Charles Fort spent thirty years copying out the facts science preferred to forget, coined the word teleportation, and seeded everything from science fiction to ufology, yet he died fifteen years before the first flying saucer and never asked anyone to believe a word of it. This is the story of the reclusive collector whose one radical act, refusing to look away from the inconvenient fact, became the founding discipline of the entire fringe.
I Think We’re Property: Charles Fort, Father of the Unexplained
For the better part of three decades, a reclusive, obsessive American sat in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library and the British Museum, working through old scientific journals and yellowing newspapers and copying out, by hand, the things that did not belong. A rain of frogs over a French town. A fall of stones from a clear sky. Wheels of light turning under the sea. Dark objects crossing the face of the Moon. He called this material his data, and he gathered tens of thousands of notes on small squares of paper, filed in shoeboxes, each one a fact that science had recorded and then, as he saw it, quietly agreed to forget.
His name was Charles Fort, and he died in 1932, fifteen years before a pilot named Kenneth Arnold watched nine discs skip past Mount Rainier and handed the world the phrase flying saucer. Fort never saw the modern age of the unexplained. His fingerprints are all over it anyway. The word Fortean, the vocabulary of teleportation, whole shelves of science fiction, and the entire practice of taking an anomaly seriously without being required to believe in it: all of it traces back to the man with the shoeboxes. When the United States Air Force ran its first official investigation into flying objects in 1948 and reached for a precedent showing that such things had been seen for a century or more, the book its analysts referred to was his (more on that later).
The man who collected what science threw away
Fort was born in Albany, New York, in 1874, and spent an unhappy childhood under a domineering father before leaving home young to knock about as a journalist and wander through parts of the world on very little money. For years he wrote fiction that mostly went nowhere. Then, sometime around his early forties, a modest inheritance freed him from the need to earn a living, and he turned the whole of his attention to the project that would consume the rest of his life.
He began to read, systematically, everything he could reach. He went through the bound runs of scientific periodicals, the reports of learned societies, the back pages of newspapers, hunting for the observations that had been noted once and then set aside because no accepted theory could hold them. He wrote two early books working this material, which he called simply X and Y, and later destroyed them both. What survived was a method and a temperament: an appetite for the excluded fact, and a deep suspicion of anyone, in a laboratory or a pulpit, who claimed to have the final word.
The novelist Theodore Dreiser, one of the most powerful literary figures in America at the time, became his champion and effectively forced his own publisher to bring out the first of the four books that made Fort’s name. Without Dreiser, the shoeboxes might have stayed in the Bronx. With him, they became something closer to a movement.
The books, and a cosmology built to provoke
Between 1919 and his death, Fort produced four strange and singular books: The Book of the Damned in 1919, New Lands in 1923, Lo! in 1931, and Wild Talents, which reached print the day after he died in 1932. The title of the first tells you his whole stance in two words. The damned, to Fort, were the facts: the data damned by science, excluded from the canon of the acceptable because they could not be made to fit. He marshalled them in their thousands, the falls of fish and frogs and red rain, the unexplained lights, the objects in the sky, the people who vanished and the people who appeared.
His prose is like nobody else’s. It is aphoristic, funny, deliberately maddening, forever interrupting its own arguments to mock the certainty of the experts. And around the data he built cosmologies so extravagant that readers have argued ever since about how much of it he meant. He proposed a Super-Sargasso Sea, a region somewhere above the Earth into which lost things drift and settle, sometimes for centuries, before storms shake them loose and rain them back down. In Lo! he introduced a word for the force he thought moved objects and people across space without crossing the distance between, a word now so common that most people have no idea where it came from. He called it teleportation. His final book turned the same lens on the human mind, on poltergeists and spontaneous fires and latent powers no one could account for.
The most quoted sentence he ever wrote sits in the first book, and most people who repeat it have never read the passage it belongs to. “I think we’re property,” Fort wrote. He meant it as a genuine possibility, offered with his usual half-smile: that the Earth had been found long ago by other intelligences, fought over, and claimed, and was now watched or quietly visited by something with no interest in announcing itself, the way an owner feels no need to introduce himself to his livestock. He did not insist on it. That was the point. He offered it as one hypothesis among many, and noted, coolly, that it fit the reported facts at least as well as the respectable explanations did. His extravagances were a kind of argument. If an idea the textbooks called impossible accounted for the data as neatly as the orthodox answer, then the orthodox answer was resting on habit rather than proof.
Where the word Fortean comes from
By the end of his life, Fort had a following, and in 1931 a group of admirers gathered in his New York flat and founded the Fortean Society in his honour. The roll of founders reads like a who’s who of American letters: the novelist Theodore Dreiser as its first president, alongside the screenwriter Ben Hecht, who had reviewed the first book by declaring himself Fort’s first disciple, the novelist Booth Tarkington, the critic Alexander Woollcott, and the wit Dorothy Parker. Fort himself, characteristically, wanted little to do with it. He distrusted societies and true believers, and suspected that any group formed around his ideas would end up as dogmatic as the science he needled. He was right to worry, though the society outlived him regardless.
The man who carried it forward was Tiffany Thayer, an actor and bestselling novelist who ran the society for the rest of his own life and edited the volume that gathered all four of Fort’s books into a single omnibus in 1941. That collection, with Thayer’s introduction, is the book the Air Force pulled from a shelf and cited seven years later that I mentioned earlier. Thayer kept Fort’s name alive through a magazine he ran until he died in 1959, and through him the adjective Fortean settled permanently into the language, the standing word for a strange fact reported carefully and left standing rather than explained away.
