A carnival of astonishment

John Rimmer explores a major re-evaluation of the data in Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned, and finds it a model of how historical fortean investigation should be done

Redemption of the Damned: vol 1 Aerial Phenomena

A Centennial Re-Evaluation of Charles Fort’s Book of The Damned

Martin Shough with Wim Van Utrecht

Anomalist Books, 2019

Pb, 410pp, £27.95, illus, ISBN 9781949501070

Why has it taken 100 years for the data in Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned to be reevaluated? Fort makes it clear on the opening pages of the book that he does not want them re-evaluated. What he is dealing with is not data, subject to evaluation, but a theatrical display, a carnival of entertainment and astonishment, to draw forth gasps of wonder or fear at the parade of “corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering … Here and there will flit little harlots … There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices; whims and amiabilities.”

And to make it absolutely clear, “The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.” “Dogmatic Science”, he tells us, “excludes” things if it cannot fit anomalous data into one of its pigeon holes.

Fortunately, here are a couple of fortean iconoclasts who have set out to violate the First Law of forteanism. They have decided to test whether or not the “little harlots” and “pale stenches” are quite as damned as Fort claimed. The cases reviewed are taken in chronological order, starting with the French astronomer Charles Messier’s observation of a large number of “small globules” crossing the disc of the Sun in 1777.

Messier was meticulous in recording his observation, and the authors have been meticulous in analysing his report. He concluded that what he had seen were “more probably small meteorites”, but in 1777 that term could mean virtually any atmospheric phenomenon, and certainly did not mean the stony, extraterrestrial objects we mean today.

The Messier account is particularly interesting because in retelling this and many other similar incidents, Fort “whimsically supposes them to be ‘super voyagers’ in space” and that this has provided a grounding to much post-1947 speculation on UFOs. The report became a staple of ufological history, and reached its height with the publication in 1954 of Flying Saucers from Mars, allegedly by “Cedric Allingham” but probably by the famous TV astronomer

“They admit there are still one or two cases which left them scratching their heads”

Patrick Moore. He spins the story, saying that Messier reported “they were large and swift, and they were like ships and yet like bells”. “Allingham” claims to have read this in “one of Messier’s diaries”.

Shough and Van Utrecht comment “Today this mutated canard – unattributed – is all over the Internet. The fable has grown on its own, but arguably Charles Fort is to blame.”

The problem with almost any re-examination of fortean accounts from this era, and probably any account of strange phenomena of any era is that we were not there, and do not have direct access to the witnesses; everything we know about such incidents is usually mediated through two, three or even more intermediate sources. The great value of this book is that it strips away most, even if not all, of the intermediaries.

One of the best examples is the case of mysterious lights seen in 1893 in the straits between Japan and Korea, north of the city of Nagasaki. The authors take 28 pages exploring every detail of the accounts of this phenomenon. On this occasion they are able to be pretty certain that they have unearthed the correct explanation, asking: “What is the probability … that images resembling fires on boats were not fires on boats in a part of the world where fleets of boats with smoky fires on them did operate in the late 19th century?”

Obviously, there are several cases where there is insufficient evidence for such certainty, but the explanations suggested are very plausible, and just “smell right”, although the authors are honest enough to admit that there are still one or two cases which left them scratching their heads and that there may be in a very few cases hints of fringe meteorological phenomena.

Each case is a model of how historical fortean investigation should be done. The authors take us to the source quoted by Fort, with reproductions of the documents quoted, and then go beyond that to other related material, scientific papers, newspapers and other contemporary sources. They have used modern online tools such as Google maps and Streetview to guide us to the places themselves.

But one important question is answered. The authors conclude that the reports they have studied in such detail do not support Fort’s claim that this data has been “excluded” by a scientific establishment, or that anything in them suggests any “intrusions into our reality from an Otherworld of limitless reality”.

Which leads to the question, what is Fort really doing in this book? In a recent Fortean Times (FT388:46-51) the philosopher Ian Kidd attempted to show that far from being an enemy of science – an impression which comes across strongly to me when reading his books – Fort was a philosopher positing a new scientific paradigm; but to me Fort, when not simply describing the anomalous reports, seems to be a pioneer postmodernist putting the English language through an endurance course.

But he does have one massive achievement to his name, which allows us to forgive anything else.

He invented forteanism. ★★★★★