So I was pleased to see Fort getting a mention in this context in a 2021 episode of Ancient Aliens called "The UFO Pioneers". There's a short clip from this episode on the IMDB website, in which one of the show's contributors, Mitch Horowitz, says the following about him:
People had written about strange lights in the sky before, but Fort was probably the first person in modern life who assembled the stories into his books in a systematic way.As well as cataloguing UFO sightings, Fort's theoretical speculations on the subject are also of interest. I'll focus on some of the more intelligent among these - though I have to admit they're interspersed with a lot of highly dubious concepts too (such as his assertion, easily disproved by any schoolchild with a rudimentary understanding of parallax, that "the stars are not trillions nor even millions of miles away").
I'll start with a "speculation" that is now so widespread that most people don't even see it as a speculation, even though it wasn't at all common prior to the end of the 1940s. This is the "extraterrestrial hypothesis", that unusual objects seen in the sky are craft piloted by intelligent beings from other planets. Here's what Fort says in chapter 1 of New Lands, first published in 1923 (all the quotes in this post are taken from the version of Fort's work on the Sacred Texts website):
Ships from other worlds ... have been seen by millions of the inhabitants of this Earth, exploring, night after night, in the sky of France, England, New England and Canada.As for the many UFO-related quotes from The Book of the Damned, I used some of them in the comic strip "Charles Fort in Space" that I did for Fortean Times last year (FT 433, pp 54-5 - also reprinted in a guest post of mine on Kid Robson's blog). The most interesting of these quotes relate to the possibility of artificial "megastructures" in space created by highly advanced aliens - a topic of genuine scientific study these days, as recounted in my own Astrobiology book. Here's what Fort had to say on the subject more than a hundred years ago:
Data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds, and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks; worlds linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in hordes; tremendous worlds and tiny worlds; some of them made of material like the material of this Earth; and worlds that are geometric super-constructions made of iron and steel.That's from chapter 12 of The Book of the Damned. In the same chapter, Fort makes the observation that, for reasons of their own, alien visitors have a general tendency to covertness:
Nothing in our own times ... has ever appeared upon this Earth from somewhere else, so openly as Columbus landed upon San Salvador... But as to surreptitious visits to this Earth in recent times, or as to emissaries, perhaps, from other worlds, or voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to evade and avoid, we shall have data as convincing as our data of oil or coal-burning aerial super-constructions.This begs the question of why the aliens should always be so careful to hide their presence. Fort's favoured answer is embodied in his famous phrase "I think we're property". His assertion seems to be (in this chapter of The Book of the Damned, anyway - he was never very good at maintaining consistency of ideas across all his writings) that, of all the many alien species that visited Earth in the distant past, one group took "ownership" for special reasons of their own. Since then, all visits to our planet have been carefully stage-managed.
Another of the standard tropes of modern ufology that Fort anticipated is the idea of a special relationship between the aliens and certain members of Earth's human population. Today, the group in question is normally assumed to be the United States government, but for Fort it was some even more shadowy organization. Here's what he says in chapter 10 of The Book of the Damned:
Some other world ... has been, for centuries, in communication with a sect, perhaps, or a secret society, or certain esoteric ones of this Earth's inhabitants.By this point, it probably won't come as much of a surprise to find that Fort was also something of a pioneer of "ancient astronaut" theory. Here's a quote taken from chapter 18 of New Lands:
Many appearances upon this Earth that were once upon a time interpreted by theologians and demonologists, but are now supposed to be the subject-matter of psychic research, were beings and objects that visited this Earth, not from a spiritual existence, but from outer space.He also entertained the idea that humans were created, or at least helped along in their evolution, by extraterrestrial visitors. In the following extract, coming from chapter 7 of The Book of the Damned, he gives the name "Genesistrine" to the home planet of these particular ancient aliens:
That the first unicellular organisms may have come here from Genesistrine - or that men or anthropomorphic beings may have come here before amoebae... That evolution upon this Earth has been induced by external influences; that evolution, as a whole, upon this Earth, has been a process of population by immigration or by bombardment.A point I've made in the past is that, unlike modern ultra-literal UFO theorists, Fort tended to think and write more like an avant-garde poet than the pseudo-scientist he's usually portrayed as. This comes across in a few of the quotes I've already given, and even more so in others - such as the following from Chapter 36 of New Lands:
We have conceived of intenser times and furies of differences of potential between this Earth and other worlds: torrents of dinosaurs, in broad volumes that were streaked with lesser animals, pouring from the sky, with a foam of tusks and fangs, enveloped in a bloody vapour that was falsely dramatized by the Sun, with rainbow-mockery.I found this difficult to visualize, so I copied and pasted it as a prompt into Bing's AI image creator. I didn't add any other words of my own, but for some reason the AI has chosen to render the picture in the style of Rubens (something that's particularly obvious if you look at the human figures at the bottom). Anyway, I think the result is pretty good, for a machine:
 |
| (courtesy of Bing Image Creator) |
14 comments:
Andrew, what did you think of that strange object that passed through the solar system a few years ago (I've completely forgotten the name it was given at the time)? I think it was described as being flat and the size of several football fields, wasn't it? Some scientists genuinely believe it could have been an alien structure of some kind.
