The Changing History (and Geography) of Lemuria

A peculiarity of certain fortean topics is the way the details develop and change over time. To pick an example, there's the legend (which, as we'll see, didn't even start out as a legend) of Lemuria. As lost continents go, it's far less well known to the general public than Atlantis, but just as intriguing to those in the know. It's been featured in at least a couple of Ancient Aliens episodes, in "They Came from the Pleiades" (2020) and "The Mystery of Mount Shasta" (2021).

In the first of these, we're informed that Lemuria was a now-sunken continent located in the Pacific, which Hawaiian folklore links to benevolent visitors from the Pleiades star cluster. In the later episode, we're told that survivors from Lemuria may still be living inside Mount Shasta - one of California's best known UFO hotspots. As with most things on the show, these ideas are wonderfully entertaining, and surprisingly credible-sounding if you restrict your knowledge of the subject to what you're being told by Tsoukalos, Pope, Childress et al. But as soon as you do a little independent research, things get a lot murkier (the Pleiades, for example, didn't even exist until the Earth was billions of years old and swarming with Cretaceous-era dinosaurs - so hardly a likely home for ancient astronauts).

My first encounter with Lemuria was probably in the Marvel Comics adaptation of Lin Carter's Thongor stories, though I've subsequently read the original 1965 Wizard of Lemuria novel, pictured above. A much more controversial novel was Richard Shaver's I Remember Lemuria (1945), which purported to be based on fact rather than fiction. My copy (edited by Ancient Aliens regular David Hatcher Childress under the title Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth) is also pictured above, together with a novel I've previously mentioned on this blog, Ron Goulart's Hello Lemuria Hello (1979). Also featured in the picture is the album Lemuria (2004) by symphonic metal band Therion.

In the lyrics of that album's title song, the name Lemuria is used interchangeably with Mu - as indeed it was on Ancient Aliens. But originally Mu and Lemuria were completely separate, and disentangling them involves going quite a way back into history. An excellent source in this context is the final book pictured above, Lost Continents (1954) by L Sprague de Camp. Best known as a fiction author, he turns his hand here to non-fiction - and does his background research far more conscientiously than Ancient Aliens ever bothers to.

The surprising fact, as I mentioned at the start, is that Lemuria didn't start out as a legend, whether in Hawaii, California or anywhere else. It began as a short-lived scientific hypothesis, developed in the latter half of the 19th century, to explain similarities between Mesozoic fossils found on the Indian subcontinent and in south-east Africa. The idea was that there used to be a land-bridge joining these two regions, stretching right across the Indian Ocean. Now mostly sunken, all that remained would have been the island of Madagascar - famous for its lemurs, from which the land-bridge got the name Lemuria.

You'll notice a couple of significant features here - first, that we're talking about a time millions of years before humans existed, and secondly that we're nowhere near the Pacific Ocean. What's more, we don't even need this hypothesis any more, because we know that, back in Mesozoic times, India was attached to southern Africa instead of being in its current position.

But instead of going away, the idea of Lemuria adapted and evolved. And it did so in a way that was peculiar to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In those days, the notion that sensitive individuals could pick up valid information by psychic means - by going into a trance and "channelling" messages from spirit entities - was well accepted in certain quarters. And that's how a lot of the key facts about Lemuria came down to us.

One strand to the Lemurian story lies within the realm of Theosophy, whose complex and confusing teachings were largely derived through psychic means. In this context, here's a passage from de Camp's book that clearly foreshadows Ancient Aliens:

Beings from Venus, which had already developed a high civilization ... guided faltering humankind to the point where the Lemurians became capable of individual immortality and reincarnation.

Most Theosophists were content to leave Lemuria in its original setting of the Indian Ocean, but several American writers of the time endeavoured to move it to the more familiar (to them) locale of the Pacific Ocean. An important development in this context came in the form of a book, A Dweller on Two Planets (1894). A cynic might describe this as a work of fiction, but it's actually presented as the channelled autobiography of a spirit entity called Phylos the Tibetan. Here, too, the second planet in question is Venus, but Lemuria is now indisputably located in the Pacific - and the connection with California's Mount Shasta is also made for the first time.

