The Complete Fortean Works of Charles Fort: the Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, Wild Talents (Pseudoarchaeology, Aliens, Ufos, Extraterrestrials) - Annotated the Fortean Phenomena Thought

Charles Fort

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The Book of the Damned
'I think we're property.'
The Book of the Damned was the first published nonfiction work of the author Charles Fort . Dealing with various types of anomalous phenomena including UFOs, strange falls of both organic and inorganic materials from the sky, odd weather patterns, the possible existence of creatures generally held to be mythological, disappearances of people under strange circumstances, and many other phenomena, the book is historically considered to be the first written in the specific field of anomalistics.

New Lands
Fort uncovers more evidence of visitors in our skies.
The focus of this book, the second which Fort published, is to tweak the nose of the mainstream astronomers. Fort's slightly tongue-in-cheek hypothesis is that the Earth is located in a fixed location, and that there are invisible lands in the sky just beyond the atmosphere. He spends much of the first part of the book illustrating a number of embarrassing mistakes in celestial mechanics, and attempting to poke holes in the technique of parallax. Then he pulls together examples of falls of stones, gelatinous substances, anomalous earthquakes, fireballs, which occurred in the same location at the same time, notably in an area which he calls the 'London triangle.' Fort concludes that these manifestations are due to contiguous 'lands in the sky' which maintain a fixed location over the earth.

As in his other books, many of the phenomena here are straight-on UFO reports. Fort gives numerous instances of 'airship' sightings, some with multiple attestations over wide regions. Many of the sightings occurred decades before humans attained heavier-than-air flight. What is striking to modern readers is the language used by the authorities to explain these sightings: bright stars, luminescent gas, mirages, ball lightning, and mass hysteria...and, just prior to WWI, reports of mysterious cylinders over south England were attributed to the Germans. So not only have there been mysterious lights in the sky long before the initial UFO flap in the late 1940s, the powers that be have likewise attempted to dismiss these reports in similar terms for a long time...

Lo!
Is spontaneous teleportation the key to a new view of reality?
In Lo!, Fort develops a theme of teleportation as an agency for many strange phenomena. He reviews the cases of the Marie Celeste, Princess Caraboo, Cagliostro, Ambrose Bierce, Agatha Christie, and Kaspar Hauser as evidence that people can be mysteriously teleported from one point to another. The main side effect of these accidental teleportations seems to be amnesia, in fact it is the sine qua non of the better examples.

Wild Talents
Poltergeists, fire-starters, telekinesis, dowsing--are humans developing new abilities?
This book, the last which Fort published, deals with paranormal abilities of human beings, such as poltergeists, fire-starters, telekinesis, dowsing, and so on. These accounts are often scraped from the police blotter of the newspapers which Fort used as his primary material, which gives a gritty true-crime feel to this volume. Many of these incidents center around a spooky little girl, today a familiar staple of horror films.