Charles Hoy Fort (1874 – 1932) was an American author famous for his non-fiction books that document unexplained phenomena. Before terms like "UFO" and "cryptid" were coined, Fort's works dealt with the subject of extraterrestrial visitors and undiscovered animals, as well as psychic abilities, mysterious disappearances, meteorites with unusual properties, cases of animals or unidentified substances raining from the skies, etc. His influence was such that the word "Fortean" has become virtually synonymous with the unknown.
In The Whisperer in Darkness, by H. P. Lovecraft, the main character Albert Wilmarth, initially skeptical about the existence of extraterrestrial creatures from local folklore, mentions how the defenders of such ideas have cited the books of Charles Fort as evidence to back up their claims. In the 2011 movie adaptation of the story, Fort appears as Wilmarth's opponent in a public debate, played by the film's co-writer and co-producer Andrew Leman.
In his 1919 work The Book of the Damned, Fort proposes that some disappearances could be the result of extraterrestrial beings laying down "dragnets" to capture people or animals. This idea might have inspired the concept of the Fishers from Outside, especially how they're described in The Horror from the Hills, by Frank Belknap Long.
Behind the Mythos[]
It's hard to overestimate or exaggerate the debt owed by Lovecraftian horror to Charles Fort. Not only did his books such as Lo! And The Book of the Damned begin a subversive subgenre of conspiratorial and anti-orthodoxy critical thinking, but his recording and promulgating of very real but completely unexplained phenomena set the scene for the whole oeuvre of Lovecraft and Mythos fiction. His recorded phenomena attested to by independent sources include unexplained discoveries in coal beds, ostensibly hundreds of millions of years out of place; lumps of jade and granite falling from the sky, discovered to be inscribed with characters in no known language; islands appearing and disappearing; unexplained animals (and even plants) and what would later be called UFO or UAP observations and encounters but which in those pre-UFOlogy days sound very much like encounters with entities from the Mythos.
As much as Lovecraft was influenced by his favorite past writers of suspense and horror he was also a voracious reader of scientific and pseudoscientific literature, and Charles Fort was one of the leaders and indeed the originator of the "Silly Season" news items - albeit those with a clear basis in reality.
Of note in terms of possible direct influences on the Mythos are the following concepts first found in Fort:
- Antarctica being the home of a lost civilization of great antiquity and great advancement, with survivals to modern times; (At the Mountains of Madness, et al)
- Astronomical observations of stars that suddenly, unexpectedly and dramatically change color at the exact time of an event on Earth; (Astrophobos; Beyond the Wall of Sleep)
- Colors or parts of the spectrum every bit as "real" as "visible light" but simply unable to be seen by humans; (The Colour out of Space)
- How and why we discovered Pluto, and whether we discovered "the right one" (The Fungi From Yuggoth, the concept of Yuggoth generally)
- Living beings naturally invisible due to reflecting light differently or vibrating differently to humans; (The Dunwich Horror; From Beyond)
- Mermaids and Mermen encountered in real life; (The Shadow over Innsmouth)
- "We Are Property" (this applies generally to much of the Mythos, in which humanity is the creation of one alien race, treated as chattel by many others and generally pushed and pulled around more like cattle in a field than a sentient race worthy of respect. It feeds directly into the concepts of Cosmicism)
Fort was a rational skeptic who extended the traditional skepticism not to fringe ideas but to the central tenets of mechanistic technological society. As such he very much anticipated the dismissive tone towards orthodox thought used as a means to "explain" or justify the weird concepts used in Lovecraftian stories that often have a paradox: people of great learning or scientific achievement at the same time confronting or even causing bizarre and unlikely paranormal events.
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