hurrengoa
charles h. fort    Researcher of the anomalous We Basques are so smitten by our own little part of this planet that we have never really professed curiosity about the wide unknown beyond our frontiers. We have spent a long time enraptured by our navels and, consequently, there has been no real interest in modern esotericism. We do admire quacks who apply verbena poultices or dig their fingers right into our kidneys because they are seen as being seemingly of ‘our own’ culture. Petrikilo (medically untrained person who cures people) is a great word. Basque from head to toe. But we continue to ignore everything that science discards. Other types of paranormal occurrences. They are left to the oddballs, you know, because we Basques are a serious people.

That is why we have never, unfortunately, had the likes of Charles H. Font, thinker, author, guide and researcher. He was born in 1874, Albany in New York and he is responsible for almost all of the theory behind modern parascience: unidentified flying objects, disappearances, parallel words, frog-rains, cryptozoology, teleportation… Watching Mulder and Scully in TV show The X-Files, you soon realise that the scriptwriters read and copied the complete bibliography of Charles H. Fort.

This magnificent author and researcher was especially adept at avoiding success. When one of his books was successful, he would quickly publish another one that would question his own findings. We find this self-critical attitude of his very praise-worthy indeed, a true role model. On moving from the USA to London he soon made his way to the famous Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park where he explained and debated his theories. Every week for eight years, he would go along to the delight of those who gathered there. Charles H. Fort was truly anti-system and an anarchist. The greatest. You really need to be an honourable and intelligent person to be able to your own biggest saboteur. Not everyone has what it takes to be a loyal lover of failure.

Charles H. Fort died in 1932. His strict diet of black bread, butter and whiskey aided his premature departure but he did manage to leave a lot of written work behind. Some of these are the novel The Outcast Manufacturers (1909), The Book of the Damned (1919) a collection of anomalous phenomena discarded by science, Lo! (1931), Wild Talents (1932) and Turra & Migüe (1935). His family found many unpublished manuscripts which included his autobiography manuscripts have since been published and they have afforded Fort, despite being lesser known than others, the prime position in the pantheon of those dreaming crazy authors. The paranormal science magazine Fortean Times (www.forteantimes.com) is named after him and this shows the true stature of this great investigator of the anomalous.