Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  This fundamental relationality of our quasi existence produces a Fortean logic that we might accurately describe as paradoxical and that he consciously and fully recognized as such (BD 190). For the intermediatist, Fort explained, there is one answer to all questions, one solution to all problems: “Sometimes and sometimes not,” or “Yes and no.” For “everything that is, also isn’t” (BD 281). Yes, things seek individuality, but they also depend deeply on other individuals to exist at all. They thus are, and they are not. Or more poetically put, in one of those memorable one-liners: “All things cut an umbilical cord only to clutch a breast” (BD 78).

  Galactic Colonialism: Fort’s Science Mysticism and Dark Mythology

  Almost none of this, it must be said, is what made Fort so beloved among his later metaphysical, countercultural, and occult readers. Again, Fort has not generally been read as a systematic thinker, much less as a paranormal postmodern, which is precisely how I have read him above. He has been read rather, in Damon Knight’s popular expression, as a “prophet of the unexplained.”

  It is often asserted, no doubt to protect Fort from the implications of his own impossible ideas, that he did not finally claim to explain the unexplained, that he did not really believe this stuff. Technically, this is true, as we have seen with his constant qualifications, his distancing humor, and his explicit rejection of the entire epistemology of belief. But it is also true that there is a consistent narrative or Super-Story woven into the heart of his four books, a story without which these texts would have little power over their astonished readers.

  And this is where things cease to be abstract and philosophical and become eerie and numinous. This is the same fantastic narrative that would later take on visionary, even physical, forms within the UFO phenomenon, a stranger story still that Fort saw in almost every detail over thirty years before it finally appeared on the public stage in the late 1940s. Prophet indeed. What we have here, in the end, then, is much more than a philosophy. It is the beginnings of a new living mythology, a Super-Story, to employ my own Fortean expression.

  I have already described Fort’s mythology as a species of the fantastic. It can also be thought of as a type of science fiction. But if this is science fiction, it is of a very special kind. After all, although Fort is clearly engaging in a genre of storytelling that looks a great deal like earlier and later science fiction, he is in fact not presenting his writing as entirely fictitious. Fort recognized, and reveled in, his own radicalism here. Any author, he noted, “may theorize upon other worlds” as long as “his notions be presented undisguisedly as fiction” or, at the very least, as hypothetical. As long as an author follows such a safe lead, he noted quite correctly, “he’ll stir up no prude rages” (BD 80).

  But Fort was interested in doing precisely this, that is, in stirring up the rationalist and religious prudes. He was also clearly convinced of the general outlines of his own fantastic tale. He had multiple letters published in newspapers like the New York Times and the British T.P.’s Weekly. They suggested, more or less exactly like his four books, that the earth was being visited by ships from outer space.32 This did not sound like a man who did not believe his own words, even though he claimed exactly this unbelief in his own texts.

  Having said that, it is also true that he works hard to occupy a twilight zone between the imaginary and the real, which means that he must always keep one of those proverbial feet on this side of everyday reality. Hence when he notes the report of a certain Captain Oliver, who “had found, upon the beach of Suarro Island, the carcass of a two-headed monster,” he quickly comments: “That is just a little too interesting” (LO 620). Similarly, when “upon good newspaper authority,” a dog appears in a story to say “Good morning!” only to disappear “in a think, greenish vapor,” Fort draws the line. Even that is impossible for him (WT 862).

  Fort, then, is not presenting his data as obvious fiction. But neither is he presenting it as established fact. His unique genres lie somewhere in between fact and fiction. As both real-unreal, a kind of “non-fictional fiction” as he once put it, his Super-Story is yet another expression of his philosophy of the hyphen.33 It is a unique genre of modern metaphysical literature for which we really do not have a word yet, but for which I would like to propose one now: science mysticism.34

  As I am using the expression, science mysticism is roughly as scientific as science fiction, and just about as disreputable. Appearances aside, neither genre is doing science. Both genres, however, draw heavily on scientific ideas and metaphors in order to construct their fantastic narratives and magical ideas. What sets apart a work of science mysticism like Fort’s Wild Talents (1932) or Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975), then, is that such texts claim significantly more purchase on reality than either science fiction or professional science does. They accomplish this, moreover, through a creative fusion of traditional mystical and modern scientific languages. To hone our terms yet further, we might adopt Fort’s own spectral language and say that, while neither science mysticism nor science fiction obtains a complete existence, science mysticism is real-unreal whereas science fiction is unreal-real. But the two genres are clearly dependent on one another and merge in the middle.

  What I am suggesting is that Charles Fort took a still nascent science-fiction trajectory and fused it with his own data of the damned in order to create a new genre of writing that I am calling science mysticism. This was science fiction come alive. This was fantasy as fact, or at least quasi fact. Dreiser picked up on something similar when he became enthralled with Fort’s X and Y and described his correspondent in a letter as “out-Verning Verne.”35 This was indeed Jules Verne, and much more.

