Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained

By: Damon Knight

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Synopsis: From the book: Charles Fort was convinced that there is a great deal going on in our universe which man has not as yet been able to explain. He was, of course, right. Fort amassed reports of events allegedly observed by humans around the world. Fort's books are full of reports of strange phenomena-such as those similar in every way to today's reports of flying saucers but centuries before they were called flying saucers. Boole gave scientists a powerful tool for attacking problems when the obvious approaches refused to yield informative results. Boole employed reductio ad absurdum. He exhausted all the impossibles and thereby isolated a "very probable" answer. Charles Fort, failing to gain the publishers'-and thereby society's-consideration of his positive theories, left world society with a Boolean-like confrontation of illogical events. Charles Fort as a man of true vision purposefully inverted the equations. By getting the publishers to publish the absurd, he proved his point that the publishers published only the absurd.