Oh dear, Colin, if you ever read any of my books you'd know the answer to that without having to ask! It was called 'Oumuamua, and it's featured in no fewer than four of my books - Cosmic Impact, Astrobiology, Fake Physics and How Space Physics Really Works - as well as a couple of magazine articles. I'm particularly interested in it in the context of my specialist subject, orbital dynamics, although I'm also fascinated by all the speculation about its possible artificial nature. Getting back to the subject of the post, I wonder what Charles Fort would have made of it?
Another hero of mine, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Fort, is Avi Loeb. He was one of the most reputable of the scientists who seriously considered the possibility that 'Oumuamua was artificial - and in particular that it was a "Breakthrough Starshot" style interstellar sail. I think this must be the theory you came across, because it requires it to have been a thin disc in shape (which is what you seem to be describing) whereas the tabloid media wanted it to be (and generally illustrated it as) a cylindrical-shaped spacecraft. I recently read Loeb's book on the subject (Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth) which I found fascinating, and generally very well thought through - except that there's a huge hole in his argument that he doesn't seem to be aware of. Maybe I should do a blog post about it one day!
Yes, the interstellar sail theory is the one I was thinking of.
Incidentally, Colin, I was slightly disappointed that you didn't have any comments on the main post, as it was inspired by something you said yourself! In a comment on a previous post about ancient aliens, you said the idea went back to H.P. Lovecraft in the 1920/30s, and I said that HPL got a lot of his ideas from Fort's writings from a decade earlier. Then last week I made a rather weak joke (which no one seems to have noticed, fortunately) linking CHF and HPL, which reminded me of our earlier discussion and prompted this post.
In Marvel's Conan The Barbarian #1, a character has visions of the future that includes astronauts. Your picture (even though it has no astronauts that I can see) for some reason reminds me of the sort of vision that some people might claim to have. Apologies if that doesn't address the main point of your post, but my brain fog makes it difficult for me to absorb information and then come up with a relevant response. I've usually forgotten a paragraph by the time I've read it these days.
No problem, Kid - I'm not at all fussy about comments straying "off topic". It's just that I vaguely anticipated that Colin might pick up on the Charles Fort / ancient aliens connection since we'd touched on it previously.
But comments on the artwork are very welcome, anyway. That's an interesting thought that the AI seems to have portrayed a mystical vision, rather than a literal scene. I actually find these images quite frightening sometimes, because the AI seems to display what in a human artist would be called a "vivid imagination". I didn't tell it to interpret it as a visionary scene, or in the style of 16th century fine art, or with a sailing ship - those were all its own ideas. How spooky is that, coming from a machine?
And to stray completely off-topic myself - to my great surprise, I remembered to buy a bottle of Extra Virgin Olive Oil when I was in M&S this morning (thanks again to Colin for suggesting this). Now I have to remember to take a daily dose of it!
Turned out I didn't need to buy one, as a bottle of the stuff has been sitting in my kitchen for a while now. Like you, though, I'll need to try and remember to take some now and again. That's harder than it sounds.
Kid, you need to take two tablespoons per day not just "now and again".
The thing you need to be aware of, Colin, is that the stuff tastes absolutely foul! I tried putting a capful in a glass and drinking it neat yesterday, and it took an hour to get the taste out of my mouth. So tablespoonfuls isn't an option, as far as I'm concerned. My next experiment will be to combine it with something I normally eat far too much of, such as Doritos. I'm going to try it as a dip this evening. If it works, it will serve a dual function of consuming more olive oil (by making it taste better) and fewer Doritos (by making them taste worse).
I've never tasted olive oil, Andrew, so I didn't know what it was like!
Now that I think about it, the Radio 4 programme last week actually said two dessert spoons but that's the same as two tablespoons, isn't it.
Well, I thought it was the same until a moment ago, Colin. I've only got two types of spoon - teaspoons and what I think of as "ordinary" spoons used for everything else (cereal, soup, pot noodle) - and I assumed you meant the latter. But I know I'm a complete slob and philistine (or perhaps "typical bachelor" would be a more polite way of putting it) when it comes to food etiquette. Having looked it up just now, I see that a tablespoon is actually twice the capacity of a dessert spoon, and really only used for measuring things when preparing recipes. So it's a good thing they were talking about dessert spoons and not table spoons!
Andrew, when making your pot noodle I hope you ignore the instructions on the side of the pot. You should pour the boiling water on the noodles, then stir and leave for at least 20 minutes which allows plenty of time for the noodles and vegetables to absorb the water and get fully rehydrated. The instructions say you need wait only 4 minutes which isn't long enough for rehydration and the pot noodle is scalding hot after such a short time but after my recommended 20 minutes the temperature has dropped so the pot noodle is still hot but in a pleasant way that won't scorch your tongue!
Interesting, Colin - I hadn't heard that before. I just leave it long enough to reach the right temperature, which is probably 5-10 minutes. But it's not something I eat that often - just 3 or 4 times a year when I've run out of "proper" food and it's too rainy to go down to the shops. But (being incorrigibly pedantic) I wanted to give a comprehensive list of all the things I use a spoon for!
Incidentally, for the benefit of all the internet users who avidly hang on my every recipe (i.e. no one), yesteday's "olive oil and Doritos" experiment was a complete success. I dumped a 30g packet of Tangy Cheese Doritos onto a plate, carefully dripped two capfuls of oil on top of them, and waited 5 minutes for it to sink in. And it tasted great! On the other hand, the fact that I'd been up and about for 5 hours today before I remembered this does mean its memory-enhancing effects aren't instantaneous (not that I expected them to be).
Post a Comment