What The Heck Is Fortean Paranormal Phenomenon?
Have you ever heard of stuff other than rain and snow falling from the sky? How about bigfoot, strange floating lights, crop circles, the loch ness monster and her sisters, chupacabra, spontaneous combustion, strange coincidences and of course UFO's? Charles Fort is famous for cataloging such phenomenon and then asking why doesn't science seriously study them.
Throughout his life, Charles Fort was skeptical about scientific explanations, observing how scientists argued according to their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence and that inconvenient data was ignored, suppressed, discredited or explained away (which is quite different from explaining a thing). Fort, born of Dutch stock in Albany, New York, spent many years researching scientific literature in the New York Public Library and the British Museum Library. He marshaled his evidence and set forth his philosophy in The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo ! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932).
His dictum "One measures a circle beginning anywhere" expresses his philosophy of Continuity in which everything is in an intermediate state between extremes. He had ideas of the universe-as-organism and the transient nature of all apparent phenomena. He coined the term 'teleportation' and was perhaps the first to speculate that mysterious lights seen in the sky might be craft from outer space.