The final step towards the modern "legend" of Lemuria came in the 1920s and 30s, with a series of books by James Churchward concerning a sunken continent called "Mu", which he proposed as a counterpart of Atlantis in the Pacific. Churchward's arguments were based (albeit shakily) on the interpretation of purely physical evidence, in contrast to the earlier mediumistic channellings relating to Lemuria - but the distinction didn't last long. The legend soon crystallized into the form most often encountered today - that Mu and Lemuria are alternative names for a single lost continent, situated in the Pacific Ocean and having strong links both with Mount Shasta in California and with benevolent aliens from outer space.

Since I love showing off my book collection, here are a couple of classics to round the post off - James Churchward's The Children of Mu (1931) and Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882):

 

The Department of Fortean Events

In a blog post last year I mentioned that issue #12 of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD featured a character named “Robert Rickard”, in a deliberate homage to the founding editor of Fortean Times – who was a friend of the comic’s creators, Steve Parkhouse and Barry Windsor Smith. In the comment thread, reader B. Smith (presumably not the same B. Smith) pointed out that a “Doc Rickard of the Department of Fortean Events” also appeared circa 1990 in a Judge Anderson story called Shamballa, by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson. This was reprinted in Judge Anderson: The Psi Files volume 02, which I finally got round to buying last week when I saw a reduced price copy in Forbidden Planet.

Doc Rickard is the old man seen talking to Judge Anderson in the excerpt above. She seeks his assistance after the world is hit by a sudden spate of Fortean events – including stigmatics in Rome, phantom hounds in London, a Manticore in Jakarta and a Bunyip in Australia. There are references to Doris Stokes, the Turin Shroud and the Tower of Babel, while Anderson herself witnesses a “pre-Columbian meteorite” break apart to reveal a living a toad entombed inside it. The villains of the story are called “deros” – degenerate human beings who live in underground caves and tunnels. The word “dero” is an obvious reference to the Shaver Mystery, although Shaver’s deros were huge, obese and sexually decadent, whereas the deros in the comic are more zombie-like – dressed in rags and physically emaciated.

There are several other stories in the collection besides Shamballa, including another very Fortean one called Childhood’s End. This has no connection to Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name, but it does have the Face on Mars, ancient aliens and references to Zecharia Sitchin’s theory of Anunnaki and Nephilim. And the art, by Kevin Walker, portrays a much sexier-looking Judge Anderson than Arthur Ranson’s version.

Although I found the stories interesting, I can’t say I really enjoyed them. I was never a big fan of Fleetway comics – for some reason they always struck me as gloomy and political (even when they weren’t). It’s all a matter of personal taste… and as far as comics are concerned, personal taste usually boils down to what you thought was cool when you were 15 or 16. Which brings me to another purchase I made in London last week – the first issue of a black-and-white horror anthology called Devilina, from Atlas-Seaboard comics.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of Atlas-Seaboard comics. They were only active for a few months during 1975, but that just happened to coincide with the peak of my interest in comics fandom – and the new company created a huge buzz at the time (the whole story of Atlas-Seaboard is a fascinating one – here’s an excellent article on the subject). Most of their output consisted of colour comics aimed at challenging Marvel (which were the ones I bought at the time) – but they also produced a few black and white titles to rival Warren magazines such as Creepy, Eerie… and Vampirella, which is where Devilina comes in.

Having finally bought it 40 years after it came out, I really enjoyed Devilina #1. It’s fairly typical of horror anthologies of that vintage, both in terms of stories and artwork. It has its share of Fortean themes, too, with a story about people being reincarnated in animal form, another about a man who becomes convinced his life is controlled by aliens, and a nice moral tale about a mermaid taking revenge on a group of sailors who gang-raped her (and then saving the man who saved her). And as shown below, there’s a neat adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest (probably his most Fortean play – see my short ebook Paranormal Shakespeare).

Fortean Aspects of the Flying Disks

Here’s a historical oddity I found by accident last week. It’s an article from the June 1948 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories entitled “Fortean Aspects of the Flying Disks”. It appeared just a year after the term “flying saucer” was coined, in the wake of the Kenneth Arnold sighting (at the time this was the defining event in ufology, rather than Roswell – which as I’ve discussed elsewhere was strangely ignored despite being in the public domain).

