Arizona Daily Star from Tucson, Arizona • Page 32

iiiniiiiiijinuuiX3 iiinuuuiuiuuuuuiuuiuiiuiiuuiuuiiuriniuiiiiiiiuuiMf ol Things That Can't Be Explained i Miracles are today discredited by wise men, but Charles Fort of Bronxvillej N. Yv has made it his life work to study all the phenomena that scientists say couldn't, and never did happen By ELEANOR EARLY Although rVLLj NO ArCUMONS-SOC-SAOrViE- FRANCE LittI TCAQ5 PROPPED FftOM SKY RDfcJoME Ito sonny FfiMCfe I -n ic- A a 1 A Dl- A rrs OF MCMBS MAMH TO MTERNAL COMBUSTS mal so I can have some new meat I There is no record that God did anything of the sort. But one day, a couple of hundred years later, there appeared in southern France an animal that looked like a demon. Two feet long, and two feet high, and formed like nothing known to anatomists to anatomists, at least, of this world. As if with belly missing, its hind legs were close to its forelegs.

It had a head like a boar, and a tail like a hyena. Maybe is came from Mars. Or the moon. Mr. Fort is not sure.

He merely hazards the suggestion. Among his notes is the record of a cow that gave birth to two lambs and a calf. Now, biologists refuse to admit any such possibility. The story, they say, is preposterous. Mr.

Fort might as well talk about an elephant producing two bicycles and a baby elephant. Vet well known stockbreeders examined the lambs, and accepted the story of their origin. The creatures, it seems, were large and coarse, and had hair on their breasts, like calves' hair. "I know it is impossible," admits Mr. Fort.

"But there it is. It's like a mule having young. Mules, as everybody knows, are symbols of sterility. But I have many recoids of fertility in mules." IhTS GOME a matter of fact, Mr. Fort has records of practically every thing.

He has plodded for 26 years in the libraries of London and New York, accumulating, weighing, sifting, and recording his impossible data in his filing cases. There are plenty of people who Vs 0 THE SU)Art 7 I THE sMaa "WATAcoo oAvje UBTOftpj METoRsf ONt rences on this earth which the Great God Science fails to interpret," proclaims Mr. Fort "I have assembled the inexplicable. In the face of my facts, final pronouncements fade into mere conjectures. Science is a delusion." Now, it would not be so bad if science had devoted itself exclusively to duping Mr.

Fort But science has attempted to delude other persons. Theodore Dreiser, for instance. The manuscript of "The Book of the Damned" had gone the rounds, and met with unanimous editorial sniffs. Dreiser read it, and liked it. He took it to Publisher Liveright who originally was as shy as his rivals.

And he said, "See here, Horace, if you don't publish this, I'll take my own books to another firm." THAT settled it. Liveright And, when the book was published. Fort took his royalties, his wife, and his parrot and sailed for England, to work in the British Museum. Maybe they file more data on phenomena in London than they do in New York. Anyhow, Mr.

Fort has spent half his life in the Museum there. Now, Mr. Fort has retired to his flat in the Bronx. It is an inaccessible place, and so the Forts are not greatly bothered by guests. Mr.

Fort borrows his wife's checked apron, and plays checkers, on its white and crimson squares. Every night he goes to the movies. Sort etimes he makes home brew. He talks a good deal to his wife. And his parrot talks a good deal to the pair of them.

"I am a hermit by circumstance," explains Mr. Fort. "Not by inclination. In the old days I was a newspaper man a social, writing man. I wanted to be a novelist And so, I thought I had to travel.

I slupped all over the world. "Then I came home, and discovered that the best way to learn life is not to travel. But to sit in one place. To know the people on the next floor, and the folks on the corner. So now I sit in my flat in the Bronx.

And I am still a disappointed novelist." "Charles Fort is one of the master minds of the world today," declares Mr. Dreiser. "I believe he may be the progenitor of an entirely new world view point CHARLES FORT believes nothing. He doesn't believe in heaven. He doesn't believe in hell.

