by Charles Fort
Handwritings on watts—I have several accounts: but, if anybody should be interested enough to look up this phenomenon for himself, he will find the most nearly acceptable record in the case of Esther Cox, of Amherst, Nova Scotia. This case was of wide notoriety, and, of it, it could be said that it was well-investigated if it can be supposed that there ever has been a case of anything that has been more than glanced at, or more than painstakingly and profoundly studied, simply to confirm somebody’s theory.
If I should tell of a woman, who, by mental picturings, not only marked the body of her unborn infant, but transformed herself into the appearance of a tiger, or a lamppost, or became a weretiger, or a werelamppost—or of a magician, who, beginning with depicting forest scenes on window glass, had learned to transform himself into a weredeer, or a weretree—I’d tell of a kind of sorcery that used to be of somewhat common occurrence.
I have a specimen. It is a Ceylon leaf insect. It is a wereleaf. The leaf insect’s likeness to a leaf is too strikingly detailed to permit any explanation of accidental resemblance.
There are butterflies, which, with wings closed, look so much like dried leaves that at a distance of a few feet they are indistinguishable from dried leaves. There are tree hoppers with the appearance of thorns; stick insects, cinder beetles, spiders that look like buds of flowers. In all instances these are highly realistic portraitures, such as the writer, who described the portrait of Dean Liddell, on the church wall, would call the handiwork of a master artist.
There have been so many instances of this miracle that I now have a theory that, of themselves, men never did evolve from lower animals: but that, in early and plastic times, a human being from somewhere else appeared upon this earth, and that many kinds of animals took him for a model, and rudely and grotesquely imitated his appearance, so that, today, though the gorillas of the Congo, and of Chicago, are only caricatures, some of the rest of us are somewhat passable imitations of human beings.
The conventional explanation of the leaf insect, for instance, is that once upon a time a species of insects somewhat resembled leaves of trees, and that the individuals that most closely approximated to this appearance had the best chance to survive, and that in succeeding generations, still higher approximations were still better protected from their deceived enemies.
An intelligence from somewhere else, not well-acquainted with human beings—or whatever we are—but knowing of the picture galleries of this earth, might, in Darwinian terms, just as logically explain the origin of those pictures—that canvases that were daubed on, without purpose, appeared; and that the daubs that more clearly represented something recognizable were protected, and that still higher approximations had a still better chance, and that so appeared, finally, highly realistic pictures, though the painters had been purposeless, and with no consciousness of what they were doing—
Which contrasts with anybody’s experience with painters, who are not only conscious of what they’re doing, but are likely to make everybody else conscious of what they’re so conscious of.
It is not merely that hands of artists have painted pictures upon canvas: it is that, upon canvas, artists have realized their imaginings. But, without hands of artists, strikingly realistic pictures and exquisite modelings have appeared. It may be that for crosses on windowpanes, emblems on hailstones, faces on church walls, pre-natal markings, the stigmata, telepathic transferences of pictures, and leaf insects we shall conceive of one expression.
To the clergyman who told the story of the hailstones of Remiremont, the most important circumstance was that, a few days before the occurrence, the town council had forbidden a religious procession, and that, at the time of the fall of the hailstones, there was much religious excitement in Remiremont.
English Mechanic, 87-436—story told by Abbé Gueniot, of Remiremont:
That, upon the afternoon of the 26th of May, 1907, the Abbé was in his library, aware of a hailstorm, but paying no attention to it, when a woman of his household called to him to see the extraordinary hailstones that were falling. She told him that images of “Our Lady of the Treasures” were printed on them.
