their own research, Fort gave his books a power they would not otherwise have had. It’s one reason why they’re still in print today, and why Fort is considered “the father of the paranormal.”

A company called Aetrex Worldwide makes GPS-enabled shoes for tracking Alzheimer’s patients
.

IT IS WRITTEN

Thanks to Fort, when a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw some mysterious flying objects over Mt. Rainier in Washington State on June 24, 1947, people who wanted to know more had somewhere to go. They went to Fort’s books—and there they read about many similar incidents, including reports of several sightings of a cigar-shaped craft with butterfly wings in the skies over Colorado, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana during the first three weeks of April 1897.

The objects Kenneth Arnold saw over Mt. Rainier weren’t shaped like cigars. They were shaped like flat discs—his was the first modern sighting of
flying saucers
. Regardless, the public paid attention. Fort had laid the groundwork for Arnold’s sighting to be taken seriously. The modern UFO age had begun.

In 1964 a writer named Vincent Gaddis wrote a magazine article about ships and aircraft that seemed to have mysteriously vanished in an area of the Atlantic bounded by Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda. Gaddis thought back to Fort’s description of “a triangular region in England” that he said was home to a disproportionate number of reports of strange events. Remembering that Fort had called the area the “London Triangle,” Gaddis named his region the “Bermuda Triangle,” and another icon of the paranormal was born.

MIXED REVIEWS

But not everybody was a fan of Fort. Writer H.L. Mencken said Fort was “enormously ignorant of elementary science,” and H.G. Wells called him a “damnable bore” who “writes like a drunkard.”
The New York Times
panned
The Book of the Damned
as a “quagmire of pseudo-science and queer speculation” that would render the average reader “either buried alive or insane before he reaches the end.” Even Fort’s beloved New York Public Library catalogued
The Book of the Damned
under “Eccentric Literature” rather than nonfiction. That made him so angry that he burned his 40,000 notes and stomped off to London for six months, where he sat in the reading room of the British Museum…and began amassing a new and equally impressive hoard of notes that he would use to write his three later books.

Work related? Sarah Michelle Gellar, star of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
,
has a fear of graveyards
.

Despite the bad reviews, Fort’s books found a large and appreciative audience, and fans soon began writing to him about odd occurrences in their own communities. In 1931 an admirer founded the Fortean Society to promote his work, but Fort refused to join. He took a militantly agnostic approach to his odd phenomena: He believed that it was important to keep an open mind and was as contemptuous of the people who accepted the strange accounts at face value as he was of the “orthodox” scientists who dismissed them out of hand. He feared the Society would become a magnet for the true believers—“the ones we do not want,” as he put it. “I wouldn’t join it, any more than I’d be an Elk.”

STILL FORTIN’

A lifelong skeptic who was deeply suspicious of authority, Fort may have hastened his own death in the early 1930s when his health began to fail and he refused to place himself under a doctor’s care. He lived long enough to see publication of
Wild Talents
, his fourth book on the paranormal. But just barely; by the time an advance copy was rushed to his hospital bed on May 3, 1932, he was too weak to hold it. He died later that night, at the age of 57.

To this day, Fort’s legacy lives on in the International Fortean Organization (INFO), which is descended from the society Fort refused to join. And there’s also the magazine
Fortean Times
, still dedicated to tracking reports of strange phenomena. True to Fort’s memory, they present the material as objectively as possible, without taking sides. “They offer the data,” as Fort once said about his own books. “Suit yourself.”

TROUSERS BE DAMNED

On January 10, 2010, nearly 5,000 people in 44 cities in 16 countries all took off their pants and rode the subway as part of the ninth annual No Pants Day. The biggest turnout—3,000 pantless participants—was in New York City during a heavy snow storm.

Charles & Sandra McKee spent $250,000 turning their home into a replica of the Munsters’ house
.

COWABUNGA!

Cows just kind of do what they do; They stand in fields and graze and moo, But they also do other things that make us stop and say, “Ooh!” So here are some cow stories, strange but true
.

I
’M OK, YOU’RE OK. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE COW?
One morning in January 2005, traffic backed up on Interstate 4 near DeBary, Florida. The cause: A cow was standing in a swamp beside the road…and she appeared to be sinking. Concerned drivers called the Highway Patrol, who quickly determined that the cow wasn’t in danger, but was merely grazing in the two-foot-deep bog. The officers left, but the worried calls kept coming in, so they went back out and put up an electronic sign on the shoulder that read: “THE COW IS OK.” Shortly after the officers left, however, the cow wandered off…but the sign remained.