The UFO Community Experiences, Activities, and Agendas: Shaping a Community
The structured UFO community can be traced to an individual, American writer Charles Hoy Fort (1874–1932), a habitual contrarian eager to scold scientists for “dogmatic” attraction to scientific fact. He also was an early collector and chronicler of UFO reports. A reclusive autodidact, Fort spent years at the British Museum and New York Public Library, poring over newspapers and accumulating thousands of pieces of scrap paper, each scribbled with his notes about a scientifically anomalous event and his annotation of the published source.
Two early, unpublished books by Fort, X and Y, concern Martian meddling in human affairs; and an unscrupulous civilization located at the South Pole, respectively. Those ideas are outside the mainstream, and some of Fort’s followers are convinced that the writer wanted to arouse skepticism, particularly in younger readers. What Fort called “interplanetary inhabitancy” led him to a discussion, in The Book of the Damned (1919), of historical sightings of dark objects passing across the Moon. Moving lights near the satellite, and white spots on its surface, also piqued Fort’s interest. By way of explanation, Fort went from extraterrestrials (with mythic and religious descriptors) to the supernatural, within the space of two pages. “Worlds in hordes—” he wrote, “—or beings— winged beings perhaps—wouldn’t astonish me if we should end up by discovering angels—or beings in machines—argosies of celestial voyagers—[.]” Mere paragraphs later, he wrote, “Dark bodies, floating, or navigating, in interplanetary space—and I conceive of one that’s the Prince of Dark Bodies: Melanicus. Vast dark thing with the wings of a super-bat, or jet-black super- construction; most likely one of the spores of the Evil One. . . . He obscures a star. He shoves a comet. I think he’s a vast, black, brooding vampire.” Besides challenging readers with his idiosyncratic diction and punctuation, Fort teased them with pendulum-like swings of speculation on single topics. But that was beauty of what he did: take information from many sources, collate it, and present it in the frisky manner of a quasi-intellectual game.
Following the 1923 publication of Fort’s New Lands, reader (and noted writer) Ben Hecht coined the term “Fortean,” as a synonym for “anomalous.” At the beginning of 1931, Tiffany Thayer established The Fortean Society in New York City. Dedicated to thinking seriously about anomalous natural events, and a repudiation of constrained, “traditional” scientific thought, the society published an official organ, Fortean Society magazine, which took a name change in 1944, becoming Doubt. Although the society and Doubt went defunct with Thayer’s death in 1959, Fort’s influence has been felt ever since. In 1973, British publishers with no official link to the Fort legacy established Fortean Times magazine, which continues to this day. Like Fort himself, the magazine is intellectually cheeky, colorful, and wide-ranging—a publication for people skeptical of skeptics.
