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Charles Hoy Fort
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Charles Fort (1874-1932) was one of the first true "skeptics" to come to the public with stories of unanswered happenings and unknown scientific theories. Among these were accounts of frogs and other strange objects raining from the sky, Genesistrine a Super-Sargasso Sea above the Earth.  Along with  spontaneous human combustion, stigmata's, UFO's, and other strange anomolies.
 
Charles Fort was the definition of a true skeptic.  He believes nothing is real and nothing is unreal, basically "all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness."  He opposses any form of dogmatism and always claimed to be an "intermedialist" in his papers. 
 
Fort never tried to make sense of his wierd collection of stories, but he did pose the question of why did this happen if indeed it did,  and was one of the first to begin the type of studies, and bring them to the publics eye. 
 
During his lifetime he wrote 1 well known book: "The Outcast Manufacturers".
 
He states that scientific theories are models, not pictures, of reality, and he considered them to be no more than superstitions,  thinking that since science is not infallible, any theory is as good as any other,  scientific or not.  Theories evolving based on personal belief rather than evidence.
 
Charles Fort, to me, was the first person ever to bring the questions I ask myself everyday to my attention.  I consider myself a skeptic at heart, but I do know that answers exsist.

Four of his known books: "The Book of the Damned" , "New Lands", "Lo!"  and "Wild Talents" .These works are the only works of his you will find, they are complex, lyrical, anti-dogmatical, and are not always the easiest of reading. As "The Book of the Damned" begins:

"A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded."

"Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them - or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten."

Many of the paranormal symbols that we accept today were injected into popular culture by proponents of Fort - fish falls, rains of blood, bleeding statues, and damn it, UFOs, as well as ghosts, astronomy, stigmata, the madness of crowds, panics and hysterias, anomalous animals.

Fort realized what he was doing - "I am a pioneer of a new kind of writing that instead of heroes and villains will have floods and bugs and stars and earthquakes for its characters and motifs."

This isn't to say that they didn't happen before Fort - rather they were ignored by literate men of reason, those who, even in 1902, were still arguing "that meteorites do not fall from the sky; that they are masses of iron upon the ground in the first place, that attract lightning; that the lightning is seen, and is mistaken for a falling luminous object."

Fort's myriad wanderings through strange phenomena - including the likes of the Devil's Hoofprints of Devonshire (1855) are endlessly quotable:

"Nothing, in religion or science, or philosophy . . .is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while."

Other Quotes from Charles Hoy Fort:

"The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open."

"An opinion is a matter of evidence, but evidence is a matter of opinion."

"One measures a circle, beginning anywhere..."

"It's the bane of psychic research. If there be psychic phenomena, there must be fraudulent psychic phenomena."

"All phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness."

"The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest--
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive.
"Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival."
Darwinism:
That survivors survive."

"By the statistic method I could "prove" that a black rain has fallen "regularly" every seven months, somewhere upon this earth. To do this, I'd have to include red rains and yellow rains, but, conventionally, I'd pick out the black particles in red substances and in yellow substances and disregard the rest. Then, too, if here and there a black rain should be a week early or a month late that would be "acceleration" or "retardation."

"To this day no one can decide whether I am a scientist or a humorist."

"I do not know how to find out anything new without being offensive."

Fortean Times