The Amazing article must have been one of the first to link the UFO phenomenon with the word “Fortean”. Interestingly, this seems to have been a minority view at the time. Today, the idea that UFOs are “Fortean” (in the sense of extraterrestrial, or at any rate beyond the understanding of science) is probably the first thing that springs to most people’s minds. But in those days, the prevailing view seems to have been that they were some sort of military technology produced here on Earth. The author refutes this explanation by pointing out that, as recorded in the writings of Charles Fort, similar things were seen in the skies long before they could possibly have been produced by human technology.

The author, by the way, was one “Marx Kaye” – which according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database was the pseudonym of a little-known science fiction author named S. J. Byrne. You can read the article online at the Internet Archive (it starts on page 154 of the magazine). In fact that’s where I read it. I do own a few issues of Amazing Stories from the late 1940s, because of my interest in the Shaver Mystery, but not this particular one.

There is, of course, a close connection between the Shaver Mystery and the early days of ufology, in the person of Amazing’s editor Ray Palmer. As I wrote in The Mystery of Flight 19 : “... Palmer wasn’t completely satisfied with the Shaver paradigm and was ready to abandon it if something better came along. And in 1948, that's exactly what happened, when Palmer became one of the first to jump on the Flying Saucer bandwagon!”

You can see the transition starting to take place before your eyes, if you read Palmer’s editorial at the start of the issue containing the Marx Kaye article. In fact, I found Palmer’s take on the subject far more interesting - from a historical perspective – than Kaye’s. Again, you can read it for yourself (page 6 of the magazine), but here are a few quotes:

• Now that science has proved in so sensational a manner at least two phases of the Shaver Mystery, we have a prediction to make. We predict, based on evidence now in this editor’s possession, that it will be definitely proved that space ships are visiting the earth right now.
• The question arises, if space ships do visit the Earth, is it a matter of “national security” and may we talk about it? [...] Perhaps in wartime, our military would clamp down on all talk concerning military matters. But right now we aren’t at war with anybody, and we, in America, have the right of free speech and can talk about anything we please.
• For the benefit of those readers who are under the impression that there was a censorship on the now famous flying saucers, that’s just plain poppycock. There never was any censorship (other than that of individual newspaper editors who “laid off” of a subject that was beginning to look ridiculous).
• For more than twenty years we [i.e. science fiction magazines] have been talking about space ships, and maybe we’re right at last! But “authorities” who will get the first reports of the mysterious craft, when they appear, will think there is a “leak” if they read any old issue of Amazing Stories at all! Moral: More “authorities” ought to read science fiction – they won’t be so surprised by logical developments as they develop.

Unfortunately there aren’t any UFO-related pictures in this issue of Amazing, but here is a Fortean image of a different kind from the back cover – the apparition of an exotic city in the sky that was seen over Alaska in 1887:

Retro-Fortean Answers

Here are the answers to last week’s Retro-Fortean Crossword. Wherever possible the clues were based on previous blog posts – in which case I’ve included a link to the relevant post.

ACROSS

1. AMBROSE Bierce, who vanished without a trace in December 1913 (See The Ambrose Collector)

5. Generic term for a mystery animal: CRYPTID (As in the Cryptid Casebook series – see The Science of Bigfoot for my contribution to the series)

9. Nickname of Raymond A. Palmer, pulp magazine editor who popularized the Shaver Mystery: RAP (My copy of the special “Shaver Mystery” issue of Amazing Stories, dated June 1947, can be seen in the photograph above)

10. “The EERIEST Ruined Dawn World”, short story by Fritz Leiber

11. Secretive organization that Edward Snowden used to work for: NSA (As featured in Satire and the Internet)

12. Fictional country which is the source of Doc Savage’s wealth: HIDALGO (The Doc Savage trade paperback pictured above includes a comic-book adaptation of Doc’s origin story, set in Hidalgo)

13. “POST HOC ergo propter hoc”, a logical fallacy popular with some conspiracy theorists

14. A short 16 mm film clip from 1967 purportedly showing Bigfoot: PATTERSON-GIMLIN (See Patterson-Gimlin Film Fake or Fact)

19. Village in the South of France reputedly associated with a great mystical secret: RENNES-LE-CHATEAU (See The Devil of Rennes-le-Chateau)

21. Ankh, cross and pentagram, for example: SYMBOLS

24. A Runic alphabet: FUTHARK

27. LEN Wein, creator of Wolverine and Swamp Thing (My copy of Wolverine’s first appearance was featured in The Marvel Age of Comics)