  But there was a crucial third element in the mix that I have not yet mentioned: Western colonialism—“colonial” understood here in both its passive American sense (America as a British colony or, in Fort’s title phrase, “New Lands”) and in its active European sense (Europe, and especially England, as global colonizer). The base story of much science fiction—that of the alien invasion—was first imagined, it turns out, as a critical response to British colonialism, and by a British writer no less. Enter H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898), one of the most important and influential sci-fi texts of all time.

  According to the literary critic Brian Stableford, the novel had its creative origins in Wells’s private reflections on Western colonialism and in his study of Darwinian biology. Wells had studied biology with T. H. Huxley, the famous bulldog of Charles Darwin whom we met in our previous chapter. Such a training would have likely given Wells the idea of alternate species and alternate evolutionary pathways on other planets. But it was European colonialism that affected him most directly. Indeed, his most famous story came to him when he was walking with his brother and discussing the fate of the Tasmanians, who had recently been decimated by the British colonialists, whose technology far surpassed that of the defenseless islanders. Wells proposed to his brother a scenario in which the tables were turned and the British colonizers became the colonized.

  And so Wells’s colonizers became Martians, who arrive in southern England, treating the locals as mere bugs to sweep aside, or squash. The result was as electrifying as it was terrifying. As Stableford points out, this story of an alien invasion, of an imperialistic force far superior to anything any human civilization has ever known, “became one of the central myths of twentieth-century Anglo-American science fiction.”36 It would also become, as we shall see in our next two chapters, the central myth of the UFO phenomenon and, as I will explore in my next book, one of the staples of the American superhero comic.

  Charles Fort played a central, indeed maybe the central role in the creation of this developing Super-Story.37 Indeed, as is often quipped, if the history of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, the history of the paranormal in the twentieth century is a series of footnotes to Charles Fort. Here is how he announced the dark mythology of his Super-Story in The Book of the Damned:<
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  I begin to suspect something else.

  A whopper is coming. . . .

  The notion that other worlds are attempting to communicate with this world is widespread: my own notion is that it is not attempt at all—that it was achievement centuries ago. (BD 124)

  If, then, we are like deep-sea fishes bumping our noses up against things we do not, and probably cannot, understand, Fort suggests now that we are also watched, even manipulated, by “super-constructions” passing above us in the atmosphere, in a kind of psychical space or spatial dimension he likes to call the Super-Sargasso Sea. These super-constructions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes: “one of them about the size of Brooklyn, I should say, offhand. And one or more of them wheel-shaped things a goodly number of square miles in area” (BD 136). Another, according to the report, is “cigar-shaped, with wings, and a canopy on top” (NL 470). And the alleged pilots are as numerous and varied as the shapes and sizes of their spacecraft. They cannot all be trusted: “I think of as many different kinds of visitors to this earth as there are visitors to New York, to a jail, to a church—some persons go to church to pick pockets, for instance” (BD 259).

  Later generations would, of course, dub these aerial ships “UFOs.” But Fort saw all of this in the teens and twenties of the last century, down to the disc-shaped details and the “falling leaf” motion of their descent (more on this in our next chapter), which he describes, true to his Super-Sargasso Sea, as “falling like a plate through water” (NL 498, 401). He thus studied and wrote about the great airship wave of 1897, when these super-constructions were clearly seen floating over Kansas City, Chicago, Omaha, and Denton (NL 468–47). He also wrote about another passing over El Paso, Texas (NL 487). Not that they were restricted to the U.S. Fort writes about “ships from other worlds that have been seen by millions of the inhabitants of this earth, exploring, night after night, in the sky of France, England, New England, and Canada” (NL 315). His data reached into India as well, mostly through the English newspapers and the British journals.

  Fort reads all of this through his historical three-stage model. The data of theology (the First Dominant), he explains, was misinterpreted by the believing theologians, and then later by the scientifically inclined students of psychical research (the Second Dominant). What the theologians, demonologists, and psychical researchers were really studying without realizing it were “beings and objects that visited this earth, not from a spiritual existence, but from outer space” (NL 419–20). Hence, for example, the commonly noted sulphurous smell of meteorites. Fort’s Third Dominant, an alien hermeneutic if you will, thus comes with a very heavy existential price, if not an actual moral panic announced with bombs: “Our data are glimpses of an epoch that is approaching with far-away explosions. It is vibrating on its edges with the tread of distant space-armies” (NL 389).

  These visitors may intend communication with us through our garbled religious traditions and our confused psychical experiences, both of which we have too easily trusted, but they may well intend something more sinister. In one his most haunting phrases, Fort will admit that, “I think that we’re fished for” (BD 264). He doesn’t mean this literally, of course, although there are a few cases in his data that look a great deal like people being “hooked” by some unknown force and carried, literally, off the ground.