“In order to satisfy her, I glanced carelessly at the hailstones, which she held in her hand. But, since I did not want to see anything, and moreover could not do so, without my spectacles, I turned to go back to my book. She urged: ‘I beg of you to put on your glasses.’ I did so, and saw very distinctly on the front of the hailstones, which were slightly convex in the center, although the edges were somewhat worn, the bust of a woman, with a robe that was turned up at the bottom, like a priest’s cope. I should, perhaps, describe it more exactly by saying that it was like the Virgin of the Hermits. The outline of the images was slightly hollow, as if they had been formed with a punch, but were very boldly drawn. Mlle. André asked me to notice certain details of the costume, but I refused to look at it any longer. I was ashamed of my credulity, feeling sure that the Blessed Virgin would hardly concern herself with instantaneous photographs on hailstones. I said: ‘But do you not see that these hailstones have fallen on vegetables, and received these impressions? Take them away: they are no good to me.’ I returned to my book, without giving further thought to what had happened. But my mind was disturbed by the singular formation of these hailstones. I picked up three in order to weigh them, without looking closely. They weighed between six and seven ounces. One of them was perfectly round, like balls with which children play, and had a seam all around it, as though it had been cast in a mold.”
Then the Abbé’s conclusions:
“Savants, though you may try your hardest to explain these facts by natural causes, you will not succeed.” He thinks that the artillery of heaven had been directed against the impious town council. However people with cabbages suffered more than people with impieties.
“What appeared most worthy of notice was that the hailstones, which should have been precipitated to the ground, in accordance with the laws of acceleration of falling bodies, appeared to have fallen from a height of but a few yards.” But other, or unmarked, hailstones, in this storm, did considerable damage. The Abbe says that many persons had seen the images. He collected the signatures of fifty persons who asserted that they had been witnesses.
I notice several details. One is the matter of a hailstone with a seam around it, as if it had been cast in a mold. This looks as if some hoaxer, or pietist—who was all prepared, having prophetic knowledge that an extraordinary shower of big hailstones was coming—had cast printed lumps of ice in a mold. But accounts of big hailstones, ridged or seamed, are common. Another detail is something that I should say Abbé Gueniot had never before heard of. The detail of slow-falling objects is common in stories of occult occurrences, but, though for more than ten years I have had an eye for such reports, in reading of hundreds, or thousands, of hailstorms, I know of only half a dozen records of slow-falling hailstones.
In the English Mechanic, 87-507, there is more upon this subject. It is said that, according to the newspapers of Remiremont, these “prints” were inside the hailstones, and were found on surfaces of hailstones that had been split: that 107 persons had given testimony to the Bishop of Sainte-Dié; and that several scientists, one of whom was M. de Lapparent, the Secretary of the French Academy, had been consulted. The opinion of M. de Lapparent was that lightning might have struck a medal of the Virgin, and might have reproduced the image upon the hailstones.
I have never come upon any other supposition that there can be manifold reproductions of images, or prints, by lightning. The stories of lightning pictures are mostly unsatisfactory, because most of them are of alleged pictures of leaves of trees, and, when investigated, turn out to be simply forked veinings, not very leaf-like. There is no other record, findable by me, of hailstones said to be pictorially marked by lightning, or by anything else. It would be much of coincidence, if, at a time of religious excitement in Remiremont, lightning should make its only known, or reported, pictures on hailstones, and make thos
e pictures religious emblems. But that the religious excitement did have much to do with the religious pictures on hailstones, is thinkable by me.
19
The astronomers are issuing pronouncements upon what can’t be seen with telescopes. The physicists are announcing discoveries that can’t be seen with microscopes. I wonder whether anybody can see any meaning in an accusation that my stories are about invisibles.
I am a sensationalist.
And it is supposed that modern science, which is supposed to be my chief opposition, is remote from me and my methods.
In December, 1931, Dr. Humason of Mount Wilson Observatory, announced his discovery of two nebulae that are speeding away from this earth, at a rate of 15,000 miles a second. There was a race. Prof. Hubble started it in the year 1930, with announced discoveries of nebulae rushing away at—oh, a mere two or three thousand miles a second. In March, 1931, somebody held the record with an 8,000-mile nebula. At this time of writing, Dr. Humason is ahead.