28. Hard to pin down, like many Fortean phenomena: ELUSIVE

29. Like a UFO, but not unidentified: IFO

30. An unexplained event: ANOMALY

31. SHANNON McMahon, X-Files super-soldier played by Lucy Lawless

DOWN

1. Early type of UFO widely reported across America during the 1890s: AIRSHIP

2. Bigfoot, for example: BIPED

3. Denny O’NEIL, author of The Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer (See Hitler’s Astrologer)

4. If the Gunpowder Plot was a False Flag operation, this person may have engineered it: EARL OF SALISBURY (As described in my Conspiracy History book)

5. A famous Fortean mystery from Barbados: CREEPING COFFINS (See Creeping Coffins)

6. Himalayan giant apes (real or imaginary): YETIS

7. Enigmatic alien creature in Philip K. Dick’s novel A Maze of Death: TENCH (My copy, which I originally read in 1980, is pictured above)

8. A type of scientific analysis applied to Bigfoot and Richard III: DNA SCAN (See Bigfoot, Richard III and Outsider Science)

15. The TEN Lost Tribes of Israel

16. The Third EYE, by T. Lobsang Rampa

17. IRA Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives

18. First name of JFK’s alleged assassin: LEE

19. A water nymph in Slavic mythology RUSALKA (As mentioned in my novelette The Mechanical Gorilla)

20. Pulp magazine which featured Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier in its first issue: UNKNOWN (See Sinister Barrier: the first Fortean novel and Pulp Forteana)

22. Planet ruled by Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon’s universe: MONGO

23. The Magic Flute or The Flying Dutchman, for example: OPERA (See Fortean Opera)

25. Huge volcanic eruption which may have been responsible for the Atlantis legend: THERA

26. Entity from another planet: ALIEN

Retro-Fortean Crossword

I thought I’d do another crossword puzzle this Christmas, since last year’s seemed to go down well. I assume it went down well, anyway, because it got an above-average number of page-views... but then the annotated list of answers the following week got below-average views, so maybe people just took one look at the puzzle and decided not to bother with it!

As before it’s an old-fashioned non-interactive crossword, so you’ll have to print it out or do it in your head. I originally wanted all the clues to refer to something I’ve written about on this blog in the last 12 months, but once I started filling letters in I realized that wasn’t going to be possible. Still, I’ve tried to stay on-topic as far as possible. I’ll print the answers (together with an explanation of the Retro-Fortean connections) next week.

ACROSS

1. ------- Bierce, who vanished without a trace in December 1913 [7]
5. Generic term for a mystery animal [7]
9. Nickname of Raymond A. Palmer, pulp magazine editor who popularized the Shaver Mystery [3]
10. “The ------- Ruined Dawn World”, short story by Fritz Leiber [7]
11. Secretive organization that Edward Snowden used to work for [3]
12. Fictional country which is the source of Doc Savage’s wealth [7]
13. “---- --- ergo propter hoc”, a logical fallacy popular with some conspiracy theorists [4, 3]
14. A short 16 mm film clip from 1967 purportedly showing Bigfoot [9-6]
19. Village in the South of France reputedly associated with a great mystical secret [6-2-7]
21. Ankh, cross and pentagram, for example [7]
24. A Runic alphabet [7]
27. --- Wein, creator of Wolverine and Swamp Thing [3]
28. Hard to pin down, like many Fortean phenomena [7]
29. Like a UFO, but not unidentified [3]
30. An unexplained event [7]
31. ------- McMahon, X-Files super-soldier played by Lucy Lawless [7]

DOWN

1. Early type of UFO widely reported across America during the 1890s [7]
2. Bigfoot, for example [5]
3. Denny -----, author of The Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer [5]
4. If the Gunpowder Plot was a False Flag operation, this person may have engineered it [4, 2, 9]
5. A famous Fortean mystery from Barbados [8, 7]
6. Himalayan giant apes (real or imaginary) [5]
7. Enigmatic alien creature in Philip K. Dick’s novel A Maze of Death [5]
8. A type of scientific analysis applied to Bigfoot and Richard III [3, 4]
15. The --- Lost Tribes of Israel [3]
16. The Third ---, by T. Lobsang Rampa [3]
17. --- Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives [3]
18. First name of JFK’s alleged assassin [3]
19. A water nymph in Slavic mythology [7]
20. Pulp magazine which featured Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier in its first issue [7]
22. Planet ruled by Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon’s universe [5]
23. The Magic Flute or The Flying Dutchman, for example [5]
25. Huge volcanic eruption which may have been responsible for the Atlantis legend [5]
26. Entity from another planet [5]

The Lemurian Conspiracy

As mentioned in a previous post, I went to the Science Fiction Worldcon in London last month. I was disappointed to find very few stalls in the dealers’ hall selling second-hand pulps and paperbacks – I guess nowadays it’s more cost-effective for them to sell such things via eBay. I did manage to get a few interesting items, however, including this 1979 novel by Ron Goulart: Hello Lemuria Hello.