  Such damned scenes aside, the truth is that Fort remains unclear or undecided about almost all of the specifics of his alien hermeneutic, although the general storyline remains quite consistent. Fort, for example, goes back and forth about whether the spaceships are of a material, a spiritual, or some other subtle or “highly attenuated” matter (NL 420). In places, he appears to imagine these ships in quite physical and literal terms. In other places, he suggests that they appear as psychical phenomena, “that some kinds of beings from outer space can adapt to our conditions, which may be like the bottom of a sea, and have been seen, but have been supposed to be psychic phenomena” (NL 507). Or, in another expression still, that “things coming to this earth would be like things rising to an attenuated medium—and exploding—sometimes incandescently” (BD 282). In such passages, Fort appears to be suggesting that different worlds, many different worlds, exist in a sort of parallel fashion. There are “vast, amorphous aerial regions, to which such definite words as ‘worlds’ and ‘planets’ seem inapplicable” (BD 136).

  Numerous occult and Theosophical authors before him and many science fiction and New Age writers after him invoked the scientific language of “dimensions” to explain what Fort was expressing here. But Fort expressly rejected such language, mostly because he did not understand it and thought it to be an intellectual cop-out: “Oh, yes, I have heard of ‘the fourth dimension,’ but I am going to do myself some credit by not lugging in that particular way of showing that I don’t know what I’m writing about” (NL 567). In other places, he lugs it in anyway, inevitably as a fourth or even fifth psychical dimension (NL 461).

  The metaphors also shift dramatically when it comes to the nature of the upper world from which such super-constructions emerge, as if they were floating in our sky. Most basically, these metaphors shift back and forth between images of water and images of land. The Super-Sargasso Sea image, for example, pounds its waves throughout The Book of the Damned. But New Lands, Fort’s second book, opens with a very different and in some way opposite metaphor, that of “lands in the sky.” The opening lines of this second book echo those of the first:

  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. (NL 313)

  As these opening lines make clear, this new image of land is in fact connected to the earlier image of water through a specific colonial narrative. By “New Lands,” Fort is invoking the European experience of “discovering” the new land of America across the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Much like Myers, he is employing the European discovery of America, which was always there, of course, as a symbol for the acceptance and exploration of all that is occult and unknown to us now, which has always been there, of course.

  America, then, is the New Land par excellence, the Land of the Occult that we would do well not to deny simply because we have not dedicated sufficient resources to its discovery and exploration. We have not even admitted its existence yet. “I am simply pointing out,” Fort explained in an especially funny passage,

  everybody’s inability seriously to spend time upon something, which, according to his preconceptions, is nonsense. Scientists, in matter of our data, have been like somebody in Europe, before the year 1492, hearing stories of lands to the west, going out on the ocean for an hour or so, in a row-boat, and then saying, whether exactly in these words, or not: “Oh, hell! There ain’t no America.” (LO 625)

  But there is such an America. And we are called not only to admit this Secret America, but to explore it and expand into it. Interestingly, here the colonized begins to become the colonizer. Fort goes back and forth on this. In places, we are clearly the colonized, hence he compares our sighting of super-constructions in the sky to “savages upon an island-beach” gazing out at three ships in the bay on October 12, 1492 (NL 471). In other places, it appears that Fort has taken this basic Wellsian narrative of the colonizer colonized, accepted its basic claim, and then reversed it. Yes, in truth, we are the colonized, and always have been. But if we can only take seriously the data of our long colonization now, we can cease to be so and can become our own explorers. We can cease being written by the paranormal and become our own authors of the paranormal. We can cease to live in someone else’s novel and write our own. We can expand.

  And we must
, whether we will or no. Fort suggests that this is somehow inevitable, that we are born explorers and must have somewhere to go. “The young man is no longer urged, or is no longer much inclined, to go westward. He will, or must, go somewhere. If directions alone no longer invite him, he may hear invitation in dimensions” (NL 313). Fort suggests this expansion is necessary to prevent an “explosion,” that we need, as it were, “San Salvadors of the Sky” or “a Plymouth Rock of reversed significance, coasts of sky-continents” (NL 314). He can be quite lyrical about this need to expand, this human drive to explore and colonize, first the planet, then the farthest reaches of inner and outer space: “Stay and let salvation damn you—or straddle an auroral beam and paddle from Rigel to Betelgeuse” (NL 314).

  Not that he claims to have gotten very far. He is all too aware of how the adventure has only just begun. Our cognitive maps, including Fort’s own, are clearly filled with silly and gross errors: “My own notion is that this whole book is very much like a map of North America in which the Hudson River is set down as a passage leading to Siberia” (BD 213). He was very, very clear about this: “We consider that we are entitled to at least 13 pages of gross and stupid errors. After that we shall have to explain” (NL 389). Given that he thought these “new lands” were just a few miles above us, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that modern astronomy was all wrong about the vastness of space, we must grant Fort significantly more than thirteen pages of gross and stupid errors. One hundred and thirty is more like it. The truth is, as Damon Knight pointed out, that much of New Lands is simply embarrassing to read now. We can well understand why Fort needed these new lands to be so close and the earth so stable (he could see no other way to explain how the super-constructions got here so easily), but the fact remains that he was spectacularly wrong about all of this.38 This is where a concept like dimensions may look far more fantastic, but is in fact far more rational and helpful.