Lo! eBook Charles Fort
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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.
Fort continues to tweak scientific pomposity, focusing on astronomers. While astronomy bills itself as an exact science, even today, with digital computers, calculations can go awry, often because of human error and the limits of our mathematical models. A Mars probe was lost because one software component was using English measurements instead of metric. While multi-body systems can now be simulated digitally using iterative methods, eventually chaos creeps in and makes predicting future locations of planets impossible. Fort uses this Achilles heel to advance his own modest cosmological proposal, of a shell of land just a few dozen miles up, with the stars as volcanoes...
Taken at face value, of course, he is dead wrong--even the builders of Stonehenge would have turned up their noses at this concept. However, Fort was vindicated in many large and small ways here. He predicted the space race, and how space travel would someday become commercialized and routine. His sense that the universe has a lot of strange components that early 20th century science had no concept of, was also prescient. Today, we might use parallel universes to explain many of these phenomena. In fact, some mainstream theories of physics demand the existence of such universes. In fact, some of these universes may be separated from ours by the spatial equivalent of millimeters. Somewhere, I think, Mr. Fort is a bit less grumpy...
Author
Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932) was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena.
Lo! eBook Charles Fort
Charles Fort writes with the typical droll humor of English authors. It not read carefully one misses it. He loves to discredit astronomers, other scientists and religion. Also, the book is brimming with unexplained happenings, all documented by quotes from newspapers and other periodicals. With tongue in cheek he insists the earth is still and that the stars, sun and moon rotate around us. There's a lot of repitition of strange events which tends to becomefaintly boring. I read this book when I was a young man. I'm 86 now and enjoyed it just as much
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Lo! eBook Charles Fort Reviews
Way up on that old misty mountain
Where the bear and the catamount range,
A pale ghostly light
Can be seen every night
That no scientist or hunter can explain.
-- "The Brown Mountain Light"
_Lo!_ (1931) is the third of Charles Fort's four stranger-than-science books and the last to be published during his lifetime. His final book, _Wild Talents_ (1932), was published a few months after his death. The title for the book was suggested by Fort's friend Tiffany Thayer. It was meant to be a satirical reference to astronomers who were constantly predicting that a heavenly body would appear in the sky when nothing would in fact be there. It was a joke that backfired. A bit later, Pluto was discovered where Percival Lowell calculated that it would be.
Charles Fort (1874--1932) was a quiet, walrus-shaped man who delighted in creating strange games and collecting natural history artifacts. He was an Hegalian and a self-professed skeptic. But most of all, he was keenly interested in researching anomalies, strange phenomena, and odd occurances that he believed could not be readily explained by orthodox science. He hoped to accumulate a mass of "data" or "damned information" that would serve as an Hegelian antithesis to a scientific thesis.
Fort waxes satirical about what he called the Scientific Priestcraft, but he is also satirical about himself and his sources of information "Lies, yarns, hoaxes, mistakes-- what's the specific gravity of a lie, and how am I to segregate?" (chapter one). Elsewhere, Fort warns the reader that his works should be considered more fiction than fact. His tongue is always firmly in his cheek, and his humor is one of his most endearing traits as a writer. He is not trying to make us true believers in a single cause. He is encouraging us to think for ourselves.
But if Fort cannot bring himself to segregate, modern readers must. Some of Fort's hypotheses that he offers in _Lo!_ are clearly preposterous that the Earth is more flat than spherical and rotates only once a year; that it is surrounded by a crystal ceiling over our heads; that the stars are holes in this ceiling through which light shines; that there is a Sargasso Sea in the crystal sky from which drop rains of fish, frogs, periwinkles, and chunks of meat; that sheep and cattle are frequently slaughtered by werewolves and vampires; and that people, animals, and objects are routinely teleported about. (Fort invented the terms "teleportation" and "telekinesis".)
I am highly skeptical of Fort's accounts of ghosts, poltergeists, bleeding statues, human spontaneous combustion, and feats of extrasensory perception. But they are at least a bit more plausible than items in the first category.
Accounts that seem to me to be either probable or well documented include red rains and snow, meteor showers and thunderstones, wheels of Poseidon in the ocean, the Brown Mountain lights, lights or objects in the sky (_not_ flying saucers), odd sea creatures (_not_ sea serpents), animal mutations, deadly flash floods, and strange footprints and fossils.
Fort discusses a number of classical mysteries the _Marie Celeste_, the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, Benjamin Bathurst (who "walked around the horses" and vanished), the Jersey devil, and Kaspar Hauser. Other items of interest include alleged scientific hoaxes, lesser known vanishings at sea, the case of Agatha Christie, cases of amnesia (or purported amnesia), and the Man from Mars. One case not discussed is the Loch Ness monster. While stories of this creature were told for quite some time, it did not receive widespread publicity until 1934, two years after Fort's death. I suspect that Fort would have loved to haved written about Nessie had he known of her. I will leave it to individual readers to decide whether they agree with Fort's interpretations of these events.
Unfortunately, there are a number of Forteans today who take Fort literally and who completely miss his humor. Martin Gardner has written of these latter-day believers
If a Baker Street Irregular began to think that Sherlock Holmes actually did exist, all the good clean fun would vanish. Similarly, when a Fortean seriously believes that all scientific theories are equally absurd, all the rich humor of the Society gives way to an ignorant sneer. (_Fads and Fallacies_, 1957, 49)
I am not generally a fan of proponents of pseudoscientific movements. But I do have a fondness for Fort, with this _caveat_ When you read _Lo!_, remember that Fort was more of a humorist and a writer of nonsense than he was a profound and solemn philosopher.
fascinating.
As presented with timely delivery.
I am almost to the end of this book,and it is very educational reading material..
Fort was a very interesting man and and his investigations are even more so. I recommend this to anyone interested in the unusual and peculiar. Rain falling from a clear sky. Reported mermaids, Raining frogs....etc.
Amazing, and love his biting humor
If you are interested in odd occurrences and strange sightings, this is the book for you, and it is, of course, a must-have book for fans of Charles Fort, who, many years after his death, became a comic book hero. I bought this book because I knew it included copy about The Crawfordsville Curiosity, an "atmospheric beast" that attacked Crawfordsville, IN, in 1891. I went to Crawfordsville many years ago to do research on the one-eyed "monster."
Charles Fort writes with the typical droll humor of English authors. It not read carefully one misses it. He loves to discredit astronomers, other scientists and religion. Also, the book is brimming with unexplained happenings, all documented by quotes from newspapers and other periodicals. With tongue in cheek he insists the earth is still and that the stars, sun and moon rotate around us. There's a lot of repitition of strange events which tends to become
faintly boring. I read this book when I was a young man. I'm 86 now and enjoyed it just as much
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