The Fortean connections are obvious right away. “Lemuria” in the title refers to a reputed sunken continent, similar to Atlantis, which featured in a number of esoteric theories including the writings of Richard Shaver – the notorious “Shaver Mystery” of the 1940s. The latter is mentioned in the back cover blurb, as is the almost-as-Fortean “real reason for the death of Elvis Presley”.

There is another Fortean connection in the book’s hero – Jake Conger of the Wild Talents Division. “Wild Talents”, of course, was the title of Charles Fort’s last book. In the novel, the Wild Talents Division is made up of operatives with paranormal abilities – Jake Conger can make himself invisible, while his female sidekick Wizard Wells is an “87 per cent accurate” Precog. This is the last of three books featuring the Jake Conger character, although it’s the first that I’ve read.

The Shaver Mystery is something of a hobby horse of mine, so I won’t get sidetracked into pontificating about it here. Suffice to say that Shaver’s basic premise – involving decadent descendents of “ancient aliens” living in caverns beneath the Earth, and controlling human destiny through mind control and other methods – is also the underlying theme of Goulart’s novel, although Shaver isn’t actually mentioned by name. The most obvious difference is that Shaver, like all paranoid theorists, was in deadly earnest about everything he said. Goulart plays the whole thing for laughs – to much better effect.

There is a character in the novel, a crackpot author by the name of P.K. Stackpole, who broadly approximates to Richard Shaver – albeit a future version of him, since the action is set in 2022. “Hello Lemuria Hello” is supposedly the title of Stackpole’s latest non-fiction book – winner of the prestigious Goofy award at the annual convention of the Crackpot Writers of America (“all sorts of pea-brained yoohoos who specialize in writing about the weird, the occult, the paranormal...”).

The other person name-dropped on the back cover, Elvis Presley, also appears in fictionalized form, as a wealthy middle-aged pop singer named Amos Binky. He doesn’t have that much in common with Elvis – in fact British readers might detect a closer resemblance to the late unlamented Jimmy Savile (“I tell you that girl scout was over twelve. Somebody done falsified her birth certificate or somethin’ to make me look bad.”). The book was published in March 1979, just a year and a half after Presley’s death, so I guess it was a case of cashing in on a still-topical subject. It’s interesting, anyway, that the idea of a “real reason for the death of Elvis Presley” was already part of conspiracy culture by that time.

The book’s setting of 2022 is now just 8 years away – much closer than 1979, which is 35 years in the past. I love reading retro-futuristic stories like this, both for the things they got right and the things they got wrong. The novel is full of smart-aleck robots, automated skycabs, sentient shopping carts and such like... all still very much in the realms of science fiction. On the other hand, everyone still reads printed books and magazines, with no indication there is any electronic alternative.

But Goulart did get some things right. People pay for purchases by putting a plastic card in a slot. They check into hotels by signing their name on a screen with a stylus. They watch mindless garbage on satellite TV. Even more prophetic is the title of one of the bestsellers of the day: “I Blew the President” – clearly a timeslipped reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the mid-nineties!

The portrayal of the conspiracy theorist, P.K. Stackpole, also struck me as being closer to a 21st century stereotype than one from the 1970s. He goes on about how he’s persecuted by Lizard People, and how the FBI implanted a radio transmitter in his rectum. His writings include articles entitled “Here’s a Microwave Threat They Didn’t Tell You About” and “The Government is Building Concentration Camps Again and You are Footing the Bills.” Just the sort of thing you see on conspiracy websites today!

Ron Goulart (who is still alive, as far as I know) was one of the most prolific science fiction authors of the 1970s and 80s. He wrote literally hundreds of novels and short stories, maintaining the cheap-and-cheerful pulp ethos at a time when most of his contemporaries had switched to writing stodgy, pseudo-literary epics. I haven’t read as much of his work as I should have, given that I share his value system – my excuse is that very little of his output saw print on this side of the Atlantic.