And science is worse. Mr. Fort does not believe that the earth is round, and revolves about the sun. Nor that men descended from monkeys. "Science," he declares, "is the accumulated lunacy of 50 centuries." "I believe nothing," says Mr.

Fort. "1 have shut myself away from wisdom of the ages, and from the so-called great teachers of culture. I shut the front door upon them all, from Euclid to Einstein. And at the back door I hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles." truth of the matter is that Mr. Fort is a most peculiar man.

He lives in a tenement in the Bronx, New York, with a patient wife, a talkative parrot, and 70,000 notes, filed in paper boxes. Mr. Fort's notes are about such things as blizzards of snails. Black rains and red rains. Showers of frogs, bleeding pictures, poison fogs, and mysterious disappearances.

Green moons and red suns. Droughts and deluges. Mermaids and sea serpents. Stones falling from the clouds, manna from heaven. Crimson worms that drop from the skies, and showers of eels.

The weirdest, most monstrous things that ever were. Blood curdling, some of them. Unbelievable, all of them. For years and years, Mr. Fort has been collecting his notes.

Many of them are newspaper clippings. Whenever possible, he has verified them. He doesn't profess to believe them. Thwe they are. Take them, or leave them.

He simply offers them for your consideration. "We should not," he holds, "firmly believe anything. Belief is an impediment to development. The only way to facilitate development is to accept temporarily." And so Mr. Fort accepts, temporarily, all these notes of his.

"They represent," he says, "a procession of data that science has excluded." FOR it is Mr. Fort's contention that any phenomenon that does not fit into science's explanation of things is discarded. Scientists, he claims, throw out miracles, ignoring or denying their existence. And then Mr. Fort goes busily about, collecting tidbits here and there.

Piling them up. Incorporating them in his ever-growing memoranda, and inviting the savants to do one of two things. To invent new dogmas to account for them. Or to interpret them by cold fotmulae. And the scientists, of course, do nothing of the sort.

They simply ignore Mr. Fort and his 70,000 notes. Which, naturally, is rather annoying. No one likes to be ignored. Fortunately, however, Mr.

Fort has attracted the attention of a group of literary men. Such men as John Cowper Powys, Booth Tarkmgton, Theodore Dreiser, Harry Leon Wilscn and Ben Hecht. These eminent gentlemen, along with several others, have organized the Fortean Society, and become the disciples of Heretic Fort. They say Fort is dead right. That science is a lot of nonsense.

And the world is full of strange, strange things. Things like mermaids. And what do scientists know about mermaids? Nothing at all. What, so far as that goes, do scientists know about any of the things tabulated and vouched for by Mr. Fort? Take, for instance, the showers of living things.

Mr. Fort has gathered records of 294 such showers. He tells of the terrified horses, up on their hind legs, hoofing a storm of frogs. About storekeepers, in London, gaping at frogs that were tapping on their window panes. On Sept.

5, 1922, at Chalons-sur-Saone, in France, little toads dropped from the sky for two days. On May 29, 1892. in Coalburg, Alabama, there was a storm of eels. Such eels were never seen before in Alabama, but someone said that he knew of such eels, in the Pacific Ocean. Farmers came, with carts, to take them away for fertilizer.

Three years ago, at Halmstead, Sweden, red worms, from one to four inches long, fell during a snow storm. Thousands of them, like red ribbons in a shower of confetti. Those are Mr. Fort's stories. And he sticks to them.

BESIDES living things, he enumerates other sorts of showers. Stones are a rather common phenomena, he says. They fall slowly and heavily, and, so far as Mr. Fort has been able to learn, have never struck anyone. Although there was the little girl who died from fright the day rocks fell on London.

Fort has a theory of his own to account for such things. "Teleportation," he calls it, and explains it as a transportory force, operating rather like gravity, only different. That may not be clear. But Mr. Fort is not quite clear himself on the subject He tells of the appearance of strange animals, unlike any creatures known to earth.

