In 1919, a largely unknown writer named Charles Hoy Fort published a book called The Book of the Damned. The “damned” in question were not people. They were facts—data points collected over decades from scientific journals, newspapers, and maritime logs that the scientific establishment of the day had either ignored, dismissed, or quietly buried because they didn’t fit any accepted theory. Rains of frogs. Falls of red liquid from clear skies. Unidentified lights tracked by multiple observers. Objects appearing and disappearing. Spontaneous fires. Animals found in places they had no biological business being. Fort spent thirty years in the New York Public Library and the British Museum reading room, copying these reports onto thousands of index cards kept in shoeboxes, assembling what amounted to an enormous filing cabinet of things that weren’t supposed to happen but apparently did anyway.
Fort didn’t claim these events were supernatural. He didn’t build a theory of the paranormal. He didn’t start a religion or declare that aliens were responsible. What he did—and this is the part that gets lost in a century of people projecting their own agendas onto his work—was point at the data and say: science claims to have a comprehensive model of how the world works, and here are several thousand documented instances where that model doesn’t account for what was observed. He called this data “damned” because it had been excluded from polite scientific conversation, not because it was demonic. The exclusion was the point. As the writer Colin Wilson later summarized Fort’s operating principle: “People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.”
That’s Forteanism in one sentence. And it’s a more intellectually rigorous position than it gets credit for.
What actually counts as Fortean
The term “Fortean phenomena” now functions as a catch-all for anomalous events that sit outside the boundaries of currently accepted scientific explanation. The taxonomy—developed by Fort and expanded by researchers since—covers a genuinely enormous range of stuff, and the breadth is part of the point. Fort didn’t specialize. He collected everything.
The major categories, roughly organized:
Anomalous falls from the sky. This was Fort’s bread and butter—his books are packed with documented reports of things falling from the atmosphere that have no obvious atmospheric origin. Rains of fish, frogs, tadpoles, insects, larvae, worms, mussels, snails, and even snakes. Falls of ice blocks, stones, and chunks of calcium. Falls of red, black, or yellow rain. Falls of sulphur, hay, and unidentifiable organic matter. These aren’t all ancient. Fish falls are still reported regularly—hundreds of small fish raining onto the town of Texarkana, Texas in 2021 made national news. The standard meteorological explanation is waterspouts picking up aquatic organisms and depositing them miles inland, which accounts for some cases convincingly and others not at all, particularly when the species involved don’t inhabit any nearby body of water.
Unidentified aerial phenomena. Fort cataloged unexplained lights and objects in the sky decades before Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting kicked off the modern UFO era. His records include reports from ship captains, astronomers, military personnel, and weather observers describing luminous objects, formations of lights, and structured craft-like things visible for extended periods. Fort invented the word “teleportation.” He also proposed, with characteristic deadpan, that Earth might be the property of some unknown intelligence—”I think we’re property,” he wrote in The Book of the Damned—though whether he meant this literally or as a satirical provocation aimed at scientific arrogance is a debate that Forteans have been having for a hundred years.
Cryptozoology. Reports of animals that haven’t been formally identified by science—Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Chupacabra, Mokele-mbembe, the Yeti—fall under the Fortean umbrella, though Fort himself was less interested in specific creatures than in the pattern of scientific dismissal that preceded eventual discovery. More on this below.
Spontaneous human combustion. Documented cases—some backed by coroner reports and forensic investigation—of human bodies found almost completely incinerated in circumstances where the surrounding environment showed minimal fire damage. The wick effect hypothesis (where body fat acts as fuel after ignition from an external source like a cigarette) explains some cases. Others remain genuinely perplexing.
Anomalous animal behavior. Mass die-offs, mass strandings, animals appearing far outside their known range, coordinated behaviors that defy current ethological models. Fort was particularly interested in cases where conventional explanations required more assumptions than the anomaly itself.
Earth mysteries. Unexplained sounds (the Taos Hum, the Bristol Hum, the “Bloop” recorded by NOAA hydrophones in 1997), earthquake lights, ball lightning, crop circles (most of which are obviously human-made, though the plasma vortex hypothesis for the handful that aren’t has some interesting physics behind it), and geomagnetic anomalies.
The surprisingly rigorous intellectual tradition
Here’s where Fortean phenomena get genuinely interesting from an epistemological standpoint, and where the field diverges sharply from the conspiracy-theory adjacent content it’s often lumped in with.
Fort’s actual intellectual contribution wasn’t collecting weird stories. It was developing a framework for thinking about how science handles outlier data. His argument—stripped of the deliberately provocative style—was that the scientific establishment has a systematic bias toward excluding observations that don’t fit existing theoretical models, and that this exclusion is driven not by the data itself but by the social and institutional structures of science. Papers that report anomalous findings are harder to publish. Careers are not built on documenting things you can’t explain. Grant funding does not flow toward investigating phenomena that might turn out to be measurement error. The incentive structure of professional science is optimized for extending existing paradigms, not for cataloging their failures.
