Case file · Non-fiction & research literature
Fort, 'The Book of the Damned'
Charles Fort's first nonfiction book, a collection of anomalous reports, from strange falls from the sky to unexplained aerial objects, excluded ('damned') by science.
1919 CE · 40.71, -74.01 · status: account
The account
Fort mined newspapers and scientific journals for data that did not fit, and mocked science's habit of explaining things away. He anticipated UFO literature by decades, and 'Fortean' became the name for the study of anomalies.
The sceptical view
Fort was openly playful and rarely checked his sources; many items are misreports or ordinary phenomena described oddly.
Connections in the atlas
- Charles Fort
- The Book of the Damned