When a tabloid newspaper reporter announces speedy doings by more or less nebulous citizens, as “ascertained” by him, by methods that did not necessarily indicate anything of the kind, his performance is called sensationalism.
It is my statement that Dr. Hubble and Dr. Humason are making their announcements, as inferences from a method that does not necessarily indicate anything of the kind.
In the New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 6, 1932, Dr. Charles B. Davenport, of the department of genetics, in Carnegie Institution, received only four inches of space for one of those scares that used to be spread-headed—unknown disease that may wipe out all humanity. “Sometime in the future our boasted skyscrapers may become inhabited by bats, and the safe deposit vaults of our cities become the caves of wild animals.” The unknown disease is antiquated sensationalism. I look back at my own notion of the appearance of werethings in the streets of New York—
I now have a little story that pleases me, not so much because I think that I at least hold my own with my professorial rivals, but because, with it, I exercise some of those detective abilities that all of us, even professional detectives, possibly, are so sure we have. I reconstruct, according to my abilities, an incident that occurred somewhere near the city of Wolverhampton, England, about the first of December, 1890. The part of the story of which I have no record—that is the hypothetical part—is that, at this time, somewhere near Wolverhampton, lived a tormented young man. He was a good young man. Not really, of course, if nothing’s real. But he approximated. Though for months he had not gone traveling, he was obsessed with a vividly detailed scene of himself, behaving in an unseemly manner to a female, in a railway compartment. There was another mystery. Somebody had asked him to account for his absence, somewhere, about the first of December, whereas he was convinced that he had not been absent—and yet—but he could make nothing of these two mysteries.
Upon the Thursday before the 6th of December, 1890—see the Birmingham Daily Post, December 6—a woman was traveling alone, in a compartment of a train from Wolverhampton to Snow Hill. According to my reconstruction, she began to think of stories of reprehensible conduct by predatory males to females traveling alone in railway compartments.
The part of the story that I take from the Birmingham Post is that when a train went past Soho Station, a woman fell from it. She gave her name as Matilda Crawford, and said that a young man had insulted her. An odd detail is that it was not her statement that she had leaped from the train, but that the insulting young man had pushed her through a window.
In the next compartment had sat a detective. At an inquiry, he testified that—at least so far as went his observations upon visible entrances and exits—there had been nobody but this woman in this compartment.
In the New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 23, 1932, was published an explanation, by Dr. Frederick B. Robinson, president of New York City College, of some of us sensationalists:
“ ‘Professors have not scored so well in making good appearances from the publicity standpoint,’ Dr. Robinson said. ‘Living sheltered lives,’ he added, ‘they yearn for public notice and sometimes get it at the expense of their college. Surely a great New England institution was not elevated in public esteem when one of its professors of English engaged in a series of publicity stunts, the first of which was to give solemn advice to young men to be snobs.’ ”
At a meeting of the American Chemical Society, at Buffalo, N.Y., Sept. 3, 1931, Dr. William Engleback told of cases in which, by the use of glandular extracts, the height of dwarfed children had been increased an inch or two. For the announcement of this mild little miracle, he received several inches of newspaper space. New York Times, Dec. 16, 1931—meeting of the Institute of Advanced Education, at the Roerich Museum, New York—something more like a miracle. I measured. Dr. Louis Berman got eleven inches of newspaper space. Dr. Berman’s announcement was that the sorcerers of his cult—the endocrinologists—would breed human beings sixteen feet high.
Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in New Orleans, December, 1931—report upon the work of Dr. Richard P. Strong of the Harvard Medical School, in the matter of the filaria worms that infest human bodies—and an attempt to make it more interesting. That an ancient mystery had been solved—biblical story of the fiery serpents at last explained. There’s no more resemblance between these tiny worms and the big fiery things that—we are told—grabbed people, than between any caterpillar and a red-hot elephant. But that the filaria worms had been “identified” as the fiery monsters of antiquity was considered a good story, and was given much space in the newspapers. However, see an editorial, not altogether admiring, in the New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 5, 1932.