The lineage did not end with Thayer. New organisations took up the work, among them the International Fortean Organization in the 1960s. In November 1973, a British enthusiast named Bob Rickard, who had discovered Fort through the pages of a science-fiction magazine, launched a small self-published newsletter to carry on the collecting. It grew into Fortean Times, which has now documented the world’s anomalies for more than fifty years, and which describes its own method in words Fort would have recognised: gathering the reports of the strange with natural scepticism and a sense of humour, refusing both dogmatic dismissal and easy belief.
The method underneath the mischief
It would be easy to file Fort as a collector of curiosities, or a man who liked weird stories. That misses what he was actually doing, and it misses the reason his work still matters to anyone who takes the fringe seriously.
Fort’s real target was never the question of what the frogs or the lights or the objects were. It was the reflex that threw the reports away before anyone had properly looked. He watched science, which he admired more than he let on, behave like any other authority when confronted with something inconvenient: explain it in passing, file it under error or illusion or coincidence, and move on before the awkward detail could unsettle the system. What enraged and delighted him in equal measure was the speed of the process, the way an observation was judged impossible and dismissed in the same breath, its evidence never weighed at all.
So he refused to do the same thing in reverse. He never asked anyone to believe in his Super-Sargasso Sea or his cosmic owners. He held the excluded facts up to the light and declined to close the case in either direction, against the orthodox and against the credulous alike. He would not found a faith, and he warned the people who admired him against turning him into one. His discipline was to keep the awkward data on the table and the question genuinely open, which is far harder than either believing or dismissing, and far rarer.
This is the exact reflex that the government’s own first UFO investigation ran headlong into in 1948. The analysts at Air Materiel Command gathered their reports, found a residue they could not explain, privately allowed that the objects might not be of this world, and then watched the whole finding get reassigned and reburied because it did not fit what the institution was prepared to say (you can read the deep dive about this story under Project Sign here). Fort had described that pattern thirty years earlier, without knowing he was writing the story of every official inquiry that would follow. The habit of deciding what is possible before examining what has happened is the thing he spent his life exposing, and it is the same habit that the fringe, at its best, still exists to resist.
The bloodline of the fringe
Trace almost any modern current of the strange back far enough, and you arrive at his shoeboxes.
Science fiction owes him an enormous and largely unpaid debt. His lists of impossible events and his demand for undogmatic imagination lit up a generation of writers. The British author Eric Frank Russell, who called Fort the only real genius the genre ever had, built his novel Sinister Barrier directly on the idea that we are property, imagining the cosmic owners as unseen predators feeding on human emotion. The influential editor John W. Campbell recommended Fort to his writers as raw material, and a wave of Fortean fiction followed through the great pulp magazines of the 1940s. Alfred Bester paid the debt openly in a classic novel of the 1950s by naming its first teleporting character Charles Fort Jaunte. Lovecraft drew on him, and so, later, did figures as different as Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson (and if you haven’t read The Illuminatus! Trilogy, The Illuminati Papers, or Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy, then go and read them immediately). The very word teleportation, now the property of every science-fiction franchise on Earth, was coined by a man in a library who meant it to explain rains of frogs.
The line into serious anomaly research is just as direct. Fort predated the flying saucer era by fifteen years, yet he had already catalogued the aerial phenomena that ufology would spend the rest of the century chasing, which is precisely why the Air Force could cite him as evidence the sightings were nothing new. The organisations that followed, from Ivan Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained to the networks that produced writers like John Keel, worked the same territory with the same tools. Others took his compiling literally and kept updating his archive of the excluded for the modern age. And the establishment itself, in that quiet 1948 memo, made the most telling acknowledgement of all: when the United States military needed a reference for a phenomenon that would not go away, it found that a self-taught eccentric with a shoebox habit had already done the filing.
What Fort was, and what he wasn’t
It is easy to associate Fort with things he never stood for. He was not a mystic. He was not a spiritual teacher, and he offered no path, no practice, and no doctrine. He did not believe in the reality of alien visitors or psychic powers in any settled way, and he would have been the first to pick apart anyone who did. His scepticism cut in every direction, including towards the marvels he spent his life collecting. If he belongs to the fringe, he belongs to it as its most rigorous sceptic rather than its truest believer.
There’s also an irony that sits right at the heart of his own society. Tiffany Thayer, the man who edited the definitive collection of Fort’s work and kept his flame burning for decades, had earlier personally dismissed flying saucers as nonsense and went so far as to call the atomic bomb a government hoax. He had waved away the very phenomenon that Fort’s own work would soon be used to explain, when the Air Force reached for his books in 1948. Fort would probably have enjoyed that enormously, because it proves the thing he cared about most: that a name and a following can calcify into their own kind of certainty, and that no label, Fortean included, is a substitute for looking at the evidence yourself.
What he leaves us is a stance rather than a set of answers, and it is a stance that runs in the DNA of everything the fringe now does. Keep the excluded data on the table. Refuse the closed mind and the gullible one with equal firmness. Treat the anomaly as real enough to examine, without needing it to prove a belief you already hold. Fort spent thirty years demonstrating that the most radical act available to a curious person is simply to refuse to look away. Nearly a century later, with governments releasing files on the very objects he was quietly logging, that refusal looks less like eccentricity and more like the founding discipline of an entire way of seeing.
Join the Conversation
Where in your own life have you watched an inconvenient fact get explained away before anyone was willing to look at it properly? And what would change if we treated the world’s anomalies the way Fort did, as data to be kept on the table rather than tidied out of sight? Share your experiences and insights below.
