Mr. Charles Hoy Fort, 1910, The Bronx, New York...


I've been reading the book "The Morning of the Magicians"
and I've found Mr. Fort an interesting entry ....
he collected notes of facts that occured all over the world... the cool thing is that the facts are out of the ordinary things that have occured i.e..

Red Rain over Blankenbergue on 2nd November, 1819.
a Rain of Mud in Tasmania on 14th November, 1902.
Snowflakes as big as saucers in Nashville on 24th January, 1891.
a Rain of Frogs in Birmingham on 30th June, 1892.
Various balls of Fire...
Marks of cupping-glasses in the mountains.
Engines in the sky.
Erratic comets.
Strange Disappearances.
Inscriptions on Meteorites.
Black Snow.
Blue Moons.
Green Suns.
Showers of Blood ...
He collected in this way twenty-five thousand notes, unfortunately he got frustrated, let down and he burned all his notes..

I haven't google'd anything about him yet, other than what I read in the book, but I wanted to interest those who would be, to go and search for some of his recordings...

I just did a search on google (didn't spend much time looking at the results) but I did see the Fortean Times.. Didn't go to the website.. now that I look at it it's pretty neat... good place for material. I find it very interesting.. more interesting is his idea of knowledge and science..


A piece from his book The Book Of The Damned...

Then you haven't studied hypnosis. You have never tried to demonstrate to a hypnotic that a table is not a hippopotamus. [19/20] According to our general acceptance, it would be impossible to demonstrate such a thing. Point out a hundred reasons for saying that a hippopotamus is not a table: you'll end up agreeing that neither is a table a table -- it only seems to be a table. Well, that's what the hippopotamus seems to be. So how can you prove that something is not something else, when neither is something else some other thing? There's nothing to prove.

This is one of the profundities that we advertised in advance.

You can oppose an absurdity only with some other absurdity. But Science is established preposterousness. We divide all intellection: the obviously preposterous and the established.

But Krakatoa: that's the explanation that the scientists gave. I don't know what whopper the medicine men told.

We see, from the start, the very strong inclination of science to deny, as much as it can, external relations of this earth.

I think a lot of people could learn from that quote on this website...

Charles Fort's work was both extremely interesting and very valuable. While a number of the phenomena he catalogued have been more or less explained away as the result of predictable natural forces, we might not have gained these insights without Fort's extensive work.

He also described a number of occurrences and discoveries that aren't yet fully understood by science... Charles Fort helped bridge the gap between the paranormal and the normal, and to demonstrate that there is no supernatural; there is only nature that we do not yet comprehend.

in a sense you're correct but in actuality he was rather unimpressed with how us as a western society are/were so stupid, saying our scientists are feeble-minded, comparing absurditities to other absurditities...
we have to isolate things to observe them... we disregard reality if it's too fantastic...

He's saying, we are denying truths because we are relating them to other truths i.e. you can't use the same criteria for describing a flower as you can for describing a elephant, type-of-thing...
We're on a path of rediscovery... but its slow and painful because we're so feeble-minded... he didn't really bridge the gap between the unknown and science he was portraying science as a poor way of describing reality...
we operate in a binary fashion .. open, close; on, off; expand, contract; right, wrong; left, right.... we have nothing to describe the varying degress, the things inbetween, the other states of reality which we don't recognize... It'd odd how a hand can be a beautiful thing, but a hand on a battle-field is...? all due to relations, but we isolate things to observe them, but can't define them without the connections to EVERYTHING else..

Things are hard for us to grasp because of our binary type of thinking.. it's a very limited conciousness.

[edit on 17/10/05 by dnero6911]