Charles Fort’s books of anomalies advanced a philosophy that saw science as a small part of a larger system in which truth and false-hood continually transformed into one another. His work found a ragged following of sceptics who questioned not only science but the press, medicine, and politics. Though their worldviews varied, they shared compelling questions about genius, reality, and authority. At the centre of this community was adman, writer, and enfant terrible Tiffany Thayer, who founded the Fortean Society, ran it for almost three decades, and edited its magazine, Doubt (see FT200:48-52).
In my new book , I argue that the fortean effect on modern culture is deeper than you think. Forteanism expanded the imaginative possibilities of science fiction, Modernist literature and ufological theorising; it gave members of those communities ways to think about how the world was organised, and how power moved through those structures. In this excerpt, I examine the link between forteans and flying saucer enthusiasts in the 1940s and 1950s. Fort provided some ways to think about aerial phenomena; forteans built on what he’d written and pushed past them into new imaginative frontiers. From these theories came a plethora of ideas about the order of the Universe and the arrangements of power. This pluralism divided the Fortean Society. For the very existence of so many contradictory voices could be proof that there was a more mundane conspiracy afoot, and that the forteans themselves were the victims. It was a very different, very cynical – very Thayerian –