Still, I do, after a fashion, hold my own. New York Sun, Oct. 9, 1931—that, shortly after the Civil War, Captain Neil Curry sailed from Liverpool to San Francisco. The vessel caught fire about 1,500 miles off the west coast of Mexico. The Captain, his wife, and two children, and thirty-two members of the crew took to three small boats, and headed for the mainland. Then details of suffering for water.
“Talk of miracles!” In the midst of the ocean, they found themselves in a volume of freshwater.
I note the statement that Capt. Curry discovered fresh water around the boats, not by a disturbance of any kind, but because of the green color of it, contrasting with the blue of the saltwater.
I wrote to Capt. Curry, who at the time of my writing was living in Emporia, Kansas, and received an answer from him, dated Oct. 21, 1931, saying that the story in the Sun was accurate except as to the time; that the occurrence had been in the year 1881.
Here is something, both very different and strikingly similar, which I take from Dr. Richardson’s Journal, as quoted by Sir John Franklin, in his Narrative of a Journey to the Polar Sea, p. 157—a story of a young Chipewyan Indian. His wife had died, and he was trying to save his newborn child. “To still its cries, he applied it to his breast, praying earnestly to the great Master of Life, to assist him. The force of the powerful passion by which he was actuated produced the same effect in his case, as it has done in some others, which are recorded: a flow of milk actually took place from his breast.”
Intensest of need for water—and it may be that, to persons so suffering, water has been responsively transported. But there have been cases of extremist need for water to die by. One can think of situations in which more frenziedly have there been prayers for water, for death, than ever for water to live by.
New York Sun, Feb. 4, 1892—that, after the burial of Frances Burke of Dunkirk, N.Y., her relatives, suspecting that she had been in a trance, had her body exhumed. The girl was found dead in a coffin that was full of water. It was the coroner’s opinion that she had been buried alive, and had been drowned in her coffin. No opinion as to the origin of the water was published.
20
The importance of the invisible—
That I’d starve to death, in the midst of eatables, were it not for the invisible means
of locomotion by which I go and get them, and the untouchable and unseeable processes by which I digest them—
That every stout and determined materialist, arguing his rejection of the unseeable and the untouchable, lives in a phantom-existence, from which he would fade away were it not for his support by invisibles—
The heat of his body—and heat has never been seen.
His own unseeable thoughts, by which he argues against the existence of the invisible.
Nobody has ever seen steam. Electricity is invisible. The science of physics is occultism. Experts in the uses of steam and electricity are sorcerers. Mostly we do not think of their practices as witchcraft, but we have an opinion upon what would have been thought of them, in earlier stages of the Dark Age we’re living in.
Or by the “occult,” or by what is called the “supernatural,” I mean something like an experience that I once saw occur to some acquaintances of mine.
A neighbor had pigeons, and the pigeons loafed on my window sill. They were tempted to come in, but for weeks, stretched necks, fearing to enter. I wished they would come in. I went four blocks to get them sunflower seeds. Though I will go thousands of miles for data, it is most unusual for me to go four blocks—it’s eight blocks, counting both ways—for anybody. One time I found three of them, who had flown through an open window, and were upon the frame of a closed window. I went to them slowly, so as not to alarm them. It seems that I am of a romantic disposition, and, if I take a liking to anybody, who seems female, like almost all birds, I want her to perch on my finger. So I put out a finger. But all three birds tried to fly through the glass. They could not learn, by rebuffs, but kept on trying to escape through the glass. If, back in the coop, these pigeons could have told their story, it would have been that they were perched somewhere, when suddenly the air hardened. Everything in front was as clearly visible as before, but the air had suddenly turned impenetrable. Most likely the other pigeons would have said: “Oh, go tell that to the sparrows!”