By the damned I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
(The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort)

Decades before the fictional characters of Fox Mulder and Carl Kolchak, there was a real investigator of UFOs and other anomalies. Both of those characters, as well as all modern ufologists, owe a lot to him. His name was Charles Fort.

Charles Hoy Fort was born in August, 1874 into a middle class Dutch immigrant family in Albany, New York. Fort was the oldest of three children, all sons of a tyrannical, abusive wholesale grocer in Albany, New York. His mother died while Fort was still young, and Fort's father remarried. Young Charles retreated from his unhappy home life into books. At 15, he wrote to Jules Verne for his autograph, and by high school he had decided to become a writer himself. He was already getting material published in national magazines while still in his teens.

At the age of 17 Fort went to work for the local newspaper, The Albany Democrat, but conflicts with his father and stepmother led to his being sent to live with his maternal grandfather. Within a short time, however, he left and moved to New York City, where he got a job with The Brooklyn World.

Charles, not being satisfied with newspaper work, decided that he needed to travel in order to have experiences to write about, so he embarked on a 30,000 mile hitchhiking trip around the world. While in South Africa, he contracted malaria, which forced him to return to New York. Back in New York, he renewed his friendship with Anna Filing, a young Englishwoman who had been a servant in his father's house in Albany. Anna nursed him back to health, and on October 26, 1896, they were married.

Fort began writing short stories, some of which were bought by newspapers and magazines, but he had to supplement this meager income by taking odd jobs. He also wrote novels, but only one, The Outcast Manufacturers, was ever published, and it sold poorly. At times things were so bad that he and Anna had to use their furniture for firewood. It was during this period that Fort began collecting reports of anomalous events from books and newspapers. Between 1910 and 1915, he wrote two different books about anomalous phenomena, neither of which was ever published. The first attributed unusual events to the idea that Earth was controlled by beings on the planet Mars, and the second attributed these same events to an unknown civilization at the South Pole.

Fort and Anna were an example of opposites attracting. Where the outgoing Anna "knew all her neighbours' affairs", Fort himself had very few friends, one notable exception being the novelist Theodore Dreiser. He lived almost like a hermit, chasing references at the library until it closed and then writing up his notes at home, working on them into the night. If Anna had not insisted that he accompany her to the movies, and his friends Tiffany Thayer and Theodore Dreiser had not visited him, he would have had no social life.

In 1916, Fort's uncle died and passed on a small inheritance to him. For the first time, Fort was able to stop worrying about money and to concentrate on his research. As a result of this, in 1919 he produced his most famous work,The Book of the Damned. This book was the culmination of Fort's research up to that point, his "X-Files."

Fort's "damned" included falls of unusual objects from the sky, archaeological mysteries, unusual weather phenomena, and unidentified aerial objects. As in his earlier, unpublished books, Fort proposed the idea that the Earth "belongs" to some superior race of beings, that we are "property."

I think we're property. I should say we belong to something: That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something: That something owns this earth -- all others warned off. (The Book of the Damned)

An example of the "Damned" is this sighting by E.W, Maunder in 1882:

E. W. Maunder, invited by the Editors of the Observatory to write some reminiscences for the 500th number of their magazine, gives one that he says stands out (Observatory, 39-214). It is upon something that he terms "a strange celestial visitor." Maunder was at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, Nov. 17, 1882, at night. There was an aurora, without features of special interest. In the midst of the aurora, a great circular disk of greenish light appeared and moved smoothly across the sky. But the circularity was evidently the effect of foreshortening. The thing passed above the moon, and was, by other observers, described as "cigar-shaped," "like a torpedo," "a spindle," "a shuttle." The idea of foreshortening is not mine: Maunder says this. He says: "Had the incident occurred a third of a century later, beyond doubt everyone would have selected the same simile -- it would have been `just like a Zeppelin.'" The duration was about two minutes. Color said to have been the same as that of the auroral glow in the north. Nevertheless, Maunder says that this thing had no relation to auroral phenomena. "It appeared to be a definite body." Motion too fast [280/281] for a cloud, but "nothing could well be more unlike the rush of a great meteor." In the Philosophical Magazine, 5-15-318, J. Rand Capron, in a lengthy paper, alludes throughout to this phenomenon as an "auroral beam," but he lists many observations upon its "torpedo-shape," and one observation upon a "dark nucleus" in it -- host of most confusing observations -- estimates of heights between 40 and 200 miles -- observations in Holland and Belgium.(9) We are told that according to Capron's spectroscopic observations the phenomenon was nothing but a beam of auroral light. In the Observatory, 6-192, is Maunder's contemporaneous account.(10) He gives apparent approximate length and breadth at twenty-seven degrees and three degrees and a half. He gives other observations seeming to indicate structure -- "remarkable dark marking down the center." (The Book of the Damned)

In 1921, Fort and Anna went to live in London so that he could pursue research in the British museum. In 1923, Fort's second book, The New Lands, was published, continuing in the same vein as The Book of the Damned.

Fort believed that space travel was inevitable, sending letters to the New York Times on the subject and even speaking on it at Hyde Park Corner. Fort proposed that extraterrestrials had visited the Earth in ancient times long before the world knew of Erich von Daniken. He was writing about UFOs years before Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting, and he proposed that extraterrestrials were responsible for mysterious disappearances decades before alien abductions began to be reported.

The British climate had a negative effect on Fort's health, and by the time he moved back to New York in 1929, his physical condition was declining and his eyesight was failing. His books had gained him an intellectual following that included Booth Tarkington, Alexander Wolcott, Havelock Ellis, and Clarence Darrow. There began to be talk of an organization to be created for the purpose of collecting data about anomalous phenomena, the type of phenomena that would soon be known as Forteana.

His third book on anomalous phenomena, called Lo!, was published in 1931, and the formation of the Fortean Society was announced by Tiffany Thayer that same year. His last book, called Wild Talents, was about extraordinary people, rather than events. He wrote frantically in order to get it finished, refusing to seek medical attention even as his health began to fail. On 3rd of May 1932, he was admitted to hospital suffering from "unspecified weakness". He died within a few hours, apparently of leukemia. Fort passed away just as Wild Talents was coming off the presses, on May 3, 1932. After Fort died, Anna lost her interest in living and survived him by only five years.

This article was previously published in 1999. It has been revised slightly by removing dead links and adding new ones as needed.

Print References: • "The Book of the Damned" by Charles Fort • "Politics of the Imagination: the life, work, and ideas of Charles Fort" by Colin Bennett