And he suggests that they may have been teleported from Mars, or the moon. Perhaps you have heard the prayer of King Louis XIV. The king was tired of lamb chops, and beef, and pork. And one day, when he sat down to dinner, he spurned his nice roast beef, exclaiming, "Oh, Godl Send me a new ani mi III Charles Fort rvho collects facts cu impossible happenings and challenges science to explain them photographed nith his files of 70,000 notes on occurrences which, he says, science calmly ignores. them were so many pilgrims that soon the place was known as Pilgrimsville.

In a month 1,000,000 persons had visited the statues. They were placed, finally, with the pictures, in windows, for all to see. There were crowds all day, and at night torchlight processions moved past the windows. Messrs. Cook, the tourist agents, sent inquiries as to whether the inns of Templemore could provide for 2000 pilgrims from England.

Inquiries were cabled from the United States, and South Africa, and Japan. The phenomenon lasted four months. Mr. Fort accepts the story as certain and provable. He is not, however, a pious man, and he questions the hand of God.

"Whatever the association may be," he says, "I note conditions in Ireland at the time. There was terrible bloodshed. Brutality and terrorism. Massacre and horror. England had instituted a reign of terror.

Five days before the images began to bleed, the town was raided. Men were murdered, and blood ran like water. Now I do not say that the phenomenon was teleportation of flowing blood. But what was it?" And what, if not teleportation, brought millions of mice to the fields of Kern County, California, in the autumn of 1927? And what, save teleportation, brought millions of rats to Invernesshire, Scotland? The strangest rats that ever were seen. Brown, with white rings around their necks.

And their tails dipped in white, very decorative but unusual. AYBE it was teleportation that rained mud on Roseau, Dominica. But what made midnieht fall at noon? At 1 I clock on the morning of Jan. 4, Roseau was mped by midnight. Night fell so heavily that it broke the roofs, and frightened the people out of their wits.

And with the dreadful night, fell mud. Black mud. Mr. Fort has his facts from the Dominican and the People, published at Roseau, Dominica, British West Indies. "I collect facts," he explains.

"But I do not draw conclusions. Mud fell on Roseau. Very well. Mud fell. Why? Why not?" Mr.

Fort puts it squarely up to the scientists. Let them explain. "I have gathered data on 16,000 occur S. would think this a dreary existence. But you'd be surprised the kick Mr.

Fort gets out of it. Stories of spontaneous combustion particularly thrill him. Think of a poor old lady, sitting all by herself, and suddenly going up in smoke! So that there was nothing left of her but a pile of bones. Lots of ladies have gone to ashes, just like that. The queer thing about spontaneous combustion is that it seems to apply particularly to women.

Mr. Fort has no records of men combusting in any such fashion. On the other hand, men, starkly naked, have suddenly dropped from nowhere, and been seen running madly about the country. Shortly nhey have disappeared, and never been seen thereafter, dead or alive. Maybe they came from Mars.

Or the moon. Mr. Fort doesn't know. Mysterious disappearances are quite baffling. Everyone has heard of Dorothy Arnold, and the way she vanished from the face of the earth.

But nobody has ever hazarded a solution as naive as Mr. Fort's. On Dec. 12, 1910. Dorothy Arnold went shopping.

When last seen, on Fifth avenue, she said that she intended to walk through Central Park, to her home on 79th street. Somewhere between 59th and 79th streets she disappeared. No more is known of Dorothy Arnold. "On this day Something appeared in Central Park, at 79th street," declares Mr. Fort "Something never seen before.

Upon the lake, near the 79th street entrance, appeared a swan. New York papers commented upon the strange occurrence. Scientists were puzzled." Now, Mr. Fort does not say that swan was Dorothy Arnold. He simply states facts.

NEITHER does he bel ieve that pictures have hemorrhages. Yet "on Saturday (August 21. 1910) all statues and holy pictures, in the home of Thomas Dawn, of Templemore, Tipperary, Ireland, began to bleed." They bled. And they bled. And the awesome news was noised abroad.

So that neo- ple came pouring into Templemore. And among a (Copyright, 1931, by EveryWeek Magaitne Printed In U. tiuuuHuiinniniiiLiiuuuiLutunuiiuunuLiULniiiiiuiiuiin3 iniuumiuiiiinuS a 1.