This is not a crackpot position. Thomas Kuhn made essentially the same argument in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962—that normal science operates by suppressing anomalies until enough of them accumulate to trigger a paradigm shift—and nobody called Kuhn a crackpot. He got tenure at MIT. Fort made the same observation forty years earlier, in a more entertaining and less academic style, and was written off as an eccentric. The difference was packaging, not substance.
The anthropologist Roger Wescott coined the term “anomalistics” in 1973 to describe the interdisciplinary study of scientific anomalies—essentially a formalized version of what Fort had been doing since the 1890s. The field has since developed genuine methodological rigor. The Fortean Times, published since 1973, combines humor and skepticism with original research. The Society for Scientific Exploration publishes peer-reviewed work on anomalous phenomena. Modern Fortean researchers use satellite imagery, digital archives, eDNA sampling, acoustic analysis, and the same statistical tools as any other field to investigate claims.
The phenomena science denied until it couldn’t
The strongest argument for taking Fortean data seriously isn’t the data that’s still unexplained. It’s the data that was once “Fortean” and is now just science.
Ball lightning was reported for centuries—glowing spheres of light appearing during thunderstorms, passing through walls, hovering for seconds before vanishing. Scientists dismissed the reports as hallucinations, optical illusions, or misidentified St. Elmo’s fire until laboratory-produced ball lightning was achieved in 2006 by researchers in Tel Aviv and again by a team in China in 2012 using microwave discharge. It’s now an accepted atmospheric phenomenon with multiple competing physical models.
Rogue waves—walls of ocean water two to three times the height of surrounding waves, appearing without warning—were considered sailor folklore until the Draupner wave was measured by instruments on the Draupner oil platform in the North Sea on January 1, 1995. The wave was 25.6 meters high in a sea state of 12-meter significant wave height. It was real, it was measured, and it immediately invalidated the standard statistical models for ocean wave height distribution. Sailors had been reporting these waves for centuries. Oceanographers had been explaining to them that such waves were statistically impossible.
Meteorites. Before 1803, the idea that rocks fell from the sky was considered superstitious nonsense by the scientific establishment. The French Academy of Sciences had formally dismissed the possibility. Then, on April 26, 1803, roughly 3,000 stones fell on the town of L’Aigle in Normandy, witnessed by the entire town and investigated by physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot, who confirmed the fall. The scientific consensus flipped overnight. Rocks from space had been “Fortean” the day before and were geology the day after.
Continental drift. Alfred Wegener proposed in 1912 that the continents had once been joined and had drifted apart. He was ridiculed for decades—the mechanism he proposed was wrong, and geologists couldn’t accept the conclusion without an acceptable mechanism. Plate tectonics wasn’t established until the 1960s. Wegener was right about the observation and wrong about the explanation, and mainstream science rejected the observation because it didn’t like the explanation. Fort would have had a field day.
The pattern is consistent: observation precedes explanation, sometimes by centuries, and during the gap, anyone who takes the observation seriously is treated as a crank. Fort’s entire body of work is essentially a catalog of phenomena sitting in that gap—things that have been observed repeatedly but not yet explained to anyone’s satisfaction.
Why rational people engage with this
The most common misconception about Fortean phenomena is that interest in them requires credulity—that you have to “believe” in Bigfoot or UFOs or spontaneous combustion to find the field worthwhile. Fort himself would have rejected this framing completely. He wasn’t a believer. He was, if anything, a professional skeptic—skeptical of claims of the anomalous, skeptical of claims of normalcy, and especially skeptical of anyone who claimed to have a complete model of reality. His position was that the only honest intellectual posture in the face of anomalous data is to document it, resist the temptation to explain it away prematurely, and maintain a suspension of judgment that he called “intermediatism”—the idea that nothing is entirely real or entirely unreal, and that all knowledge is transitional.
That’s a position that would fit comfortably in any philosophy of science seminar. It just happened to come wrapped in stories about rains of frogs and mysterious lights over the Atlantic, which made it easy to dismiss.
The Fortean approach doesn’t require you to believe anything. It requires you to take observation seriously even when the observation is inconvenient, to resist the reflexive urge to explain away data that doesn’t fit your model, and to recognize that the history of science is littered with phenomena that were “impossible” until they were measured, at which point they became textbook material and everyone pretended they’d never doubted them.
That’s not credulity. That’s intellectual honesty with better source material than most people expect.
We cover the full landscape of Fortean phenomena—anomalous events, cryptozoology, legendary conspiracies, and the science of why humans believe what they believe—across our Fortean Phenomena & Anomalistics course. If the rogue wave story made you want to know what else science got wrong before it got it right, that’s where to start.