Charles Fort is most commonly associated with the more offbeat end of the anomalous spectrum - things like frogs falling from the sky - and for his many surreal/poetic/philosophical quotes such as the one in the graphic above (which is a screenshot from an arty video of mine, Charles Fort on Frogs). Oddly, however, his ahead-of-their-time speculations on UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation, going all the way back to The Book of the Damned (1919), aren't as well known as they might be.
So I was pleased to see Fort getting a mention in this context in a 2021 episode of Ancient Aliens called "The UFO Pioneers". There's a short clip from this episode on the IMDB website, in which one of the show's contributors, Mitch Horowitz, says the following about him:
People had written about strange lights in the sky before, but Fort was probably the first person in modern life who assembled the stories into his books in a systematic way.As well as cataloguing UFO sightings, Fort's theoretical speculations on the subject are also of interest. I'll focus on some of the more intelligent among these - though I have to admit they're interspersed with a lot of highly dubious concepts too (such as his assertion, easily disproved by any schoolchild with a rudimentary understanding of parallax, that "the stars are not trillions nor even millions of miles away").
I'll start with a "speculation" that is now so widespread that most people don't even see it as a speculation, even though it wasn't at all common prior to the end of the 1940s. This is the "extraterrestrial hypothesis", that unusual objects seen in the sky are craft piloted by intelligent beings from other planets. Here's what Fort says in chapter 1 of New Lands, first published in 1923 (all the quotes in this post are taken from the version of Fort's work on the Sacred Texts website):
Ships from other worlds ... 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.As for the many UFO-related quotes from The Book of the Damned, I used some of them in the comic strip "Charles Fort in Space" that I did for Fortean Times last year (FT 433, pp 54-5 - also reprinted in a guest post of mine on Kid Robson's blog). The most interesting of these quotes relate to the possibility of artificial "megastructures" in space created by highly advanced aliens - a topic of genuine scientific study these days, as recounted in my own Astrobiology book. Here's what Fort had to say on the subject more than a hundred years ago:
Data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds, and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks; worlds linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in hordes; tremendous worlds and tiny worlds; some of them made of material like the material of this Earth; and worlds that are geometric super-constructions made of iron and steel.That's from chapter 12 of The Book of the Damned. In the same chapter, Fort makes the observation that, for reasons of their own, alien visitors have a general tendency to covertness:
Nothing in our own times ... has ever appeared upon this Earth from somewhere else, so openly as Columbus landed upon San Salvador... But as to surreptitious visits to this Earth in recent times, or as to emissaries, perhaps, from other worlds, or voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to evade and avoid, we shall have data as convincing as our data of oil or coal-burning aerial super-constructions.This begs the question of why the aliens should always be so careful to hide their presence. Fort's favoured answer is embodied in his famous phrase "I think we're property". His assertion seems to be (in this chapter of The Book of the Damned, anyway - he was never very good at maintaining consistency of ideas across all his writings) that, of all the many alien species that visited Earth in the distant past, one group took "ownership" for special reasons of their own. Since then, all visits to our planet have been carefully stage-managed.
Another of the standard tropes of modern ufology that Fort anticipated is the idea of a special relationship between the aliens and certain members of Earth's human population. Today, the group in question is normally assumed to be the United States government, but for Fort it was some even more shadowy organization. Here's what he says in chapter 10 of The Book of the Damned:
Some other world ... has been, for centuries, in communication with a sect, perhaps, or a secret society, or certain esoteric ones of this Earth's inhabitants.By this point, it probably won't come as much of a surprise to find that Fort was also something of a pioneer of "ancient astronaut" theory. Here's a quote taken from chapter 18 of New Lands:
Many appearances upon this Earth that were once upon a time interpreted by theologians and demonologists, but are now supposed to be the subject-matter of psychic research, were beings and objects that visited this Earth, not from a spiritual existence, but from outer space.He also entertained the idea that humans were created, or at least helped along in their evolution, by extraterrestrial visitors. In the following extract, coming from chapter 7 of The Book of the Damned, he gives the name "Genesistrine" to the home planet of these particular ancient aliens:
That the first unicellular organisms may have come here from Genesistrine - or that men or anthropomorphic beings may have come here before amoebae... That evolution upon this Earth has been induced by external influences; that evolution, as a whole, upon this Earth, has been a process of population by immigration or by bombardment.A point I've made in the past is that, unlike modern ultra-literal UFO theorists, Fort tended to think and write more like an avant-garde poet than the pseudo-scientist he's usually portrayed as. This comes across in a few of the quotes I've already given, and even more so in others - such as the following from Chapter 36 of New Lands:
We have conceived of intenser times and furies of differences of potential between this Earth and other worlds: torrents of dinosaurs, in broad volumes that were streaked with lesser animals, pouring from the sky, with a foam of tusks and fangs, enveloped in a bloody vapour that was falsely dramatized by the Sun, with rainbow-mockery.I found this difficult to visualize, so I copied and pasted it as a prompt into Bing's AI image creator. I didn't add any other words of my own, but for some reason the AI has chosen to render the picture in the style of Rubens (something that's particularly obvious if you look at the human figures at the bottom). Anyway, I think the result is pretty good, for a machine:
(courtesy of Bing Image Creator) |