I’ve read one of his non-fiction books – Cheap Thrills, a history of the pulp magazines – but he’s written several others, mainly on comic-book culture. I’ve read a handful of Goulart’s short stories in anthologies, and the three of his Vampirella adaptations that were reprinted in the UK. Apart from that, I’ve only read three Ron Goulart novels (all paperbacks imported from the States)... and Hello Lemuria Hello is definitely the best of them.

Charles Fort in Fiction

At the end of February, Nick Redfern wrote a blog post about The Lurker at the Threshold – a novel that is purportedly by “H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth”, although it’s generally considered to be almost pure Derleth, worked up from just a brief fragment by Lovecraft that was discovered after his death. Like Agatha Christie’s N or M, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, The Lurker at the Threshold is a book I’d had sitting unread on the shelf for years. I was finally prompted to read it by Nick’s very positive words about it... and particularly because he mentioned that it “cites the work and books of Charles Fort”.

I happen to have a special fascination with that small and exclusive sub-genre of fiction which mentions Charles Fort by name... if for no other reason than that the first few times I ever came across Fort’s name was in works of fiction. I can’t be absolutely sure, but I think the very first time was in a short story by R.A. Lafferty called “Nor Limestone Islands”, which was part of an anthology entitled Universe 1 that was published in 1971, although I read it in 1977 (I know, because I used to write down the title of every book I read and the year I read it... in fact, I still do). Often when a fiction writer namedrops Fort it’s just to say “look, weird things really do happen” – but Lafferty’s “Nor Limestone Islands” is a genuinely Fortean tale. The limestone islands in question are islands in the sky, from which mysterious things sometimes fall to earth. And you can’t get more Fortean than that.

As a general rule, the notion of “citing a reference” is much commoner in non-fiction than in fiction. One prominent exception to this rule is H.P. Lovecraft, whose fiction is often packed with citations. Sometimes the works cited are themselves fictitious, such as the Pnakotic Manuscripts or the infamous Necronomicon, but often they are real works – the books of Charles Fort among them. So it’s no surprise that August Derleth—who was a master of imitation—copied this aspect of Lovecraft’s fiction in The Lurker at the Threshold and some of his other Lovecraftian pastiches. But H.P. Lovecraft wasn’t the only writer that Derleth strove to imitate – he also wrote numerous Sherlock Holmes pastiches featuring his own Holmesian detective, Solar Pons... and Charles Fort is mentioned in at least one of these stories too!

Over on my website devoted to Astounding Science Fiction magazine, there’s a page entitled Charles Fort and Astounding. This was originally intended to describe appearances of Fort’s own work, and discussions thereof, in that magazine. However, as time went on I started to add in any other allusions I found to Fort in various works of fiction. Since the resulting list is hidden away in a fairly obscure location, I thought I’d reproduce it here (in slightly abbreviated form):

