New Lands Read Online Free

after that Dreiser came to the apartment to see Anna, asking if Charles had been in touch. There'd been raps, and noises: one day, she said, his aunt came and told her she'd get none of his money, and she went to bed crying. In the middle of the night woke up, and saw him sitting there. "He said, 'Hello, Momma' and I was never so glad to see anybody in my whole life.'" She survived him by five years.
    Dreiser and Thayer met to discuss what should happen to Fort's notes, to his manuscripts, to the preservation of his memory. To no one's surprise they wildly disagreed, Thayer forever alienating the better-known author, who refused to have anything more to do with matters Fortean. It wasn't long before Thayer was publishing the first issues of his zine, Doubt, nominally undertaken in order to print the remainder of the notes. But no sooner did the second World War begin than Thayer, an isolationist, conspiracy theorist, and crank of the third order, started using the pages to publish his musings on Pearl Harbor, on the draft, on the income tax, so on, so forth; to presenting theories so incomprehensible as to make Lawson's "Zig-Zag-And-Swirl" theory seem to be quantum mechanics, works posing a Hebraic origin for Native Americans, and so on -- after a while, naturally, there was no more room to reprint Fort's notes. By the time the last issue appeared in the late 1950s, around the same time the hardcover Books of Charles Fort went out of print, Thayer had managed to drive away most everyone.

    ***

    A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine time.

    Thinking Fort to be an earlier iteration of Thayer, Martin Gardner -- noted science writer and a skeptic honorable enough to be called Fortean -- devoted a chapter to him in his Fads And Follies In the Name of Science . While Gardner could not help but note some of Fort's more outlandish theories, he quickly observes that we cannot be sure at all that Fort is serious. By the end of the chapter the reader realizes that, somehow, the subject caught him off-guard, and so he pays Fort far more respect than anyone else in the book deserves.
    References to Fort began to appear in the flying saucer books that came out in the 1950s; more still in the UFO books that came out in the 1960s. Then, the books themselves, reappeared, and after that the start-up of new Fortean groups as his influence became clear in every aspect of what began to known as the Paranormal. And in the time since, the first appearance of Fortean Times in the UK, which quickly became and remains the journal for all Forteans -- which means, as far as I want to define it, one with a mind skeptical yet convincible, especially in matters most often considered "human -- all too human." In the past fifty years, but most especially since the turn of the century, ours has become a world where it is essential to be a Fortean. To what degree it is essential, we are I think only beginning to discover.
    Fort's time is here.
    As a Fortean, it pleases me greatly that the original will now be available in eBook form, having spent the good part of the past century in print. In words at times as beautiful as anything ever written in English, Charles Fort will reveal to you the marvels of an age, question the nature of what you have been taught, and -- most importantly -- provide you more with than one lead on how not to be fooled by the dog stories, no matter who does the tell. You to draw the line somewhere.

NEW LANDS

PART I

    1
    Lands in the sky—
    That they are nearby—
    That they do not move.
    I take for a principle that all being is the infinitely serial, and that whatever has been will, with differences of particulars, be again—
    The last quarter of the fifteenth century—land to the west!
    This first quarter of the twentieth century—we shall have revelations.
    There will be data. There will be many. Behind