The man who spent 27 years in libraries collecting the facts that science threw away.
Documented
The Book of the Damned is a real archive
Between 1919 and 1932 Fort published four books compiled from scientific journals and newspapers: The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, Wild Talents. Rains of fish, frogs, and stones; strange lights; objects falling from clear skies. Every entry carries a citation to a published source. He invented no facts; he collected the ones that had no shelf.
Assessment: Fully documented. His sources are checkable, the Fortean Times still mines the same seam a century later, and even skeptics treat Fort as the genre's one honest researcher.
Interesting claims
We are property
Fort's own verdict on his data: 'I think we are property.' Something owns the earth, he half-joked, and the unexplained falls and lights are its leavings. He proposed a Super-Sargasso Sea above the world where lost things drift until they drop.
Assessment: Fort himself winked while proposing it. He built theories the way a prosecutor builds cases, to show that any theory can swallow any fact. Read him as the genre's conscience: the data is damned not because it is false, but because no theory wants it.
Stories
The hermit of the Bronx
The legend: Fort sat in the New York Public Library for twenty-six years, took notes on tens of thousands of slips, then burned forty thousand of them when a theory changed. He went blind finishing his last book. The Fortean personality cult is built from these stories.
Assessment: The library years and the manuscript burning are documented from his own letters and his wife's accounts. The legend compresses a genuinely strange life into a patron saint of the unexplained, which he would have mocked.
Sources and further reading
Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, Boni & Liveright, 1919
Charles Fort, New Lands, 1923
Worth asking
Fort said one measures a circle beginning anywhere. If every fact he catalogued was real and published in respectable journals, who was damning the data, the witnesses or the explainers?