• Two or three fanatical extremists went so far as to hint at possible meanings in the ancient Indian tales which gave the hidden beings a non-terrestrial origin; citing the extravagant books of Charles Fort with their claims that voyagers from other worlds and outer space have often visited the earth. (H.P. Lovecraft: “The Whisperer in Darkness”, from Weird Tales, August 1931)
• If there are extra-terrestrial races further advanced than ourselves, why haven’t they visited us already? Charles Fort gave me what may well be the answer. He said “I think we’re property”. (Eric Frank Russell: “Sinister Barrier”, from Unknown, March 1939)
• A very large, though usually suppressed, body of occurrences antipodally contradictory to the total scientific knowledge of mankind, which occur daily in all parts of the world, some of which have been collected and chronicled in two remarkable books by a comparative unknown named Charles Fort—The Book of the Damned and New Lands. (H P Lovecraft and August Derleth: The Lurker at the Threshold, Arkham House 1945)
• Charles Fort was one of those who came closest to guessing, or knowing the mysteries contained in the artificial cave world beneath this Earth’s surface. He thought that we were ‘fished for’, or that the possibility existed that we were fished for.... Before the reader dismisses the question with “ridiculous!” let him read any of the daily papers of the past few years, or the books of Charles Fort for literally thousands of unexplained ‘disappearances’. (Richard Shaver and Bob McKenna: “The Return of Sathanas”, from Amazing Stories, November 1946)
• He believed that science, orthodox science, especially astronomy and meteorology, was screwy, that it had gone off the beam somewhere and led us astray. He gathered facts—mostly in the form of news clippings from everywhere—of things that didn’t fit in with the current opinions of the scientists and are therefore ignored or explained away. Rains of frogs, rains of fishes, mysterious appearances and disappearances, werewolves, spaceships, sea serpents, earthquakes and meteors... Take something that happened comparatively recently—this flying disk business. That would have been meat and drink for Charles Fort. (Fredric Brown: Compliments of a Fiend, Dutton 1950)
• Yet Fort himself assuredly made exciting reading, as Danny found out directly afterward at the public library. He could see why writers loved the man. He wrote in a continuous and highly poetic display of verbal fireworks, superbly controlled, intricately balanced, witty and evocative at once... But his explanations for the things he had observed, collected at second hand, or simply collated were deliberately outrageous. Every now and then Danny found in one or another of Fort’s four books a glimmering trail toward something useful—and every time Fort took the developing insight and stood it on its head. (James Blish: Jack of Eagles, Greenberg 1952)
• The fictions of H P Lovecraft had, it seemed to me, the same relation to truth as the facts, so inexplicable to science, reported by Charles Fort. (August Derleth: “The Seal of R’lyeh”, from The Mask of Cthulhu, Arkham House 1958)
• She had seen photographs of Fort. He was a big bear-like man, rather shy, and boasting of a brown, walrus moustache. His eyes peered out at the world from behind thick glasses. Those who knew him said his apartment was filled with shoe boxes crammed with notes and clippings.... His fourth book was called “Lo!” The title was suggested by his old friend Tiffany Thayer, because, he said, astronomers are for ever calculating and pointing to the sky where they figure a new star should be, and then saying “Lo”, and there is nothing whatever to be seen where they point. (Lionel Fanthorpe, writing as John E Muller: The X-Machine, Badger Books SF-74, 1963)
• Ah, there was a man! There was a man who knew how to doubt, and what to doubt! Fort was a rebel; like all rebels he was impetuous and he probably went too far in a number of directions, but basically, what he said and did was good—which takes us back to what we were saying earlier—Truth cannot hurt the truth. (Lionel Fanthorpe, writing as Bron Fane: UFO 517, Badger Books SF-115, 1965)
• I suddenly had a definite suspicion that Karel had gone insane. In my youth, I had read the books of Charles Fort, with their suggestions of giants, fairies and floating continents. But Fort’s extraordinary farragoes of sense and nonsense have an air of humorous exaggeration. Karel Weissman’s ideas sounded as mad as Fort’s, but they were obviously advanced in all seriousness. (Colin Wilson: The Mind Parasites, Panther Books 1969)
• We haven’t the exact citation of this. It’s from Charles Fort or from one of his imitators. It’s of a scientist who refused to believe that several pieces of limestone had fallen from the sky, even though two farmers had seen them fall. They could not have fallen from the sky, the scientist said, because there is no limestone in the sky. (R. A. Lafferty: “Nor Limestone Islands”, from Universe 1, Ace Books 1971)
• A favourite gambit of investigators, like Charles Fort, of curious, unexplained facts: that of strange, motiveless disappearances... as vanishings into ‘holes in space’ or into other dimensions, or some such phenomenal ‘openings’ in time and space. (August Derleth: “The Adventure of the Missing Tenants”, from Chronicles of Solar Pons, Robson Books 1975)
• Orthodox science ignores these events, of course. They don’t fit into the scheme anywhere, so they can’t have happened... All that Charles Fort did to earn your scorn, my dear, was simply collect reports from perfectly respectable sources—annual registers, weather reviews, meteorological reports. He never invented a damn thing. (Ian Watson: Miracle Visitors, Gollancz 1978)

The Mystery of Flight 19

While I was researching this weekend's blog post, I came across an interesting piece of Fortean history... even though it wasn't what I was looking for! It is, I believe, the earliest speculation in print regarding a potentially paranormal explanation for the disappearance of Flight 19 in December 1945... the incident that would later give rise to the myth of the Bermuda Triangle.

