Charles Fort was a painstakingly erudite dissector of scientific texts and a ravenous predator of scientific dogma, who scrutinized how scientists formed their theories according to their own personal views, rather than the weight of evidence available. Fort gleefully trawled through the data that was suppressed, discarded or explained away in a less than satisfactory manner. He referred to this this data as 'damned'.

It is probably safe to say there are more people familiar with the work of Fort's work than actually know anything about him, in spite of the stalwart campaigns of various Fortean societies, organizations and institutes, not to mention 'Fortean Times', the London based 'Journal of Strange Phenomena'.

Every time some character from 'Star Trek' or some other science fiction drama start warbling on about teleportation - that's Fort, or rather the tongue-in-cheek 'explanation' that he conjured up to explain the alleged disappearance of objects from one place, and their apparent reappearance elsewhere.

Born in 1874 in Albany, New York, Fort lived most of his life in New York City, apart from eight years in London, England. He died in NYC in 1932.

Of his many works, there are really just four that are easily available today: 'The Book of the Damned' (1919), 'New Lands' (1923), 'Lo!' (1931) and 'Wild Talents' (1932). These works are complex lyrical, whimsical works of investigation, doubt and anti-dogma, 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."

It shouldn't be assumed, however, that 'Forteans' - those who practice a form of humorous agnostic skepticism - should be thought of as dogmatic - for the very nature of Forteanism demands the questioning of all doctrine, never mind how sacred. Fort illustrated how explaining something something away was much different to actually explaining it - "The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open."