The scan on the left comes from a "letter to the editor" (from one Edward R. Walker of Colorado) in the August 1946 issue of Amazing Stories. There can be little doubt that 'Six Navy planes disappearing all at once off the coast of Florida' is a slightly garbled reference to the loss of Flight 19 (consisting of five Avenger torpedo bombers) and the subsequent loss of one of the search aircraft (a Martin Mariner flying boat).

The letter in itself isn't particularly interesting... after all, the incident must have made headline news only a few months before the letter was written. What is far more significant, historically, is the editor's reply. And part of the significance is just who that editor happened to be!

In 1946, Amazing Stories was edited by none other than Ray Palmer... who later became famous as the editor of Fate magazine. It was Fate, under Palmer's editorship, that first popularized the Bermuda Triangle mystery in the early 1950s. But Fate didn't appear until 1948, when Palmer left Amazing... or more accurately, when he was forced to leave Amazing. The magazine was supposed to be devoted to science fiction, but Ray Palmer, as editor, had consistently alienated his publishers and traditional SF fans by focusing on "non-fiction" mysteries of the Fortean kind. Foremost among these was the Shaver Mystery, which dominated Amazing in the last few years of Palmer's editorship. This particular issue (August 1946), for example, contains a short "semi-factual" novel by Richard Shaver himself, as well as a two-page feature on The Shaver Mystery by Palmer.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Palmer's comments on Flight 19 (reproduced at left) show a distinctly Shaverian bent: 'Not a sign, not a message, just instant disappearance. And no fuss about it since, just official forgetfulness. Your editor would like to KNOW what happened, because it wasn't anything ordinary. As a matter of fact, this is only one of hundreds of mysteries of this type which have baffled the world in the past few years. But we hear nothing further about them because "officialdom" and "explainers of everything by means of book larnin'" can't explain them. We think Shaver has come closest to a real explanation, and after all, a poor explanation is better than none at all.'

The final comment is interesting, because it suggests that Palmer wasn't completely satisfied with the Shaver paradigm... and was ready to abandon it if something better came along. And in 1948, that's exactly what happened, when Palmer became one of the first to jump on the "Flying Saucer" bandwagon!

Precogging Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick has a reputation, both among academics and general readers, that places him far above the other science fiction writers of his time. It's true that much of his work belongs solidly in the mainstream of literature -- the scathing social satires of the early period, the character-rich novels of the middle period (often closer to soap opera than traditional space opera), and above all the inimitable "religion, drugs and rock & roll" ethos of the late works. But by focusing on Dick in isolation from his SF contemporaries, it's possible that some of his zanier plots and ideas are seen as original or unique when in fact they aren't.

Quite a lot of "Dickian" SF was produced in the 1940s, before Dick himself began to write, by then-popular (but now-obscure) authors such as A.E. Van Vogt, Eric Frank Russell, Fredric Brown and Henry Kuttner. The hero of Van Vogt's magnum opus The World of Null-A (1945) discovers that all his memories are false, and that he is a pawn in a huge power struggle between the politicians and shadowy background players. The government in Russell's Dreadful Sanctuary (1948) sabotages its own space missions, while the power behind the government is a secret society run by paranoid schizophrenics. But -- although obscure -- books such as these are not yet completely forgotten by academics. For a pre-Dick Dickian novel that is totally unknown to them we need to turn to Richard Shaver (1907 - 75).

Shaver is remembered today as the originator of the pseudo-factual Shaver Mystery, but during the 1940s and early 50s he was also a fairly prolific science fiction author. His novel The Mind Rovers was published in the January 1947 issue of Amazing Stories, and has never been reprinted. I have no idea if Philip K. Dick ever read it, but it's about as Dickian a tale as you could ever find. The story is narrated in the first person by a character who may be sane or insane... if the latter, then the situations and events in the story may have no objective reality at all. The narrator is an inmate in prison -- as are all good, healthy young Americans in this particular world. The government is run by the mob, and the mob is run by Klug -- an ex-Nazi who escaped from Germany at the end of the War (less than two years ago: the story is set in the "present"). The hero and some of the other convicts learn how to dream themselves into other people's brains, which are like miniature worlds... modeled after the dreams of the person in question, and populated by tiny people some of whom are real (like themselves, who have mastered the technique of mind-roving) while others are imaginary constructs of the subject's brain. By hopping between brains, they eventually find their way into Klug's brain for a final showdown with the Nazi tyrant...